She’d never heard of fentanyl before police knocked on her door. Since then, it’s stolen a generation of her family. How this grandmother is fighting to hold onto the next one

STANDOFF, ALTA.—Lorraine Black Water knows her granddaughter is close.
Has to be.
She checks the usual haunts: the bank of computers at the library, beneath the overpass where city traffic hurtles over the railway lines, and the shelter, where staff greet her by name. Having no luck, she circles in on the park.
There, she finds her granddaughter, sitting in the grass. The young woman is slim in the way her mother had been; her frame whittled down further by drugs. Her reaction at seeing her grandmother advance toward her is immediate: “Oh, shit,” Lorraine recalls her saying.
Almost a decade ago, when death had come for the girl’s mother, Lorraine’s daughter, Angela, Lorraine didn’t even know her daughter had been using a vicious new substance that would soon overwhelm her community and her family, one she often refers to simply as “the drug.” She wasn’t about to let it pull Angela’s daughter under, too.
She orders the teen into the truck for the ride from Lethbridge back to the Blood Reserve of southern Alberta, plans already forming in her head about how to get her into some form of treatment.
There are days Lorraine seems bewildered at how this foreign substance took over her life. But she knows the damage the drug brings, and today the how and when aren’t as important as the here and now.
The withdrawal will begin within hours, and she has to get her granddaughter home. 
Lorraine lives in a white two-bedroom bungalow in a stand of poplar trees, tucked away at the end of a dirt road that loops around on itself, under the protection of a towering river bank that makes the endless prairie of southern Alberta suddenly disappear.
If there’s an epicentre of the crisis of toxic drugs and death that has consumed this country — or the societal indifference to one of the most prolific killers of our time — it may well sit in this house; the burden on the shoulders of one grandmother. 
At 61, Lorraine is a slender woman with glasses and thick dark hair. She has braced against more than her share of storms. She’s quick to make a joke. Under all that runs steel. 
Her house is on the very edge of Standoff, the biggest town on Blood 148, the biggest reserve in the country. It’s home to the Kainai Nation, also known as the Blood Tribe and part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Picture a rolling swath of grassland and hay fields twice as big as Toronto but so flat you can see all the way to the snowcapped Rocky Mountains almost 100 kilometres away; a jagged spine where the waters split to flow west to the Pacific Ocean or east to Hudson Bay, a dividing line the Blackfoot call the backbone of the world.
The drug crisis has devastated Lorraine’s family. It’s robbed them of a generation, and it’s still devouring more. Seven of the children, children-in-law and grandkids that Lorraine helped raise have been lost, five over the course of last year’s brutal spring alone. Unofficial counts offer a glimpse of the staggering toll that this First Nation — one of many in Canada to fight this battle — has suffered.
The death of Lorraine’s 30-year-old daughter, Angela, was one of the first drops in what would become a tsunami of pain and anguish.
That day nine years ago, when police arrived at Lorraine’s door, was the first time she had heard of fentanyl.
Four months after Lorraine’s daughter Angela died in November 2014, Blood Tribe officials declared one of the country’s first states of emergency from opioids and began a crackdown on dealers bringing the illicit drugs across the Prairie — often from Calgary, two hours north.
Soon, there was a 24-hour crisis line, attempts to teach residents how to reverse overdoses and a community march through town in a show of unity against the dealers.
This is a community for firsts — the Kainai were the first First Nation in the province to have an on-reserve detox, among the first to make naloxone available to reverse drug poisonings. Yet the deaths continue. 
And when a fresh wave of drug poisonings hit last spring, part of a surge that rippled across Alberta, the effects were devastating.
In the cemetery off the main road through Standoff, many graves are marked with small photos of the deceased, and the faces are shockingly youthful. The mounds of fresh-looking dirt are marked by the ball caps of favourite basketball teams, Oilers beer cozies, a well-used Xbox controller.
Death is only one way the crisis has scarred the community, where more children are anxious about their parents’ survival or traumatized now that they’re gone; children who cry at night and then fall asleep at school, as one psychologist says. More grieving grandparents are left raising young ones, wary of what might happen to them if they end up in government care. 
Assessing how bad things are in Standoff and the Kainai Nation is not easy — because no one in power will say.
In response to the Star’s questions, Indigenous Services Canada said it could not release statistics on deaths without permission from the First Nation; the Kainai Nation itself declined, saying only the provincial coroner could determine cause of death, while Alberta Health also said no, citing “privacy.”
The head of Blood Tribe Department of Health also said providing numbers for the community risked violating the privacy of its members.
