Last fall we had to euthanize our old horse, Bay. My husband had to break apart Bay's body so it would sink into the hole he'd dug a week before. He dug the hole the day of his birthday party, while I cleaned the house and cooked party food and avoided death questions from our two young sons. "Why is Daddy digging such a big hole? What are we going to put into the hole? Can I ride on the digger? Can we play in the hole?"

Michael finished the hole a few hours before friends were supposed to arrive. "Isn't the vet coming?" he asked. He scooped a cut carrot through the onion dip.

"No. I just wanted to get the hole dug."

"You haven't called them yet?"

"I'm not sure it's time. I just wanted the hole dug, the ground is going to freeze soon."

"Don't you think we should have planned this better?"

"That's food for the party. Quit eating the carrot sticks."

Michael went upstairs and the kids rolled after him. Michael was a god, after driving the digger around our yard. Michael got to be a god and I was still the scullery maid.

I'd just finished cutting cornbread into chunks and counting the pieces to see if we'd have enough when he came back downstairs, children trailing behind.

"I thought you were in the shower," I said.

"Listen, I think I can do it."

"We've only got a couple of hours and I could use some help."

"I looked it up on the internet. I've got my gun in the basement, it doesn't look too hard."

"Are you talking about shooting my horse an hour before your party?"

(Possessive pronouns – nowhere but within a marriage do they take on such an undertow of meaning and accusation. Really, Bay belonged to both of us.)

"Andi, if we don't do it today we'll have to rent the backhoe again. That thing comes at two hundred bucks a shot."

"Maybe we can get someone to just stop by and fill in the hole when it's done."

"We could just get this done today."

"I don't want to shoot a horse right before a party!"

We noticed the boys carefully listening. "Men, let's clean up the living room," I told them. "Daddy's party is almost here."

I left the three of them on their knees organizing puzzle pieces into appropriate boxes and went upstairs to spy on whatever Michael had been reading. /Only perform this procedure if a certified professional is unavailable and the horse has been examined and deemed a terminal case./ Apparently this warning, repeated four times in slightly varied jargon, had hidden itself during Michael's perusing.

The window over the computer desk looked at our neighbor's house across the street, our only neighbor within a mile. We forgot to invite them, I thought. We weren't close. We'd had a few disagreements over the seven years we'd been neighbors. They called the police once when our dogs were loose. One of their chickens died in our garden, natural causes, and I'd always had a guilty suspicion they blamed us for that. Generally we found no reason to interact beyond waving by the mailboxes, though for the first couple of my sons' birthdays they sent over old trucks used by their own two boys when the boys were small. Now their boys are teenagers and sullen, in a polite way.

Michael didn't shoot the horse and the party was fine. Men grouped in the kitchen and talked about computers while women talked about men in the living room.

The following Monday, Michael got notice that everyone at the small company he worked for was being transferred to contractor status. Laid off. No more health care.

A week later the vet came and laid Bay to rest and the backhoe came back for another two hundred dollars and Michael saw and heard things to do with animals he'd rather not have. We'd had a wet fall. The nine foot hole Michael dug the day of his birthday party had filled up with rain, nearly to the top, nearly spilling over. Bodies float until you claw them with a backhoe shovel so they split and let some water into the resulting cavity. I witnessed nothing of the necessary damage other than a small pile of grayish pink bulging rope left over beside the grave – intestines. Michael's not sure the job he did will be good enough. Parts might flow up come mud season.

My sons were naturals at handling death. Kids – you'd think they were born in a zen state.

"Mummy," asked Tallis one morning. "Bay's dead, right?"

"That's right. Bay's dead."

"And we put him in the ground."

"Yes, we buried him so flowers could grow out of the dirt he will make." I poured a cup of coffee and thought about finding bones in the spring. I wondered how far decomposed he'd be by then.

"Can we plant corn in his body?" Tallis asked.

"Corn?"

"Pilgrims like to eat corn." His younger brother, Luca, zoomed by pushing a truck and Tallis set to chase. Too much shade over there to grow corn, I wanted to tell him. Where he's buried, too many trees.

A few nights later our neighbors had a house fire.

Twenty trucks? Thirty? Our town's fire department was entirely volunteer. They blocked the street, our driveway. Michael was busy shutting off engines and tucking keys above visors. I stayed in with the boys. We tried to see the house, we tried to see flames, but there were so many lights over there you couldn't tell disaster from useful illumination.

Michael loved to help. He liked to be in the heart of disaster; I think it made him feel necessary and purposeful, qualities absent in his daily perception of himself. He offered our neighbors a place to sleep for the night, a place to sit while men worked on their house, coffee – they refused. Later, when it was done, the woman came over and hugged us and cried and explained it was too close, she couldn't bear being so close to their ruined house. I thought of how women are like that, how they can be like that – we will think to soothe men's feelings even when brutally faced with substantial, steaming loss. I offered to feed the animals. "Our cats are all dead," she said. "One of them, Smokey, I don't know where he is. Maybe he's okay."

Later, after she'd left and Michael and I had shared a glass of wine I laughed about this. A cat called Smokey, burned up in a house. (I know this will keep bothering me. The thought of myself laughing on the night our neighbors, decent people, lost a substantial chunk of their habits.)

The next morning as I fed our remaining horses the flight of a white bird over their house caught my eye, but it was just cloudy sky showing through. Like a backhoe had punched a hole.

A few days later my older son asked, "Our neighbors are not dead, right?"

"No, Sweetie. Their house burned, but they're all fine. That's the important part."

"If our neighbors die, would we get new neighbors?"

"Maybe. Someday. But our neighbors are alive and they will build another house."

"Can I have a blue Popsicle?"

"It's so cold out."

"I like to be cold out and in at the same time."

I handed out a blue Popsicle and then a red one for his younger bother who refuses exclusion.

Michael came downstairs. "I have worked only four billable hours this week."

"At least we have our health."

"Isn't it a little cold for Popsicles?"

"I like to be cold out and in at the same time," our older son explained. He sighed. He had so much to teach us.

One of the few good things about my husband being laid off: we ate at the table, all of us together, for at least ten minutes every night. We said cheers with juice and wine. The boys asked us how our days went. Usually we said fine and gave an example. I liked to think that in the midst of varying levels of tragedy stirring around us and among us, we could clasp this image of ourselves as a family who eats dinner together nightly, for at least ten minutes before small people finished and bigger people remembered more work to be done. Horses had to die, jobs and houses were reduced to ash – we all sported at least one green vegetable on our plate. If I were a believer, I might just have muttered, "Amen."

Andi Diehn earned her M.F.A. from Vermont College while hugely pregnant with her first son. Since then she has had several short stories published in journals such as the American Literary Review and the Laurel Review; to fund her fiction writing habit she also works as a freelance writer and book reviewer. In June she expects her third son to arrive, hopefully after she finishes her novel.