...And Never Let HerGo

realities of their situation. They loved her as siblings, but as time went on, they became almost parent figures, too.
    Robert Sr. was bereft without Kathleen. He had lost his anchor, the one person in the world who might have been able to keep him from drinking. The hold alcohol had always had over him grew more tenacious, and he was bitter, sure that life had been so unfair to him that no one could blame him for finding solace in a bottle. He worked less and less; he didn’t have the heart to convince other families that they needed to prepare for illness, death, and loss of wageswith the judicious choice of life insurance policies, when his own family had been shattered.
    The older Fahey children ranged in age from Kevin at twenty-one to Brian at thirteen and they could take care of themselves, although they all were coping with not only the loss of their mother but also the end of their family as they had known it. But Anne Marie was only nine; in a sense, she had lost the most.
    With their mother gone,
her
mother, their grandmother Katherine McGettigan, did her best to help. If only she could have, she would have taken them to live with her, but she had been a widow for over twenty years and had to work hard for her own living. She always had. Along with her brothers, James and Jack, Katherine grew up on a hardscrabble farm in Ireland—a place with five horses, a cow, and an acre of land that gave of itself grudgingly. In America, she had gone to work as a maid and a cook.
    Katherine lived in Media, Pennsylvania, and she came down to Wilmington once a week to clean and cook for her grandchildren. The Fahey children called her Nan, and less often, Kate. She had worked for some very wealthy families and learned a lot about the niceties of life. She taught Kathleen and Anne Marie how to survive the humid summer nights without air-conditioning by powdering their sheets. Anne Marie faithfully poured talcum powder in her bed, convinced that she really did feel cooler. She would also remember how Nan told her it was important to have a pretty bed, and she dreamed that one day she would have flowered bedspreads and ruffled pillows.
    Nan wasn’t the cuddly kind of grandmother, and it was just as well. She taught her six grandchildren how to survive in a world where they were virtually on their own. She taught them to be doers who would get out there and make a place for themselves in the world, whatever fate or luck handed them.
    “She had great internal strength,” Robert Jr. recalled. “She was very shy and very stern, a little like the nuns who were our teachers, but we always knew what to expect from her. We had other adults in our lives who were variable, but Nan was predictable and we could count on her. She taught us a strong work ethic.”
    In her later years, Katherine McGettigan’s job was as a meat wrapper at the A&P supermarket. She was on her feet all day, but the pay was better than she had ever known. Even though she couldn’t move the Fahey children into her house in Media, they always knew she was available to them. She had Robert over for dinnerevery Wednesday night, and Kevin came on Sundays. For lonely boys at college, it meant a lot. Nan made special times for all of her grandchildren, and worried the most about little Annie.
    To fill the gaps of what Nan could not do, young Kathleen tried her best to take her mother’s place. “I think the tragic loss of our mother brought us closer in a lot of ways, but it was a very turbulent time,” she said. “I was fourteen, and I assumed some of the mothering role, and I was ill equipped to handle the responsibility. And there were times that I’m not proud of, but it was just a very difficult time, and I think that anger with the situation we were in—we took it out on each other, because there was no one else around.”
    Anne Marie would remember that in one tussle with Kathleen, her sister stuck the vacuum cleaner so close to her long wavy hair that the suction drew strands of it painfully into the metal tube and they had a hard time untangling it. It was the kind of thing that happens when siblings get on each other’s nerves—only there was nobody there to step in and play referee. There was no one to look after them.
    Most of the time, Anne Marie and Kathleen got along as well as any sisters six years apart would; Kathleen called Anne Annie, and Anne Marie called Kathleen Cass or Kate. Sometimes names in the Fahey family could be