It’s a maddening information gap that has left even some doctors in the community scanning obituaries to try and figure out how many have died from overdoses. They say it contributes to a patchwork approach to care and makes it even harder to do their jobs.
Trying to fill the void is an elder named Roger Prairie Chicken — a former Blood Tribe health department employee who still works with youth from the community. He has begun inputting his own statistics into an Excel document, compiled by comparing the band book, which lists all adult members of the nation, with the death notices posted by local funeral homes and what he hears from friends and family about their loved ones’ cause of death.
According to his numbers, more than 100 band members died after consuming a combination of opioids and crystal meth last year, which would mean as many as one of every 20 of the provincial deaths was a member of the band who died either on reserve or somewhere else. Put another way, that would mean that almost one per cent of the roughly 13,000 Blood Tribe members died after using opioids or crystal meth just last year. It’s a burden that has pushed the health-care system and the community to the brink.
“This is a horror story,” Prairie Chicken said last fall, sitting with his wife at a table strewn with his own paperwork. “People will just shut it down. ‘Yeah right, there’s another Indian dying,’” he says, his smooth baritone veering higher as he imitates a sneering critic. 
“But no, we’re humans. We’re human beings.” 
What’s unfolding in communities such as Kainai is playing out amid an ideological tug of war across this country.
On one side are those who want to minimize the risks of an increasingly deadly drug supply through supervised consumption sites and what’s been dubbed safer supply — meaning a regulated and therefore less dangerous flow of drugs. On the other are those who see abstinence and recovery as the more noble goal. If British Columbia is seen as the poster child for harm reduction, neighbouring Alberta, and its governing United Conservatives (UCP), has planted its stake in trying to get people who use drugs to quit.
For years, the Alberta government has pointed to B.C.‘s rising death toll as evidence that harm reduction is a failed experiment.
But in the meantime, Alberta’s rate of death has begun to close in on British Columbia’s, despite the westernmost province’s long-standing reputation as ground zero of a continually evolving drug crisis.
While the way they record numbers isn’t exactly the same, both provinces broke records for fatal drug poisonings last year, with Alberta reporting a mortality rate of 43.9, compared to B.C.‘s 46.3. As in recent years, fentanyl and other illicit opioids were far and away the most common killer.
When, in early April, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced a new agency for mental health and addictions, she doubled down on recovery being the only, best, path: “I don’t want anybody to think that there’s any such thing as a safe supply of opioids,” she said.
“Have we seen immediate success? Not yet, but I’m very confident that we’re on the right track.” 
Since forming government in 2019, the UCP, now led by Smith, says it has increased the number of detox and recovery spots in the province by roughly half, meaning there are now almost 30,000 multi-week placements available, and eliminated a $40 daily fee at publicly funded addiction treatment facilities.
But one of the biggest promises of relief made to the community seems stuck in limbo. In 2020, then-premier Jason Kenney announced a new 75-bed treatment facility for the Blood Tribe, part of 11 recovery communities — long-term live-in communities for people trying to stop using drugs — being built across the province.
While a groundbreaking ceremony was held last summer, so far construction seems to have stopped there.
Responsibility also seems to have changed hands. In an email in March, Hunter Baril, a spokesperson for the minister of mental health and addiction, said the facility is no longer a government-led project, but has been changed to a “capital grant process,” meaning the money is now going to the First Nation directly, which is now in charge of getting it built. Baril said the province expects construction to be done in 2025. The Blood Tribe health department did not respond. 

Right now, the only thing standing is a sign in an otherwise empty field.
Spring arrived sluggishly on the southern Prairies last year, the cloudy days and chilly nights slow to give up their grip to the heavy heat of summer. Something in the drug supply seemed to be different, too.
The beginning of the Blackfoot year is marked by the first crack of thunder of the first spring storm. What Lorraine calls her year of pain began with another death.
To keep all the dates straight, she’s filled a piece of lined yellow notepaper with her tidy handwriting. The first was Jessica.
It’d been a few years since Lorraine lost her daughter, Angela, and  Angela’s husband, Shawn. But the families had remained doubly entwined, with two siblings married to another set of siblings. Angela’s brother, Justin, had married Shawn’s sister, Jessica. 
By then Lorraine was no stranger to the gravitational pull of the toxic substances seeping into every corner of the community, and this time, she saw the slow creep coming. She believes it was the use of Tylenol 3s that cracked open the door for Justin, a six-foot-five former basketball player who’d trained to operate heavy machinery to support his growing family. The years of physical strain had taken their toll. He seriously hurt his leg in a car accident. He switched to stronger, illegal stuff, which started depleting his large frame. Jessica, a doting mother to their four girls, started using, too.
