Her dad’s autopsy showed a massive aneurysm. It wasn’t fair. He had deserved better, the kind of guy who’d pull over to change a flat for anyone, who paid off the balance of a family’s layaway at Christmas. Dave Carlisle should’ve died heroically, running into a burning building to save babies and puppies (and he would have run in, and Lauren had no doubt he would’ve saved everyone). He should’ve died with a smile on his face, surrounded by the three women who loved him, his baby grandson on his chest, full of gratitude for the love he had earned in his life.

But . . . “life sucks and shit happens” and all the other bumper stickers told Lauren that she had to swallow this bitter pill—a baseball-sized pill—and keep living.

Sometimes grief brings a family together; sometimes it pushes each person into a corner. Sometimes it does both. She and Jen had always been good to each other; Jen was five years older, and Lauren adored her appropriately. Jen had set the bar unfairly high with her grades and career in environmental law, her beautiful, kind husband, her perfect baby, and Lauren cheerfully acknowledged this.

But when their dad died, they grew closer, and the age gap mattered less. They called each other a few times a day, whispering their grief and shock, crying with each other. Lauren went to visit all the time, holding Sebastian, laughing at his sweetness, crying because her dad wasn’t there to see it. As time passed and the shock of grief lessened, they just got closer.

Lauren’s relationship with her mother, on the other hand, shriveled. Donna had always been the competent, brisk, all-knowing, all-powerful parent, but when her husband died, she crumbled. It was completely understandable. A love like Donner-n-Dave’s, as Rhode Islanders pronounced it, didn’t happen often. They had been the envy of all who knew them. Donna didn’t seem to notice that her daughters had also lost someone incredibly important. Her focus was on herself, which wasn’t exactly a surprise, as Jen and Lauren discussed. She’d been a good mother, totally solid, but not the kind who paid a lot of attention to her girls. As a teacher, her students ate up a lot of her patience. She wasn’t cruel . . . it was just that the girls (especially Lauren) were something of an afterthought. Husband, job, community, and oh, yeah, two daughters, too!

Lauren had always felt that if she were, say, kidnapped, it would take her mother a week or so to notice she was gone. “Shoot, where’s that Lauren got off to?” she might say, failing to notice the ransom note taped to the door.

But her dad . . . her dad would’ve charged to her rescue.

When he died, the family seemed diminished by a lot more than one-fourth. It was like 90 percent of them were dead, too.