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Your mother is dead, Mac thought. They’ll have to give you something to eat. The baskets of food the women had brought would last them a day. The rashers their mother had been frying when it all happened were still in the pan, and no one wanted to touch them. The best thing they could do was go up to the Lees and fill their bellies. He wondered how his thinking could be so blunt and practical with his mother lying dead in the next room.

“Should I go, too, Mac?” Barry asked from the loft.

“You should,” Honnie answered for him. “And you as well,” she said to Mac.

“Excuse me,” Rian interrupted, stepping forward. “But is our mother gone to heaven?” He’d come back inside specifically to raise this crucial question on behalf of himself and his fellow youngests. No one had said straight-out. He was peering into the bedroom where she lay. From the moment Mac had turned and found her slumped in the chair to now, four hours had passed, and no one had said the sentence to the smaller boys yet.

Mac knelt down to Rian’s height. “She is, Rian. I’m very sorry.”

Rian looked back and forth between Mac and her body as if to say: But there she is.

“But…” Rian seemed to puzzle over what exactly he wanted to know. “What will happen now?”

THERE WAS AN URGENCY TO the funeral that Macdara felt stupidly late to understand. The weather was warm. He’d dealt with enough animals to know. When they came back from the Lees, they found Cathal had returned. The women had prepared Mary’s body and left. Cathal repeated what the women had already said, that someone had to stay up with her all the time, so there’d be people in and out of the house. The undertaker had come to speak with Cathal but Cathal sent him away. They did things the old way and she would stay where she was until they put her in the ground. Already, her hands were turning a color Mac didn’t like to look at. Around her mouth, too, she’d changed, so when it was his turn to sit he focused only on his own hands and the shadows the candle made on the wall as it flickered. What had happened? A frayed wire. A loosened stone. He looked at her face. Something inside her that no one could see had broken.

The wake would continue through the next day and on the day after that she’d be buried. Trying to stay outdoors as much as possible, he and Barry and Fearghal did every chore plus a few that had been hanging over them since the start of the summer. Working mostly in silence, one would sometimes say something that proved they were all having the same thoughts. If the doctor had been at home. If she’d said she had a pain. Poor Sean. Alone in England. Not alone but without any brothers. Couldn’t he come, despite the papers? Couldn’t he sneak? No. If he was caught he’d have to stay. “And so what?” Mac asked. This was where he belonged anyway. It was where they all belonged.

They’d need to look their best for the funeral, so Macdara washed and pressed all the good clothes he could find. Woolens he hung on the line to air out. Cathal went out and when he came back a few hours later he had a new suit for himself and a few fresh shirts for whoever had grown out of theirs. He’d been drinking, they could see. There was a looseness to his movements, something in the openness of his expression. The boys looked at one another but didn’t say a word.

When they tried on the shirts and went into the room to show him, he took one look at them, then raised his fists to his eyes like a baby and bawled.

Barry made big eyes at Mac, urging him to say something. Mac worked it out in his mind first. You must not drink now. You must not leave. But before he could say anything, Cathal lifted the hem of his shirt to wipe his face and then he left again.

THE AFTERNOON BEFORE THE FUNERAL, a cousin on their Joyce side knocked at their door. Some neighbors were outside saying the rosary, ready to take their turn at her side.

“I’m Rose Joyce,” she said. She was a pretty, petite woman with reddish-blond hair like most Joyces and big blue eyes. Mac didn’t know her, but she did have a familiar look about her. “Griffith now. Are you Sean? I met you when you were small.”

“Sean’s in England. I’m Macdara.”

“Ah. I’m very sorry for your trouble, Macdara. This is my husband, Tom.”

Tom, who’d slowly gotten out of the car and walked around, shook Mac’s hand. The car was still running.

“Your mother was a lovely person. Every time I met her I was glad for it. I can’t believe what’s happened. Is your father here?”

“I’m not sure where he went.”

Mac showed them inside and pointed to the room where their mother lay. Rian was sitting with Seamus on his lap. Rose said a prayer by Mary’s bedside while Tom stood behind her with his hat in his hands, and when she was finished she explained that she was very sorry for any confusion—maybe it was she who’d gotten confused—but she’d received word from Cathal asking for help. They’d arranged a time for her to come. Had Cathal not mentioned that?

“Help with what?” Mac asked.

She said she’d come to fetch Vincent and mind him until after the funeral, one less thing for them to worry about. “He doesn’t understand anyway,” she pointed out. “You don’t want him fussing during the Mass with everything already on your plate.”

It was true. Mac had already thought of that. Who’d take him outside if he started crying or if he needed to be changed. Seamus at two and Eamon at three would be enough of a problem.

“My father didn’t say anything to me about this.”

“I wish he had,” Rose said. She walked over to Vincent’s cradle and peeked in. “Oh, he’s lovely,” she whispered. “When Cathal called I told him that we planned on coming and that I’d mind Vincent during the Mass, but he said this would be the best help, taking him to my house for a while. We live in town, you see. The chemist there sells formula and bottles and everything for a baby.”

Macdara didn’t know Rose, except as a name. “Ah,” he said, glancing at Barry, who looked equally concerned. “We’d better wait until my father gets back. Would you like tea?” But he didn’t want to leave Vincent alone in his cradle with her while he made tea, so he looked at Barry with an expression that told him to do it. Barry received the message perfectly.

They waited awkwardly for the water to boil. She insisted she didn’t want to keep them from doing all the things they surely needed to be doing. “My mother is your father’s sister,” she said. “Your aunt Irene?”

Mac knew his aunt Irene by name but he hadn’t seen her in a long time. She was a lot older than Cathal. There’d be people coming to the funeral that he hadn’t seen since he was a baby. Just then Honnie came through the kitchen door with a lumpy sack like Santa’s.

“Hello,” Honnie said, setting down the sack. “Aren’t you Irene’s girl?”

“I am,” Rose said, and seemed happy to see her. It occurred to Mac that the best proof that Cathal had arranged this pickup by Rose was that he wasn’t there. It was exactly the sort of thing he wouldn’t want to be present to witness.