On the second day of February 2023, Jessica, aged 36, died of an overdose, sending the family into shock. 
Next came Lorraine’s nephew David, a child of her closest brother, a nephew who was more like a son. He’d been the doted-on youngest of the family until his baby sister came along, and he had won ribbons in school for sports and perfect attendance. As an adult he had three kids of his own. 
After trying and failing to get him to treatment, she welcomed him into her home in the hope he could kick the opioid himself. The pain of withdrawal was so bad that she remembers him trying to climb the hallway walls, so she dragged him onto the couch and sat on him to hold him down. “He was literally climbing the walls,” Lorraine says. “I couldn’t get help.”
He died at age 28, still waiting for treatment.
Meanwhile, Lorraine’s son Justin was reeling from the loss of his wife, Jessica. In March, emergency workers raced down the road to Lorraine’s little white house, charging through the bathroom door, forced shut by his head after he collapsed on the linoleum.
Lorraine, so scared she’d temporarily forgot the phone number to summon police, had wedged it open a crack and was trying frantically to revive him using the tiny slice of his body she could see. Police guided her into a back bedroom so she wouldn’t have to see them try to save him. Justin, 38, didn’t make it.
Justin and Jessica’s oldest, Ashley, was a sensitive teen who loved photography and makeup tutorials. Her family doesn’t think she would have touched drugs if not for the weight now on her thin shoulders. After her parents died she was getting up at 5 a.m. to care for her little sisters while also trying to finish high school. One day Ashley came over and sat on the floor, doing her makeup, as she excitedly told her grandmother about her first boyfriend.
She wanted Lorraine to meet him over supper, now that her dad no longer could. “We’ll all go out,” Lorraine remembers reassuring her granddaughter. “We’ll do this, we’ll keep trying.”
But these days every hit is a gamble; no one is safe. It’s hard to overstate how dangerous Canada’s illicit drug supply has become since the synthetic opioid known as fentanyl first upended the black market more than a decade ago. Drug supply today is an ever-changing medley of unpredictable substances, from cheap additives like caffeine and sucrose to powerful sedatives and tranquilizers that don’t respond to Naloxone, a medication that can reverse an opioid overdose. Any hit could contain a toxic cocktail of ingredients.
In early May, just over a month since Justin had died, the Blood Tribe leadership sounded the alarm once more about a “very poisonous batch of drugs” spreading through southern Alberta. This came on the heels of another state of emergency and $1.5 million to crack down on trafficking on reserve. “Please check on family members,” the notice read. “Please have Naloxone on hand and DO NOT USE ALONE.”
Three days after the warning, Ashley died from what the family believes to be an overdose, shortly before her high school graduation. She was found with bruises on her face, Lorraine says, and what looked like a cigarette burn on her chest. The family doesn’t know why.
The final blow came in early June, when police came to tell Lorraine that Daisy, a granddaughter she’d raised, had died of what was also believed to be an overdose. At that point, Lorraine asked that they not tell her exactly where Daisy, 28, had been found. The town is already filled with ghosts and she figured she had enough places to avoid.
For years, Lorraine tried to save her kids herself, driving them to doctors, calling the on-reserve detox and hunting for beds in treatment centres. When she was desperate she’d go into town to buy Suboxone — a medication that minimizes withdrawal symptoms — for $5 or $10 a pill to keep their withdrawals at bay and, if she had no luck, she’d sit with them through the agony that followed. “They were willing to go,” she says of her hunt for a treatment bed. “But I had no one to help me.”
“And then the drug just overtook them. The pain they go through, I know. Because they stayed with me. I’ve seen their withdrawals, the pain, their crying.”
Meanwhile, the family had struggled with how to help her children’s kids. Some had ended up in the government care system, a roll of the dice that saw some of them placed with a loving family with a nanny, while others were mentally and physically abused, Lorraine says. Daisy had come to her because her mother was living on the streets. Now Daisy was gone, too.
After the deaths piled up, one after another, Lorraine went to court to get custody of Daisy’s three kids, ages 11, five and two.
Now they’re living with her and at an age when many people are thinking about retirement, she is, in some ways, circling back to the beginning. But as she looks to the future, the question of whether her great-grandchildren can escape the past looms large.
The reserve known as Blood 148 is the biggest in Canada.
