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Macdara didn’t need to ask what made him think so. It didn’t take a professor to figure it out. Mac could always tell by a person’s eyes, how they darted around a room until a bottle was brought out. There was always a general twitchiness about a drinker who hadn’t yet had a drink on a given day, like they were waiting until the hour when it was acceptable, like everything before that moment was only an act, a way to get from minute to minute, until the strike of noon or four or six and then the tinny sound of a cap unscrewed, the gentle slosh and glug of liquid poured into a glass. They all had rules. Mac had never met a drinker who didn’t unless they were so far gone that they’d lost jobs and families. Most held on, due to these rules. Nothing before noon, nothing before five, nothing on Mondays or Tuesdays, nothing brown on weekdays, no drinking inside their own home, no drinking in the presence of children. Only it never worked, because if you followed these rules then you’d never be at home, you’d never see your children. Mac calculated. At forty-eight it would be beginning to show on Rian.

“How’d you leave it?”

“I asked about his little girl. I have a feeling that’s why he’s stuck around the area for so long, because his daughter is there. He said she’s called Mary, so I told him you have a Mary too.

“ ‘Macdara has a Mary?’ Rian asked.”

So he said my name, Macdara thought.

“He does, says I,” Martin continued. “His first. He has three girls in all. His Mary is around twenty, I told him.”

“Twenty-two,” Mac said.

“I left my phone number and my address. I told him I was in touch with you. I told him all he had to do was ask and I could get him everyone’s phone number and address at the snap of a finger.”

“Well, thanks, Martin. Thanks a million.”

“Don’t thank me. I know I stuck my nose in. But there’s one more thing. The state trooper who ran the address, PJ’s friend, he also got me the security tape from Cutty’s Pub. I put it in the mail to you this morning in case you want to have a look at him.”

MAC HELD ON TO ALL of this for a week, like having a fluttering bird hidden under his jumper that he was trying to both tend to and conceal. When a fat yellow envelope came in the mail he brought it inside and walked it to the living room, where he looked at it on the coffee table for a minute. No one was home, so he opened it, pushed the tape into the slot of the VCR, and pressed play. The angle was from above, a grainy black-and-white picture without sound, the camera trained on a door that sat at the top of a short flight of five steps. After a few seconds of nothing, suddenly there was his brother, stepping through the door and into a Montana evening.

He was grown up, his face narrow like a fox. His clothes hung on him. He was wiry like Cathal. A cigarette perched on his bottom lip. There were patches of snow on the sidewalk, a streetlamp off to the right. Before the door fully closed behind him another two people exited, a man and a woman, talking to each other. Mac watched his brother hunch his shoulders and step to the side to let them pass. He watched him toss the cigarette from the top step to the sidewalk below. He watched him take the first two steps quickly, and then lose his footing for a second—ice or too much to drink or a miscalculation, Mac couldn’t tell. Watching, Mac made a move as if to catch him. Rian grabbed the railing and righted himself, and then he continued down the next three steps. He brought his fist to his mouth to cough, and then he disappeared from view.

Mac hit rewind and watched again. Again Rian slipped, caught himself. Again he threw one hand up while the other grabbed the railing. Neither of the two people so much as glanced over. What if he’d fallen and cracked his head? What if he’d been knocked unconscious and no one noticed for a long time and he was left lying there alone?

Mac rewound and watched it again. He left the couch and knelt in front of the TV. What he most wanted to know was whether Rian’s life had been difficult. Well, every life was difficult, but he wanted to know if Rian had had more than his fair share. He wanted to know if he’d had any luck at all, any kindness, any joy. Had he had anything like the moment in Mac’s own life when he met Lillie? Or years before that, the kindness of PJ and Jenny, of Honnie Lee, who pulled him into her cottage and showed him the money she’d collected to help him leave, of Vincent at the university, who must have known that day when Mac showed up at the Anthropology Department that he was hungry, and for that reason suggested lunch as if it had nothing to do with Mac. He rewound and watched again. Rian wasn’t wearing gloves though the night must have been cold. He wasn’t wearing a hat or scarf. Didn’t he have anyone to tell him not to put his hands in his pockets when he was walking down a flight of stairs, especially on an icy night?

