How could we keep losing more and more of him? Would a day come when there’d be a final loss and then, poof, he’d be gone completely? The fact of him disappeared?

It took us a long two hours to take everything out to the garage for drying. By the time we were done, we had newspaper clippings dangling from wires stretched overhead, business papers spread on plastic sheets, and reporter’s notebooks fanned out atop tools.

I began peeling Dad’s favorite photo of us away from the wet glass of its frame. Dye in the ten-year-old brown matting had run, fingering rust across our black hair and splotching Mom’s delicate features and my little-girl face, with my round cheeks and eyes full of questions.

“This must have been taken with our old film camera,” I said. “Maybe we still have the negative.”

I was just talking, trying to fill the damp, sad air, and I didn’t expect Mom to answer. Her hands were clasped beneath her chin, squeezed tight, knuckles pale. She said, “I don’t know how I’m going to sort all this out.”

In recent days I’d seen Mom look stunned and seen her at a loss, seen her cry and seen her gather her will. Now, surrounded by broken cartons and soaked papers, with even the dry things in disordered piles, she sagged back, eyes closed. “I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t.”

Her words scared me because they expressed how I felt, too: like sagging back, giving up. Yet I was even more frightened by what would happen if we did give up.

So I said, “I can do some. I still have a week before I start my internship.”

I went to my room dead tired but too wound up to sleep, and instead of trying to, I booted my computer and watched the Herald’s homepage pulse onto the screen. Shapes interlaced into columns of type, and headlines dissolved one into another. A photo of a migrant workers’ camp became a picture of an immigration agent, which became images of a reporter asking, listening, writing. The display promised the kind of story my dad might have worked on, about real people with different views of what was needed and what was fair. The kind of story I could picture myself writing one day. All I had to do was squint to imagine that it was my photo on the screen, that I was the reporter stepping into an unfamiliar place and getting to know its truths.

I had an idea what that would mean, because I knew what newspapering had meant to Dad, whose news service stories had appeared in print and electronic media across the country. Along with Mom and me, Dad’s work had been his life.

And I knew how proud he’d been that I wanted a news career, too.