But it’s still just a splinter of the territory once claimed by the Blackfoot, the Prairie’s dominant military power back when hunters galloped horses into thundering bison herds and gathered in midsummer for the annual Sundance, a tradition that continues today.
If addiction is the result of pain, as Canadian doctor and mental health guru Gabor Maté has said, this community has had plenty of it.
Its borders were pierced in the 1880s by American whisky traders, drawn by the potential for profit in an area nominally controlled by Britain but free of the law enforcement lurking south of the border. Cheap, strong liquor was their stock-in-trade and it soon did more damage than any war.
“What was flatteringly called trade whiskey was more correctly a dangerous concoction which could contain any or all of laudanum, painkiller, ginger, turpentine, essence of vanilla, red ink, tobacco and alcohol, all well diluted with slough water,” Alberta politician and historian Grant MacEwan wrote in 1985. “Two cups of the poisonous mixture was the customary price in return for a bison hide, and the skins rolled in to be piled high on the traders’ wagons.”
A century and a half later, the battle continues.
Elder Charlene Plume remembers when she used to see people addicted to alcohol trying to hitch a ride to the nearest liquor store in Fort McLeod, but now people are making their way to dealers in Lethbridge or buying opioids for use at home. So many in the community, including couples and multiple members of families, have died suddenly, disappearing like a light bulb that has burned out. 
In that shadow, a generation of children are going to have to find their way. Plume works in schools and sees how the crisis has trickled down to the town’s youngest. “I would often hear the kids say, ‘we want to use the phone, we want to use the phone.’ Finally I pulled one of the kids aside, and I asked him, ‘why do you want to use the phone?’” she recalls.
The answer shook her. “‘We want to phone home and check that our parents are still alive.”
Lorraine’s house has always felt a little bit removed from life in town.
Growing up, she remembers running through the bush with her brothers, splashing in the river, playing hockey on the frozen pond. Her brothers would insist she be goalie as they skated loops around her.
But tragedy lurked. One of her brothers died in a car crash going down the hill to town, not far from the neighbouring Hutterite colony. Another jumped off a flatbed truck — or so Lorraine’s mother was told — though Lorraine says when they went to view his body there were no scrapes on his skin, despite his apparently violent end. Questions about the role of substances in both deaths lingered. 
She met her now former partner at a party here in Standoff and they had their oldest daughter, then Angela and Justin in quick succession. But they separated shortly after their youngest daughter was born and Lorraine took the opportunity to move to Calgary, where she enrolled in college before attending the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology for business administration. 
But when Eugene, the brother she’d been closest to ever since they were small, called and asked her to come back, she did. They needed more family around, she recalls him saying.
As Lorraine’s kids grew into adulthood and had children of their own, danger found them anyway. After Angela died, drugs became a constant in the community, or so it seemed to Lorraine.
She tried to turn her little house into a refuge, preferring to know her children, when they were using, were safe with her and not out sleeping in the southern Alberta wind. 
However they got there, she’d take their shoes off if they were unable, and they’d sleep for days in the back bedroom where they could be somewhat insulated from the noise in the rest of the house. Lorraine, on the other hand, would sleep less, getting up to peek her head in the door and make sure they were still breathing. Sometimes her kids would end up in her room, lying across the foot of her bed.  
Like many people who have used opioids, Lorraine’s kids inhaled sweets, the sugar providing a shadow of the dopamine hit they were missing. So she’d stock up on little bags of mixed gummies from the gas station, marshmallows shaped like strawberries and bottles of Coke. Even full bags of sugar would disappear within days, emptied spoonful by spoonful into mugs of coffee or tea. 
Lorraine says it was practically impossible to get her kids into the on-reserve detox facility, which often sees far more demand than its two dozen beds can handle. Getting a free bed required calling every morning at 8 a.m. and hoping for a vacancy that, at least in her case, never came in time. Once she got a call that there was room for Daisy, but she was already dead. 
She wasn’t alone, with at least one community doctor enlisting family members as ad hoc caretakers for those unable to get into a detox facility, teaching them to administer medication and monitor symptoms, in a desperate attempt to fill the gap in official services. 
Sometimes when Lorraine wasn’t able to get anything to numb the withdrawal, her kids would get up in desperation and start walking down the long dirt road to town.  
Dr. Susan Tallow Christenson works out of the Laverne Clinic on the Blood Reserve. It’s here that Lorraine has come when she needed help.
“I think it’s amazing that (Lorraine) hasn’t completely lost it with all the stress and the losses in her life,” says Christenson.
