“Oh, turn off the waterworks,” her mother said, though she was tearing up too. “Don’t you see how much damage you cause? How fragile everything is? You don’t remember, you can’t remember living in that roach trap of an apartment in Washington, just you and your brother and me. There was a crash one night—I thought it was an earthquake. I opened the front door, and the entire landing of the building across the street had just dropped off. The whole length of it. All those people on the first floor were looking at a pile of concrete as high as your shoulder, and those poor people on the second floor opened their doors to nothing, to air. Can you imagine what that was like? And I realized I was looking at all that from the landing of our building, the same landing on the identical building, and it was all I could do to run back inside and get to you and your brother, to make sure I wasn’t killed, because what would happen to you then? Uncle Phil had been transferred to Arizona; he would have been no help at all. And you slept through the whole thing. The earth shook, and you slept through it. After that night I was terrified every time we stepped out the front door.” She reached down and snatched a length of toilet paper off the roll, gave Karen half, and brought the rest up to her own eyes. She took a deep breath. “You have no idea how quickly things can change,” she said. “Behave. Can you do that?”

Karen just wanted out of the bathroom. She had to go to the bathroom, but she wanted out of it more. She nodded yes.

“All right, then. Is there anything you want to say to me?”

“You really can’t take Communion anymore?”

“Of course I can take Communion,” her mother said, straightening up and sniffing. “I told Father Gillespie you were lying, that you make up stories all the time, and that’s how it’s going to stay.” She blew her nose and opened the door.

The cluck of Frankie’s sleep-breathing woke her the next morning. She was on one of the roll-away beds; Matt was on the other. Frankie and Joe were in the nearest double bed and her parents were in the one next to the bathroom. She was on her side, facing the front window, and from the light she saw coming in around the curtain, it looked as if the storm had passed.