“Should wear this, Dear.” He placed the straw hat on her head and she didn’t flinch. “I got some work around here she can do, Luce. And David won’t be home this summer, all the way over there in Africa with Médecins Sans Frontières.” Lucy adjusted the hat and pulled out a weed as she listened to Declan butcher the French words.

“All the way over in Africa doing the volunteer work,” she said. “Lord. Declan, doesn’t anyone make a salary anymore? Everyone working for free these days?” She waited for him to justify why their children were so different from their friends’ children.

“Aren’t a lot of jobs out there now, Luce. You know that.”

Lucy pulled out another weed. She was very tired. It was as though the disappointment of her entire life was trying to press her down into the earth. “What’s she going to do around here?” Lucy’s voice was barely a whisper and Declan answered in a gentle tone, as if he were trying to match her voice and keep hers from rising.

“Lots of stuff. You know I can’t do what I could before, what with the bursitis. Lots of stuff, the house needs painting or we’re going to have to take off them shingles and put on the siding.”

“You know how I hate the siding.” Luey yanked out a fistful of weeds but the effort to pull them felt like she had ploughed an entire field by hand. It was stifling hot, worse than normal.

“I know you hate the siding, and that’s why we have to keep the paint on the wood so the rot don’t get in. If you want to live in an old house, then you got to do the upkeep. Deirdre could help out with all this, all the stuff Davie used to do.”

“I’m not moving into a bungalow. I may be retired, but I am not moving into a bungalow.” Lucy sat down on the lawn.

“Lucy, the sun’s too bright for you.”

He went in and came out with some pink lemonade and peanut butter cookies, and they sat in the shade together, watching the hummingbirds sipping at the nectar in the trumpet honeysuckle. There were more hummingbirds than ever this year. Over two dozen. Declan counted them every morning and every evening. They hardly ever alighted, constantly feeding, drawn to the exotic beauty around them.

“Dec, that’s a fine feeder you’ve hung up there.”

Lucy watched Declan as he sipped his lemonade and peered up into the sky, tracing the birds with his pinkie finger.

“I know you’re not moving into a bungalow, Lucy. I’m not saying that —”

“Then what are you saying, Declan? What are you trying to say?”

“Well, if you let me finish, I’d say it.”

“Well, say it.”

“I’m saying let Deirdre come home and help us out around here, for the summer.”

A bird hummed by Lucy’s head. She didn’t know where it had all gone wrong, why every year passed and yet she never felt happy, why her family was always letting her down.