Christenson tried to create a model where a team of medical professionals, including counsellors and a family doctor, supports someone trying to get off drugs.
But recruiting people to do this work has been difficult. After 16 years, she is pausing new patients and isn’t sure what the future holds. She sounds tired.
Some of her patients have told her that the place they got the best care was in jail — though she has had patients overdose there, too — where there’s opiate replacement therapy and group counselling and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. 
“I’m just always kind of personally relieved when they’re there, because I can quit worrying about them for a while,” she says.
She was one of the first to raise the alarm when opioids overwhelmed the reserve. But since then she’s seen groups form to tackle the crisis that would start strong and meet monthly, only to disband and get replaced; treatment programs that failed to communicate with each other, practitioners that came and went and families shattered. The response has been haphazard.
Once you’re addicted to something like opioids, weaning your body of its physical need for them is very, very hard. The harsh truth, Christenson says, is that we don’t have a simple answer to how to help someone struggling with addiction in the way we know how to fix a broken leg or heal the damage from a heart attack. She was one of the first people on reserve to prescribe Suboxone, to help get people through withdrawal. The burden on her has decreased as other doctors have stepped up to help prescribe, and a new provincial virtual program devoted to dispensing the treatment drugs has given her weekends back. But people need much more than that. 
If sending people to treatment is the ultimate goal, she points out that treatment has a less than 10 per cent success rate in helping someone get sober. If she prescribed an antibiotic that worked so poorly, there would be outrage, she points out. But in this case, that’s accepted as good enough. If someone wants to stop using drugs it can take years, she says, and while she’s grateful for sober living facilities, she’s seen many people stabilize for a year and then relapse when they get out. 
When you tack on a lack of housing and education and mental health treatment that many face, it’s a mountain that can begin to feel unclimbable.  “I mean, you never want to give up hope. But maybe this is something we have to learn to live with, like alcoholism, right? We’ve all kind of just thrown our hands up,” she says. “I mean, honestly, fentanyl gives you the highest high that you and I could ever imagine. How can we compete with that?”
But Christenson’s soft voice changes when she talks about her patients who have managed to move on from addiction, something she calls “so awesome and wonderful.” She talks of one former patient who has gone on to become a health-care worker and has a car and a loving partner and children.
While there’s no secret formula to who makes it and who doesn’t, there is something Christenson says always gives people purpose: Family. 
Watery winter light pours through the windows as kids buzz around Lorraine’s kitchen table like traffic at a crossroads. A group of teenage granddaughters gets ready to pile into a vehicle and head for home, someone hunts for the Wi-Fi password; another spies opportunity, scooping up the last of the crackers from a spread of snacks.
Lorraine stands in the thick of it, saying goodbyes, trying to find the password, deftly redirecting a soccer ball kicked by Amelia, the toddler, into the centre of the action.
“It feels good when everybody’s here,” she says later, with a smile, in a brief moment of quiet. “Laughing, doing whatever. That’s how it always was.”
Today marks a year since her daughter-in-law Jessica died, at the beginning of that tragic spring. It means the end of what Lorraine calls the worst year, and a shift into a year of memory. There’s talk of doing a mass later in the week, but today, it’s enough to be together. Earlier this year it felt like the number of deaths had ebbed in the community at large, but whether that was because of different ingredients in the drug supply or a recent crackdown on drug dealers by band police wasn’t clear, but then a few waves of deaths returned. No one knows what the future holds.
The yard is scattered with toys, the driveway full of vehicles belonging to visitors. Every time the door opens Lorraine pauses whatever she’s doing to shout: “take off your shoes!” Amelia is all big eyes and confidence. She pads inside, the cartoon face on her tiny pink Ugg boots spattered with mud; five-year-old Rylan careens in after her and bumps into a bag of dog food before regaining his footing and continuing inside, his snow boots still on. 
Hayden, the oldest, recently came home with a scruffy little puppy who is now a ready playmate in the yard as the kids bound in and out. (“I guess I’m a dog owner now,” Lorraine says with pretend exasperation.) 
It’s obvious to Lorraine that her great-grandkids carry the scars of addiction. They’ve seen more than most, and nothing she can do can change that. As she once sought out drug treatment for her kids, she’s now working to get her littlest charges to grief counsellors, though getting them into those services isn’t easy, either.  But that doesn’t define them.
The wall above her couch is hung with the tasselled caps of the family’s recent graduates. One of the people beaming out from a graduation photo is Arian North Peigan, 20, a thoughtful soft-spoken college student who has stopped by to see her relatives.
