As soon as we got home, Margo ran to tell Mother, who met her on the stairs and told her, “God has taken Jack, but now your Johnny will come home.”

I was upstairs in the sewing room a few hours later when the undertaker’s van turned the corner and came down the street quietly under the summer’s canopy of fresh green maple leaves. They brought the coffin into the living room and opened the lid. I peeked in only once. My brother looked dead and strange. We probably entertained two or three hundred visitors over the next couple of days. Every room downstairs was crowded with white lilies. People would duck into the living room to pay their respects, then come out for sandwiches and cake, tea, and whiskey. Daddy hardly came out of his study, and every evening, after the last mourners had left, four little French Canadian nuns would arrive in a taxi. Mother had arranged for them to sit with the body through the night. It was the custom; you weren’t supposed to leave the dead alone. They brought sewing baskets with them.

I was in bed with Life magazine the night before the funeral when there was a knock on my door. It was Margo, wearing her red doeskin dressing gown. She sat on the bed. “Do you think it’s true, what Mother said? That Jack’s dying means Johnny will come home?”

“He’ll come home, Margo, but it doesn’t have anything to do with Jack dying.”

Margo had always been closer to our brother than anyone else, and I could see how it troubled her to think that his life might have been traded for her husband’s. But it had also given her hope, a straw to cling to.

My sister’s husband was kind and cheerful. Despite the death dancing around that summer, scenting the air with lilies and the fragrance of maple seed, I could not imagine him not coming back to her.

“She didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”

“What did she mean?”

“She meant you shouldn’t give up. You have to hope for the best. It’s what faith is all about.”

That’s what I said then. Now I wonder if what Mother meant was, everything must be paid for.