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she’s composed herself for good and at great cost, and her body when I press myself against it feels like a gently closed door. It’s been thirty-eight and a half hours. Any further tears—thousands, millions, in the years she has remaining of her own brief life—she will shed out of our sight.
    Father Bob is still here, standing next to the birdcage, breathing like a gut-shot deer. Mum looks up. “Father,” she murmurs to her baby brother, “you’re going to have to pull yourself together.”
    Another turn of phrase new to me, and it too sounds just right, for we have burst, haven’t we? We lie in pieces that must be pulled together, and Father Bob has to help whether or not he believes he can. He will pull himself together because his big sister reminds him that he must. Tomorrow he must act as chief celebrant at the funeral Mass, his snow-white vestments signifying birth, not death. He must lead the Requiem prayer and sprinkle holy water on Dad’s draped casket, and he will have to do this without breaking down.
    Mum takes his coffee cup to the sink and he gets up. He puts one hand lightly on Mum’s head; the other, fingers spread, hovers over the rest of us.
“In nomine Patris . . .”
he begins, blessing us all. I shut my eyes to receive God’s grace. I pray for my uncle, who is still crying. We hug him goodbye—he’ll stay the night in his room at Cumpy and Aunt Rose’s house on Mexico Avenue—and then he, too, is gone.
    So here we are, same as always, getting ready for bed as Anne lays out the new dresses we’ve worn only twice: last Sunday, and on Easter, the Sunday before that. We’ll wear them again tomorrow to Dad’s funeral. Anne helps us find our Easter hats. We’re a working machine with a part missing. No Dad, just us, and the cats and the bird, and the Hickeys below, and the Norkuses below that, and the car with no driver, and the mill huffing and puffing on the bank, oblivious and aloof, the mill that gave Dad work and purpose and, quite possibly, the instruments of his death.
    We wash our faces as we’re told, brush our teeth, climb into our beds, and recite our nightly prayers: the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Angel of God, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Act of Contrition.
    â€œAHH FATHA,” Betty begins. “WHO AHHT IN HEAVEN. HELLO BE THY NAME.”
    â€œThat’s wrong. She’s saying it wrong.”
    â€œIt’s all right,” Anne says. “Keep going, Bet.”
    â€œTHY KINGDOM . . . COME . . . THY . . . THY . . . AHH FATHA . . .”
    â€œBetty!”
    â€œBe nice, you two. We can start with a Hail Mary.”
    Mum is in her bedroom, undressing in the dark—or maybe just sitting there in her good dress—wondering how to finish the awesome task of raising three more children, one of whom, at age eleven, can’t advance past second grade or get her prayers straight.
    â€œAHH FATHA . . .”
    â€œThat’s not Hail Mary.”
    â€œShe always says it wrong.”
    â€œGod doesn’t mind, Monnie.”
    We’re draped over Anne the way we used to drape over Dad. Cathy on one side, I on the other, Betty in Anne’s narrow lap. She smells like flowers, after an evening spent near the flower-choked coffin of a big-laughing, chain-smoking man who once taught her how to hem a skirt.
    â€œWhy don’t we start all over, with the Our Father?” she asks us. “Everybody, now. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven . . .’”
    Our father—our actual father—art in heaven. Down here on earth, Anne is our calm. Our medicine. Our mirrour of grace and majestie divine.
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    Later that night, Cathy and I lie on our stomachs, ears pressed to the crack under our bedroom door, listening to Anne and Mum confer at the kitchen table a few feet from our pitcher-size ears. Betty stays in bed,