Arian has a unique perspective on her family.
She was about eight when she first remembered watching her mother crush up pills on a plastic DVD case. She didn’t understand what was happening and chalked it up to mysterious adult behaviour. She remembers her parents taking care of her, so she didn’t worry.
When she was 12, she and her little sisters were seized by child protective services and sent to live with a new family in what they all thought would be a short-term placement. But her parents ended up living on the street and suddenly the placement wasn’t so temporary. No one knows better than this family that placements in government-sponsored care often don’t have a happy ending, with some children stripped of their culture, family or worse.
But Arian says she was lucky. While she says she was always encouraged to stay in touch with her birth family and attend events like the Sundance, she ended up living with her new family until she became an adult and still visits them and her younger sisters often.
She has wrestled with her own powerlessness, and worked to accept that she can support her family members as they grapple with addiction, but if they don’t want to stop, there’s ultimately nothing she can do. She wonders if it would be as easy to say that if she was living with them full time. 
One of the things that baffles her is the idea that heavy drug use is something that people do purely recreationally. There’s no way so many in her family have suffered so much for so long, just to have a good time. “I actually don’t know where this pain comes from. I don’t know the story of why they started,” she says. “It wasn’t because it was fun.”
Which doesn’t mean she isn’t still looking for answers. She recently wrote a research paper for English class on Indigenous people and the opioid crisis, which meant reading about the connection between drugs and residential schools, about how the kids who attended often suffered the kind of emotional damage that meant when they grew up they struggled to take care of their own children. It made her think about her own parents and what they didn’t know. 
She also considers what has fallen to her. She’s just started a criminal justice program in college with the hopes of one day working for Blood Tribe police, and proving there are options for young people beyond drugs or leaving town. It would be a challenge, she admits. Coming from the reserve means being part of a web of family ties that connect almost everyone, and she worries about responding to overdose calls involving a cousin or friend. But there is already fear, she says, of the next overdose and the next funeral. 
“I understand that it’s hurtful for us,” she says of the colonial legacy at play, perched on Lorraine’s couch. “But we need to figure out some ways to get past that.”
Meanwhile, Lorraine fights on.
The granddaughter who Lorraine once tracked down in a Lethbridge park was able to get off drugs and put on weight. She even started laughing again. But she struggled to maintain sobriety and is now living elsewhere. Her grandmother continues to worry. Another grandson is now living in the trailer outside, having arrived a few weeks ago with little warning. 
Lorraine took him in, but her focus has changed. If he brings anyone involved in drugs around, she has told him he’ll be kicked out. She’s already done it once. She put up cameras, she says, but they were torn down. 
Her two surviving daughters both fought their own battles with drugs and ended up on separate paths. One is still struggling and living on the street, while another is in recovery and works at a café in town.
Taking care of her grandkids has necessitated a shift in Lorraine’s thinking. It hasn’t changed her love, but it has made clear her priorities.
“I’m at that point where I’ve had it, and I’ve told them I can’t do this anymore. It’s too hard,” she says of her attempts to get her kids into treatment. “I told them, ‘Don’t you see what we went through? Didn’t it click? It’s not like I don’t care. I care,” she says. “But it’s just I can’t keep doing this when I have these ones to start worrying about.”
Most days are a blur of cooking and folding laundry and the chaos of small children. Recently, Amelia methodically slotted the family’s collection of forks into a hole in the wall. 
Sometimes Lorraine asks her ex-husband to come over so she can at least go to the grocery store without three grasping sets of hands toppling extra items into the cart. At night they take comfort with what they’ve got, the kids with bottles and she with a beer. Compared to the structure with which she raised her own son and three daughters, she now figures things like homework and potty training will come when they come.
Nowadays she doesn’t leave home much, keeping her little family separate from the rest of the town, in the little house at the end of the road. She’d take the pain from them if she could, she says. 
“I’m not going to pretend I’m the greatest grandmother. I’m not, I have my faults,” she says quietly, in a rare moment of quiet. “They know that, they do.”
As the afternoon light begins to wane, the two youngest kids spill into the yard. Rylan picks up a stick and swings it around, but one pass gets slightly too close to his little sister. Amelia plants her feet and starts to cry, her shrieks bounding in all directions under the endless Prairie sky.
The front door flies open and Hayden steps onto the porch, scanning the yard for his sister. He strides down the steps, his young face etched with concern as Amelia pumps her toddler legs towards him. He bends to wrap her in a hug and immediately, the crying stops. For just a moment, all is well.