“Well,” I said. “You got the kids, and you got the man.”

“I got him in the end, all right. What Tessie and Matt left of him. He’d started on the drink by then.”

“But you wanted him anyway.” I kept my voice nice and non-judgmental.

“I’d my heart set on him. My mammy, God rest her soul, she warned me: never go with a drinking man. But I hadn’t a clue. My own da-you won’t remember him, Francis, but he was a lovely man-he never touched a drop; I hadn’t a notion what a drinker was like. I knew Jimmy’d have a few, but sure, all the fellas would. I thought it was no more than that-and it wasn’t, not when I first spotted him. Not till Tessie O’Byrne wrecked his head for him.”

I believed her. I know what the right woman, at the right moment, can do to a man-not that Tessie seemed to have got away scot-free herself. Some people should never meet. The fallout spreads too wide and gets into the ground for much too long.

Ma said, “Everyone had always said Jimmy Mackey’d be good for nothing. His ma and da were a pair of aul’ alcos, never worked a day in their lives; ever since he was only a little chiseler he’d be going round to the neighbors asking could he stay for the dinner because there was nothing at home, he’d be out running the streets in the middle of the night… By the time I knew him, everyone said for definite he’d wind up a waster like his ma and da.” Her eyes had strayed off the polishing, away towards the window and the falling rain. “I knew they were wrong, but. He wasn’t bad, Jimmy wasn’t; just wild. And he wasn’t thick. He could’ve been something. He didn’t need Guinness’s, he could’ve had his own little business-there was no need for him to be answering to bosses every day, he hated that. He always loved the driving; he could’ve done deliveries, had his own van… If your woman hadn’t got to him first.”

And there was the motive, gift wrapped and tied with ribbon, to go ever so perfectly with that signature MO. One day Jimmy Mackey had had a top-flight girl on his arm and a top-flight job in the bag, he’d been all ready to paint the future in his colors and give the finger to the bastards who said he’d never do it. Then he made one slipup, just one, and prissy little Matt Daly waltzed in cool as a cucumber and pocketed Jimmy’s whole life for himself. By the time Jimmy’s head cleared, he was married to a girl he never wanted, scrambling for the odd day’s work on a job with no prospects and drinking enough to kill Peter O’Toole. He spent twenty-odd years watching his lost life unfold right across the road, in another man’s home. Then, all in one weekend, Matt Daly humiliated him in front of the whole street and almost got him arrested-in what passes for an alcoholic’s brain, it’s always someone else’s doing-and he somehow found out that Rosie Daly was wrapping his son around her finger and dancing him off to wherever suited her.

And there could have been more to it than that, more and worse. Da grinning at me, winking, daring me to talk back: The Daly young one, yeah? She’s a little daisy. The kegs on her, my Jaysus… My girl Rosie, the sweet spitting image of his Tessie O’Byrne.

He must have heard me after all, tiptoeing through the front room, sure I was untouchable. I’d seen him pretend to be asleep a hundred times. Maybe he had only meant to tell her to get her hands off his family; maybe he had wanted something more. But then there she was, in front of him, slapping him in the face with just how little it mattered what he wanted: Tessie O’Byrne’s daughter irresistible and untouchable all over again, Matt Daly’s daughter taking away whatever Jimmy had that she fancied. Probably he was drunk, at least until he realized what had happened. He had been a strong man, back then.

We hadn’t been the only ones awake that night. Somewhere in there, Kevin had got up, maybe to go out to the jacks, and found us both gone. At the time it had meant nothing to him: Da regularly vanished for days on end, Shay and I both had the occasional nighttime errand of one kind or another. But this weekend, when he realized that someone had been out killing Rosie that night, Kevin had remembered.

I felt like I had known every detail of this story, in some chasm in the deepest part of my brain, since the second I heard Jackie’s voice on the answering machine. It felt like icy black water, filling up my lungs.

Ma said, “He should’ve waited for me to grow up. She was pretty enough, Tessie was, but by the time I got to sixteen there was plenty of fellas thought I was pretty as well. I know I was young, but I was growing. If he’d just taken his great stupid eyes off her long enough to notice me for one minute, none of this would have happened.”

The solid weight of grief in her voice could have sunk ships. That was when I realized that she thought Kevin had been drunk out of his skull, just like he learned from Daddy, and that was what had sent him out of that window.

Before I could pull myself together enough to set her straight, Ma swiped her fingers across her mouth, looked at the clock on the windowsill and let out a screech. “Holy God, will you look at that, it’s gone one o’clock! I’ve to eat something or I’ll be getting a weakness.” She shoved the ornament away from her and pushed back her chair. “You’ll have a sandwich.”

I said, “Will I bring one in to Da?”

For one more second Ma’s face turned towards the bedroom door. Then she said, “Leave him,” and went back to pulling things out of the fridge.

The sandwiches were soft butter and reconstituted ham on white sliced pan, cut into triangles. They took me straight back to when my feet didn’t touch the floor at that same table. Ma made another pot of ferocious tea and ate her way methodically through her triangles. The way she chewed said she’d got better dentures, somewhere along the way. When we were kids she always told us her missing teeth were our fault: she had lost them having us, a tooth for every child. When the tears started coming, she put down her mug, pulled a faded blue handkerchief out of her cardigan pocket and waited for them to stop. Then she blew her nose and went back to her sandwich.

18

A part of me would have sat there with my ma forever, giving the teapot a reheat every hour or so and making the occasional batch of sandwiches. Ma wasn’t bad company, as long as she kept her mouth shut, and for the first time her kitchen felt like shelter, at least compared to what was waiting for me outside. As soon as I stepped through that door, the only thing left for me to do was go after solid proof. That wasn’t the hard part-I figured it should take about twenty-four hours, max. That was where the full-on nightmare kicked in. Once I had proof, I would have to figure out what to do with it.

Around two o’clock, noises started up in the bedroom: bedsprings creaking, a wordless throat-clearing shout, that endless retching full-body cough. I figured that was my cue to leave, which triggered a volley of complicated Christmas-dinner questions from Ma (“If yourself and Holly both came, I’m only saying if, would she eat white meat or dark meat, or would she have any at all, because she’s said to me her mammy doesn’t give her turkey unless it does be that free-range one…”). I kept my head down and kept moving. As I dived out the door, she called after me, “Lovely seeing you, come back soon!” Behind her Da shouted, through phlegm, “Josie!”

I even knew exactly how he could have found out where Rosie was going to be that night. The only way to that info had been through Imelda, and I could only think of one reason why my da would be anywhere near her. Here I had always taken it for granted that when he vanished for a day or three, it was booze he was hunting. Even after everything else he had done, it had never once occurred to me that he would cheat on my ma-if I had thought about it, I would have figured he had an alcohol-related inability to do any such thing. My family is just chock-full of surprises.