Later that week, when he was better and sitting up, we had piled on either side of him and he’d read to us. Even Thomas, who was sometimes shy around Dad, lay on the edge of the sofa bed with us. Dad could recite sections of “The Deserted Village” by heart. He’d often repeated those lines—“Where wealth accumulates, and men decay”—when we said something about someone being rich or someone’s big house or another father’s big job. That week when he was sick, he read “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” a poem by Yeats he loved. The five of us were on the pull-out bed with him, as if it were a boat we were all clinging to on a pitching sea. He changed his tone of voice for the final lines, as if it always got to him. I could see the world described, the “long dappled grass,” the silver and gold. I’d written the lines on the inside cover of my tree notebook. When I thought of those lines, I pictured him in a golden meadow, walking in the long grass, searching.

“They didn’t even let us wake his body,” Aunt Rosie had said, with such pain that I knew we had done something terribly wrong, something we could never fix. I wished now, as I had a thousand times before, that I could have gone to him at that moment when he was dying, away from us and alone, and said something to him so he would have known how he was loved, even though we never talked like that in my family.

A cloud moved across the rec room floor, and the room went dark. I looked up. Marie was still reading. Beatrice was leaning back, her book on her knees.

“Is it good?” I asked.

She moved her head up and down slowly without taking her eyes off the page. I looked out the window. The woods looked like rain.

7