On the day it happened, my mother finished the dishes, making sure everything was clean before she left. I stood by the fridge, peeling at an old sticker of a rainbow. Half the color was gone. Mom wiped her hands on the front of her apron, unwrapped it from around her hips, and switched off the radio. The lack of bluegrass was suddenly abrupt. The sound of the crickets outside took over. It was September on the farm, that golden part of the year when everything looks dipped in honey, and the three of us—me, Ruth, and Pim—lined up in the kitchen, barefoot and scruffy. Dad was outside. I could hear him starting up the truck.

Mom turned to Ruth. “Ruth Van Ness,” she said, “you’re the oldest, so you’re in charge. We’ll be an hour, no longer. Don’t touch anything electrical. And look after your brother and sister.” It was the first time she’d ever left us.

Ruth was thirteen and almost Mom’s height. “I’ve got it,” she said. “Go and have fun.”

“I want to come, too,” I said, because I was eight years old and the world felt wrong without my mom in it. “Why don’t you ever take me?”

“You’ll survive for an hour, Alexandra. Willem Van Ness, are you going to be good?” She’d christened him Willem—a nod to our Dutch heritage—but for all four years of his life we’d called him the traditional shortener, Pim.

“Ruth says I can jump off the roof if I want.” Pim’s big eyes were earnest. “I’m going to make a parachute umbrella.”

“I never said that.” Ruth smiled. “And he won’t be doing that.”

Mom took her wedding ring from where she had hooked it over the white china bird on the windowsill and pushed it hard back onto her finger. Then she walked down the line of us, pressing her lips to the tops of our heads.

“Goodbye, my owl,” she said to Ruth. “Goodbye, my little tiger,” to me. And for Pim, “Goodbye, my little hazelnut.”

The three of us filed through the screen door and onto the porch. We watched as Dad helped Mom into the truck, then took off out of the driveway, bumping down the gravel road. They were going into town to buy hoses. I remember it because it sounded like a boring reason to go on a journey. Couldn’t my father have gone on his own? The humdrum of their chore—a walk down an aisle in a hardware store—should never have run parallel with an afternoon like that one. It seems impossibly cruel. But that’s the thing about life’s tragedies: they’re always hidden in something small.