“You’re lying.”

“No I’m not, boy.”

“Prove it.”

“I don’t have to. You’ll prove it for me. And the proof of everything I say is in that file. Find the O’Malley file and you’ll find your proof.”

The boy didn’t respond. He just stood there, as still as the shadow of a tree, and then turned again and hobbled off.

“Call me when you find it,” Bobby shouted to the retreating figure. “And we’ll have a celebration of the holy truth.”

CHAPTER 24

KYLE BYRNE WAS PISSED. He was a little drunk, too, which accounted for the way the 280ZX was swerving as he punched the radio’s buttons looking for something with some snap, but more than anything he was pissed.

He was pissed at that creepy fraud O’Malley for talking crap about his father, who Kyle was sure was neither thief nor scoundrel, despite the illicit circumstances of Kyle’s own birth. He was pissed at Tony Sorrentino for sating his anger against Kyle’s father by turning loose his goons and sheathing Kyle’s body in pain. He was pissed at his best friend, Kat, and at Bubba Jr. and at Skitch and that Detective Ramirez and all the other well-meaning blowhards who thought it was their right, nay, their obligation, to tell Kyle how badly he had screwed up his life. As if Kyle weren’t fully aware of exactly where his wrong turns had been taken and the prices he had paid for each. And Kyle was pissed at the radio, where all he could find were American Idol rejects or teenage emos or oldies that were a hit before he was born.

But most of all he was pissed at himself for caring. He had announced to the cop and that fake O’Malley that he was through, and he had been telling the truth. He’d been to enough funerals, buried enough old men. And now he had been bounced around like a soccer ball, with the promise of more to come. He was so ready to put it all behind him. His father had died long ago, his father’s funeral had been a fiasco, it was time to bury him for good.

Except some questions in this life needed to be answered, some doubts needed to be quelled, and for Kyle these were the questions and these were the doubts. And so here he was, driving like an angry fool west from the city, smack into his past.

He hadn’t been back to the old neighborhood since he lost the house. Which was an interesting and accurate way of putting it. Perhaps only Kyle could lose a house, like others lost their sunglasses or keys. Even though it was already dark, he recognized the landmarks as if they were great monuments in a capital city. That was the school yard where he’d first played T-ball; that was the field behind the Wawa where he’d pitched the Red Sox to their second straight Little League championship. There was Kat’s street, where she and her family were right now chowing down on broiled eel. And there was his elementary school—Jesus, it looked small. He had played basketball on that outdoor court every summer of his youth, had sledded down that hill during every snowstorm with Kat, had kissed Melissa Dougherty in the trees above the playground.

And then the turn, as familiar a bend as his elbow. And then the street, her street, and then the house, her house. He stopped the red car right in front and stared for longer than he thought possible. The tour of his childhood markers had served to transform his anger into sentimental remembrance, and now, here, while remembering her, he fought against the tears.

It was a little Cape Cod, the smallest house on a crowded block. There was a For Sale sign on the unkempt front lawn that had once been lush. The paint was peeling where it had always been perfectly maintained. The flower beds were overgrown where once they’d been covered with an explosion of blossoms and swarms of white butterflies. The house’s condition was sad enough in itself, but what was actually bringing tears to Kyle’s eyes was the absence that lived in the house as surely as it lived in his heart.

On soft summer nights, she would sit on that front porch, rocking back and forth on her rocking chair, smoking and staring out into the night as if waiting for something brilliant to come her way.

Waiting for him.

This journey into his past was all about his father, but there was no avoiding his mother in the process. The trajectory of her entire adult life had been bent by his father’s gravitational field. She had fallen in love with him at a tender age, had been impregnated by him, had set up her house and her schedule to suit his whims and inclinations, and after his death she had lived the rest of her life in some sort of bemused tribute to that early love that had altered her life so. Before Liam Byrne’s death, she would sit on the porch, waiting on the possibility that he would choose this night to visit his son and then share cocktails with her on that very porch. And later, long after his funeral, she would sit on that selfsame porch, as if she still were waiting, as if that youthful love were strong enough to cheat death itself.

“He was going to leave his wife,” she told Kyle one night on that porch, a few years after his father’s funeral. She was smoking and staring out into the darkness, that distant smile on her face, as if her life were a cosmic joke that she was just on the cusp of understanding. “He was moving in here. We were all going to be together again.”

“Did he tell you that?” said Kyle.

“In his way.”

“Did he tell her?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“What makes you think so?”

“He told me once she would never let him leave. I guess she proved him right.”

“Mom?”

“Isn’t it your bedtime?”

“I’m fourteen.”

“My big, big man. Go to bed, Kyle.”

“You don’t think . . .”

“You’re right, Kyle. I don’t.”

There was something fierce in her ability to avoid his questions. She was a competent typist, a devoted mother, a fine cook and a brilliant gardener, but most of all she was a cipher. He had always believed that his mother was fooling herself about his father’s moving back with them. It was the saddest memory he had of her, it made everything else in her life seem just as delusional. But suddenly, now, that very conversation seemed to harbor not delusion but maybe something akin to the truth.

The fake O’Malley had said that his father was supposed to have taken the file cabinet to his home. Yet his father’s wife knew nothing about it. It didn’t make sense, until the day after Kyle’s strange meeting with O’Malley at the gazebo, while Kyle was sitting in front of Kat’s TV, watching the baseball game and downing his traditional Father’s Day case of Yuengling beer, when he remembered his mother’s comment about his father telling her, in his way, that he was coming to live with them.

What would be his way? He’d bring something to the house, something to store, something most valuable. Something too heavy for him to handle alone.

“Uncle Max,” Kyle had shouted over the phone after he’d thought it through but before driving out to the old neighborhood. He was shouting because he had reached his Uncle Max at the Olde Pig Snout, and the game was on and the television was blaring. “I got a question.”