“She barely had eight hundred dollars to her name,” he said, in a tone of weary grievance, as if she had inconvenienced him one last time by dying poor.

“We’ll have to split the burial four ways.

Mabel, you and my brother will need to cover your share, same as the rest of us.”

I stood in the doorway with a warm cup of tea between my hands, and I was, to my own surprise, perfectly calm.

The storm of the last two days had passed through me and left a strange still clarity, the kind of quiet you find in the very center of a thing.

I looked at the four of them bent over their mother’s bank statements, dividing up eight hundred dollars and their own grievance, and I said, quietly: