“Well, you’re supposed to knock when someone’s in the bathroom.”

Frankie tapped his knuckles lightly on the door. “I have to pee, and Mom says dinner’s ready.”

Roy surrendered the bathroom to the boy, and when he emerged, the atmosphere had changed. Deliberate steps had been taken to calm things down. Teresa had had the foresight to bring paper plates and plastic forks and spoons, and there were six place settings spread out across the two beds. On the nightstand was a selection of what they’d salvaged from the refrigerator. Teresa was standing next to the food. The rest of them were sitting on the floor around the perimeter of the two beds, in front of their paper plates.

“What’s this?” Roy asked, trying to sound light and jovial.

“We’re survivors,” Teresa said, unfolding a paper napkin. “We’re riding out the storm, and we’re going to have a proper dinner.” There was a slight, artificial-looking smile crimped into her mouth. The television was turned off and in place of its noise was a kind of leveling static. There they all were (including Frankie, who had just slipped past him and taken his spot alongside the bed), gathered around food, waiting for Roy so they could start a meal, like regular people. Roy appreciated—and felt guilty about—her efforts.

“Well, then, let’s eat,” he said, walking over to the chair they’d pulled up in front of his plate.

They passed around a loaf of Wonder bread, a package of baloney, a jar of mayonnaise, a jar of pickles, a Tupperware container of leftover spaghetti, and a container of orange Jell-O Teresa had made the previous day. Roy picked up his plastic fork.

“I think we should say grace,” Teresa said. “I think that would be nice.”

“I’ll say it,” Matt offered, and then cleared his throat and said the word grace.

“A real grace,” Teresa said. She looked at Roy. “Would you do it?”

He’d become an atheist in his late teens. Then, when he was twenty, he’d barrel-rolled his car into a field and by all rights should have died in the crash, and because he hadn’t, he’d started believing in God again. But at some point over the past year—after he got laid off from NASA and spent a month lumbering aimlessly around the house, fantasizing about waking up dead and wondering what was beyond death—he’d come to the conclusion that people were no more special than blades of grass: they either got rained on or withered up in a drought. There was no set path, no great design. It was all chance, and God was just an invention that people were convinced they needed, like digital watches or steering-wheel wraps. But he couldn’t admit his atheism to Teresa, who dragged them all to mass each Sunday and saved the missalettes as if they were concert programs.