Gladys stood up and set her knitting on the table. “Let me have that, you ninnies,” she said. “No need for long faces until you actually read what it has to say.”

She hadn’t seen that the man had been in uniform.

Margaret turned toward Gladys and felt like she was looking through a veil of water. Life, distorted. Because if this news was what she was fearing, she didn’t know how things could ever be the same.

She pulled the telegram from her pocket with trembling hands and gave it to Gladys without saying anything.

Gladys stuck her red-glossed thumbnail underneath the seal and ripped the thing open.

“Probably just a solicitation for the volunteer fire department. They’re always collecting this time of year.”

Then her eyes grew wide.

“The 101st Airborne and the Department of the Army deeply regret to inform you—” she began, her voice wavering.

“No!” screamed Dottie. She collapsed onto the couch and Margaret snatched the telegram back from Gladys’s fingers.

“The 101st Airborne and the Department of the Army deeply regret to inform you,” she began again. “That your son, Private First Class John Francis Beck, died in performance of his duties and in service to his country on November 30, 1943, in a parachuting accident in Aldbourne, England. The department extends to you its sincerest sympathies in your great loss.”

November 30. Today. John must have died just hours before they were luxuriating in the glow of the Christmas carols.

John was already gone even as Margaret had been imagining future holidays with his wife and children around the Beck table. As she’d been knitting a scarf for his Christmas box.

“Margaret?” Mrs. Beck spoke from the top of the stairs. Her hair was in pink foam curlers and she was tying the sash of her robe around her waist. “Is everything all right? Was that Dottie I heard just now?”

Gladys zipped over to Margaret’s side and held her hand.

“Mama,” Margaret said, infusing her voice with a steadiness she did not feel. “Please bring Pops down. I need to tell you both something.”

*  *  *

Four days passed in the house as four years might have. It took all Margaret’s willpower to accomplish even the smallest of things like brushing her teeth and buttoning her pajamas.

In any other family death, that span of time would have included a funeral and a burial. But there was no body to be buried. At least not here. Their John had died a world away from the people who’d loved him all his life.

Oliver and Gladys were unexpected saviors, cooking together and delivering meals that might have been delicious if the world had not turned tasteless.

Brooklyn was all too experienced with the process of mourning, and Margaret was aware that their acute pain was one shared by too many.