The dam slipped a little and shifted in the heat, but as it softened, it still kept a grip on her skin and held the vinegar pretty much where I wanted it to be.

What seeped out I wicked away with the rag.

“It’s working well,” Cate said through her teeth, her hands in fists.

“Are you all right?”

“I am,” she said. “I will be.”

After a while, my mother came to have a look.

“You’ve had no supper. Either of you.”

I looked up at her.

“Ellie, you go on and have something. I’ll stay with Mrs. Cleary until you’re back.”

“A name I’d nearly forgotten,” Cate said. “Though I’ll not forget my good husband, stuffy as he was.” She tried to smile, but it was a struggle. “Doctor Cleary was Doctor Cleary, through and through, though he was Reggie to me when the world wasn’t listening.”

My mother looked at me. “We’re all more than one thing.” She went around the bed to lean over my father, kiss him on the forehead, smooth his cheeks with her hands. “Go on now, Ellie,” she said. “Go get your supper. And when you come back, bring your father some broth. And bring Mrs. Cleary a plate.”

“Oh, don’t bother with me,” she said. “I haven’t much in the way of an appetite.”

“Perhaps not, but you need your strength if you’re to get better. You’ll at least try some of the broth I’ve made for him.”

So I went for my supper and found that Samuel had been right: The trout was the best I’d ever had, though being hungry had a lot to do with that.

I looked in on him before I went back to Cate. Found him sleeping so deeply that even when I kissed his warm cheek he didn’t stir.

To Esther, who was reading by lamplight in her bed, I said, “You’re kind to read to Daddy like you do.”

She looked up, startled. “I suppose I am, but I do it mostly for myself, Ellie.” She laid her book down in her lap. “It’s terrible to feel useless.”

Which I knew to be true, though I hadn’t imagined how she must have felt as our father lay shrinking and fading to gray through the long, cold months.

We looked at each other in the golden darkness.

“Good night,” I said.

Esther picked up her book again. “Mrs. Cleary is lucky that I wasn’t the one who found her.”

“Well, but you did,” I said. “I just found her first.”

—

It was an odd supper I took to Cate: a mug of venison broth and a slice of dried-blueberry-apple-walnut-maple pie. For Captan, the last of the trout topped with the soft, brown skin from the bottom of the corn-bread pan.

For my father, broth alone.