She did the sad ones.

When Bea cried about their mother, at seven and eight and nine, she went to Odile.

When the twins asked questions, they asked Odile.

When Teddy had a bad stretch in 2013, it was Odile who sat on the end of her bed.

Not because I refused.

Because I was at a warehouse off Highway 99 from two-thirty until eleven, and a seven-year-old who is upset at six-forty in the evening does not save it for Saturday.

My oldest daughter absorbed five children’s grief about their mother for six years, at an age where she was also absorbing her own, and she did it at a volume I never heard because it happened in the hours I was not in the building.