Kate looks at her big brother. He’s still wearing one of Henry’s aprons. She nods toward it. “Mom would be so proud.”

Martin puffs his chest out. He’s not the type to be embarrassed. Neither of her brothers is. They were kings in high school, tall and handsome, while Kate was doughy, awkward, no one quite believing that she was what came after them.

Martin flattens out the apron. “Nice, huh?” he says. He does not acknowledge Kate’s mention of their mother.

“Bea takes showers now,” Kate says, annoyed.

“Still. The boys and Stell? So after we eat they can get right to bed.”

Tess doesn’t let her kids go to sleep without bathing, ever. As if somehow they’ll be damaged if the ritual the internet says one should deploy at bedtime is disturbed.

Colin is the oldest. Bea’s seven to his eight, thirteen months younger. Kate had struggled with nursing, and Helen brought Tess down one weekend with Colin to help. Tess had nursed Bea, shown Kate how to latch her, how to hold Bea in the crook of her arm without feeling afraid she’d break. The ease with which she’d done it had shocked Kate, who always thought she’d be the better mother. But then there was Bea, happy, better satiated by Kate’s uptight, too-thin sister-in-law than she’d ever been by her.

“I can do it,” Kate says, about the bathing.

“I’ll help,” Martin says.

She knows Tess told him to stay with her, but she doesn’t mind being alone with her big brother. She lived with him off and on in New York her first few years out of school. Their dad had died when Kate was a college freshman, and Martin had come to help her pack her things and drive her home. He was Good, her brother, smart and kind, the sort of person who helped her move apartments, served as guarantor those years their mother couldn’t, who didn’t call or text too often but who showed up when he needed to show up.

She wants to say now: she wishes that they talked more. She wants to lay her problems out before him—the house, the money—let him make all of it better. She wants to ask him if he knows what to do now that their mother’s gone.

“You find the towels,” he says, and Kate nods and says nothing. “I’ll go track the little monsters down.”