Dad died twelve years ago, fast, a heart attack in that same garage on an ordinary Saturday, and the ground went out from under all of us.

But it went out worst from under our mother, who had built her entire self around him for forty years and did not know how to stand up in a world he wasn’t in.

And grief, I have learned, does not make people kinder.

It strips them down to whatever they were underneath, and sometimes what’s underneath is not what you hoped.

Three months after we buried our father, my mother said a thing to me in this house that I carried out the door with me and did not bring back for nine years, and I never told my brother what it was, and standing in that garage twelve years later I understood that my silence about it had cost Terry a sister when he needed one most.