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All of us except one, Mac wanted to say, but he left it.

“You’re very annoying sometimes,” he said. “Never noticed that before now.” He gathered her hair up in his hand and fanned it across her pillow.

“I know it, my love,” she said and kissed him.

VINCENT’S DESCRIPTIONS OF HIS TIME with Cathal bore no resemblance to the man Mac knew. In Vincent’s stories, their father was even-keeled, a bit much to take when he got on his high horse about something, but in general he showed up when he said he would. When Vincent got an award for debating and they made a small ceremony of it at his school, Cathal came. He stood in the back despite Rose saving him a chair and afterward he told Vincent that he likely got his brains from his mother’s people. Did Vincent know he was the namesake of a university professor with a reputation in America as well as in Ireland?

“I forgot about that,” Barry said, turning to Mac. “I forgot that’s where Vincent’s name came from—your professor. Do you remember him? How strange he followed you around all those weeks.”

“Oh god, and the whale,” Fearghal said. “Remember the whale?”

“The whale?” Barry asked, looking off like he was searching the horizon for something. “That rings a bell.”

“Are you serious?” Mac asked. “You can’t be.”

“That’s right,” Noel said, like a picture was slowly being unveiled in his mind. “Did they haul it back into the ocean with ropes?”

“It was dead,” Mac said, amazed. “They left it. Remember how it stank?” He turned to Barry. “You couldn’t have forgotten it. The younger ones maybe but it was a big to-do. You couldn’t have forgotten. I even asked you about it when we talked on the phone that time when I was in Montana.”

“You did?” But Barry still looked blank. He was searching, thinking, and it would no doubt come to him, but the idea that he couldn’t immediately recall every striation of that giant animal’s body was a shock to Mac. To him, the whale and their mother’s death had happened together, remembering one meant remembering the other. Hearing Vincent’s description of his time with Cathal, Mac felt doubly disoriented. Sean and Barry seemed to get a great kick out of it and countered with their own stories of delivering the mail in the dark because Cathal had had too much poitín to mount his bicycle, never mind stay balanced on it.

“Mac came upon him sleeping in a field once, the mail sack for a pillow,” Sean told Vincent. It was true. And it had happened many times. The time Sean was recalling was only the first, the only time Mac felt panicked enough to run for help.

Mac suspected that Vincent and the rest of the youngests didn’t quite believe this version of Cathal. For his own part, Mac tried to make his mind reckon with the idea that Cathal had been told the date and time of an important event, had shown up, and had not made a scene. People changed, he knew that. Things had happened to Cathal that had changed him. That was certainly possible. Mac had changed too. But something about it made Mac hate hearing about it.

“And what about Rian?” Vincent asked tentatively. “Do you hear anything?”

So he did know.

“Nothing,” Mac said. All the momentum in the stories halted. “What has Cathal said to you about it?”

“Not much,” Vincent said. “I didn’t know what happened until I was in school for a few years. Cathal went to England a couple times but I guess it wasn’t Rian after all. He didn’t seem too keen on talking about it when he came back.”

Cathal had gone to England? More than once? Cathal who as far as Mac knew had never been to Dublin?

“When was that?” Mac asked. He couldn’t picture Cathal packing a bag and walking through an airport. He had a passport? A lead, no doubt. Like they all heard from time to time, but it must have amounted to nothing.

“The first time? I guess it was about ten years ago. He went again maybe two years ago and he stayed a long time, almost three weeks.”

“Did you two know that?” Mac asked Seamus and Eamon, but they shook their heads. “Must have been after we left,” Seamus said.

AFTER VINCENT HAD BEEN IN New York for a few months, he assured them that he wouldn’t stay in the apartment forever. He said he knew it must have come as a surprise to them and he appreciated a place to be while he got on his feet. “But don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll get my own place soon.”

“Why would you do that?” Eamon asked. “There’s plenty of room.”

“Yeah?” Vincent said. “In that case I’ll stay.”

TEN

In the fall of 1985, Lillie came home from the hospital after having their third baby girl, who they named Ann, a sister for Mary and Bridget. Two months later, they got word that Nuala had died.

Lillie and Mac’s house in Yonkers had three bedrooms and one blue-tiled bathroom in the hall. In the beginning, tiles would tumble off the bathroom wall and shatter in the middle of the night. When Mac went to snake the kitchen sink drain right after they moved in, the line pushed right through the metal as if it were tissue paper. He unscrewed the u-shaped piece of pipe and it crumbled to dust in his fist. The backyard was so overgrown with vines that the Realtor said they’d have to get a backhoe to dig it all out and start again, but Mac knew he could do it on his own, bit by bit, in the hours when he wasn’t working. By the time Annie was born and they brought her home, the yard was long cleared of vines and Mac had coaxed a velvety lawn from what had been a dirt patch. He’d built a deck off the kitchen and Lillie had wound the creeping roses around the posts of the fence out front. Sometimes just the sight of the house in the distance as he drove up the street was so sweet—the hula hoops and tricycles left outside, the laundry hanging on the line out back—that it overwhelmed him. What luck he’d had. How well things had turned out.

“Will you go home for Nuala’s funeral?” Lillie asked him after the older two girls were down for the night. How could he even consider it? Annie, eight weeks old, was tucked into Lillie’s arm like an American football. Their first two babies had been born the old-fashioned way, but Annie had to be removed by cesarean section. The doctor had come into the waiting room to tell Mac what had to be done and why, and then he waited a moment as if Mac was supposed to accept or decline this course of action. What in the world did he know? He’d seen what happens to cows when the calf is wrong inside her and won’t come. He’d seen the pain of it, the absolute fear. Mac could do what needed to be done when it came to horses and cows but he could never deliver human children, no way, not for all the money in the world could he face the fear and sorrow of a woman giving birth if it went wrong.

Lillie was private about the incision. He looked at it a few times in the days after Annie’s birth, to make sure it wasn’t getting infected and to help her with the bandage. It was painful for her to bend over and look for herself. He made sure she didn’t lift anything heavier than a cup of tea and when she needed the baby he handed Annie to her. But after a week or so she managed on her own. She told him to stop fussing, he was driving her up a wall.

“I can’t go with you, obviously, but I think you should.”