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practically snorting in disgust. He’d felt superior all those years ago that he had been able to protect his girls. And now look at them. Life was a numbers game, a craps table. Apparently, it was his family’s turn to slam head-on into tragedy.
    As Roger continued to watch his wife flit around the kitchen with purpose, he realized his feelings of helplessness were exacerbated in direct proportion to her extreme competency with their children in the face of crisis. She was a cyclone of ceaseless activity, the centrifugal force that spoked out to sustain and nurture them all.
    Roger was appreciative, even envious of the rote activities women engaged in that moved the family forward: washing dishes, folding clothes, stocking the fridge, and supervising all of the many containers of food that had been dropped off. The organization and sense of purpose required for these mundane activities eluded him. Yet those strengths, Margaret’s capability and industriousness, were the very characteristics that had drawn him to her, he mused, sitting in the Corrigans’ kitchen, holding Sarah and watching his wife ladle the steaming soup into a bowl.
    His daughter’s home was now a place of both stagnation and industry; of meals, laundry, and cleaning amid the reflective tide pools of pure grief. This was the kind of stage on which Margaret shone. She could turn her elbow grease on any problem and buff it up. Margaret’s ability to “do” was a manifestation of grieving, a way of putting what had happened aside, of moving only ahead. Inertia, Roger knew firsthand, created a portal for the horrible thoughts and feelings to seep in.
    “Can you take Sarah up for me so I can change her?” Margaret asked as she placed the soup bowl on a plastic floral tray.
    Roger put Sarah up on his shoulders, which caused more giggling, and then he ducked slightly at the bottom of the stairs, following his wife to the second floor as Sarah reached out to touch the striped wallpaper on the landing. Margaret delivered soup to Maura, lying listlessly in bed in her darkened room, while he veered into Sarah’s room. The cramped spaced smelled vaguely of baby powder, and a cache of stuffed animals was piled next to a wooden dollhouse in the corner. Margaret entered a few minutes later and lifted Sarah from his lap onto the changing table, then efficiently applied the cream and powder from the shelves while steadying his granddaughter with her other hand. Have I ever done that? Roger thought. Had he diapered his own children? He couldn’t recall.
    “You’ve still got it, Mother,” Roger said, forcing a smile, and Margaret swiveled to meet his eyes, modestly pleased. She turned her attention back to Sarah.
    “Oh, I did plenty of this in my day, didn’t I, sweet princess?” Margaret was cooing at Sarah now, who was delighted with the attention from her grandmother and clapped her hands together with a squeal. “You’re almost too big for these now, aren’t you? Almost ready to give up your diapers at night and nap, hmmm?” Margaret lifted her granddaughter off the table and lowered her in the crib. “Do you want bunny with you?” Sarah nodded, her baby-fine sandy curls bobbing, and reached up to grab her favorite stuffed animal, flopping down on the mattress and popping her thumb into her mouth. She poked one chubby hand through the slats to sleepily wave good-bye.
    “I just love babies’ wrists,” said Margaret. “I love the way there is a little fold right here where the arm meets the hand, and dimples by the knuckles and then … all that fat just goes away at some point.” Her cadence slowed as they moved to exit Sarah’s room.
    They looked at each other for a second, each individually thinking about James, how he had been on the cusp of leaving boyhood at nine. “Double digits” he’d called his upcoming birthday. He had already been planning how he would celebrate.
    Being in his granddaughter’s small room, a large closet really,