In the terrified moments, he wonders how he can handle the task he’s been given. How can he possibly be the parent to the boys that his father would have been? And how is he so selfish that he can’t set aside his own grief to share anyone else’s?

In the numb moments, he sometimes looks at the boys and feels almost nothing, like all of his other emotions are eclipsed by his sadness, and he’ll never get any of the good ones back.

At least Johnny will be back in school soon, and Danny is old enough for preschool. Robbie’s tired of seeing them drifting around the house like ghosts while Robbie tries to sanitize the rooms of all of their small reminders of their father. He keeps everything he picks up—pictures, old cowboy paperbacks, handfuls of flint arrowheads—in shoe boxes filed in the basement. One day, he plans to bring them back and spread them out. But he has to wait until things get easier.

Because they will get easier. Everyone says so. And if he lets himself doubt that promise, then the hollow moments are going to swallow him, and that’s all he’ll be.

He’s thinking about washing the pile of dishes in the sink that’s been there almost a week when he hears a noise from outside and glances out the window above the faucet. Johnny is charging by on a horse, bent over its neck, galloping headlong through the grass. It’s Johnny’s horse, a gentle old gelding who’s a former mount of their dad’s, so seeing Johnny riding it wouldn’t ordinarily bother him. Johnny’s been coaxing the gelding up next to the fence so he can crawl on bareback to avoid asking anyone to help him with the saddle that’s still too heavy for him. Today, though, eight-year-old Johnny isn’t just bareback—there’s not a halter or bridle on the horse, either.

“Robbie, Robbie!” cries four-year-old Danny from the porch. “Johnny’s on the horse and he didn’t tell nobody!”

“Stay there!” Robbie orders, not pausing as he brushes past his younger brother and races into the yard, toward the meadow where Johnny’s mount is thundering by. But he breaks stride halfway to the fence when he realizes that, rather than grimacing in terror, Johnny is grinning hugely. And rather than running blind, the horse has one ear cocked back toward Johnny, and each stride is measured, controlled. Johnny sees Robbie watching and throws up his hands, that cocky smile broader than it’s been since the funeral. He guides the horse into a circle using just his seat and legs, like a pint-sized circus performer.

Danny appears at Robbie’s side, because of course he wouldn’t do a thing Robbie tells him, including staying on the porch in the presence of what Robbie had thought to be a runaway horse.

“He’s in trouble, isn’t he, Robbie?” Danny demands, scowling. “He’s supposed to tell somebody if he’s getting on the horse.”

Robbie can’t help it. He laughs. He laughs so hard that he has to bend over and brace his hands against his legs.