Mac hoped Rian’s daughter was a source of joy. He wondered if Rian loved the girl’s mother, what had happened between them. He looked a little haggard, a little worse for wear, but maybe he transformed when he was with her. He rewound and watched again.

For the week that he kept all this to himself, he thought about that day he left the Cuan more and more: Cathal disappearing so he wouldn’t have to say goodbye, Kevin Lee impatient to get going in the car he’d borrowed from—where?—and nine-year-old Rian running behind them for so long. That moment was the fulcrum Mac’s life had hinged on and he hadn’t even known it. Even more than the moment of his mother’s death, leaving Rian behind was the thing he carried. He couldn’t have helped his mother. Age had taught him that. Experience had taught him that. But he could have helped Rian. He remembered telling Kevin to keep going, keep driving. He remembered rolling down the window and calling to Rian to go home. And how had he said it? He’d been annoyed. He said it as if he’d see Rian again one day soon, as if that moment of leaving would pass as all things passed and next thing he’d be back in Ireland for a visit, his suitcase full of toy cars and American clothing to give away. As if Rian, who he’d promised to never abandon, could be bought off by those things.

FINALLY, MAC TOLD LILLIE. SHE said she knew something was on his mind and had been leaving it to him to tell her and she was very glad he finally had. She told him he knew best what to do. Next he went over to Barry’s. One by one, he figured. He chatted with Regina, and then he asked Barry if he could borrow a saw. Once they were out back on their own, he told him. Barry sat on a step stool to take it in. “Now that’s something I didn’t expect today,” he said.

“No,” Macdara agreed.

“I’ll put the kettle on,” Barry said.

They went back inside and Barry got out two mugs and threw a tea bag in each. Regina was upstairs. They were quiet for the whole length of time it took the kettle to boil.

“I remember PJ’s visit too,” Barry said. “Kevin Lee went on and on about a trout and I remember thinking to myself if I ever get to America, I certainly won’t come home with stories of some old trout, that was for sure.”

Barry said once they told the others he supposed they’d decide together about Cathal.

“Decide what about Cathal?” Mac asked.

“If he should be told,” Barry said.

“I don’t know,” Mac said. Seamus had recently installed a railing on the single step down from the cottage door for their father. He’d mounted grab bars in the bathroom, and still Cathal fell twice, six weeks apart. At the hospital in Galway after the second fall, a second x-ray of his hips, the doctor asked him if he felt safe in his home. It was nothing, Cathal said. It was his shoe, the weather, a gust of wind, it would have happened to anyone, even a young person. He called his sons to report deaths of people they didn’t know or didn’t remember. The wife of a neighbor’s first cousin had died in New York, would any of them get to the wake to represent the Joyces? He still walked to the village on fair days, though the journey took much longer than it used to, and he usually forgot his stick, so one of them had to go after him. He used to sleep with his shotgun leaned against the wall next to his bed but now he slept with it on the pillow beside him, ever since a series of news stories about rural home invasions, rampant antisocial behavior among Ireland’s young people despite the significant uptick in job opportunities. Seamus warned him that he’d end up shooting himself by mistake one day and Cathal told him that pups should never mind what the big wolf is doing. They tried not to ever leave him alone.

Vincent lived in Dublin now and visited sometimes, and when he did he brought with him newspapers from the city that were difficult to get in the Cuan. Cathal worried about the swiftness of houses going up all over Ireland, the developments closer to Galway, the astonishing sizes of these homes, what was a home after all but a place to lay one’s head, how sudden it all seemed. He was somewhat obsessed with Ireland’s growing dependence on multinational companies and tried to discuss it with anyone in the village who’d listen, to see what they thought, to see if they were as worried as they should be. Old Tom Costello, who was roughly Cathal’s age and toward whom Cathal had held a lifelong animosity, pointed out that Cathal hated Ireland for being poor and then hated it for being wealthy and that was the Irish for you in a nutshell. Cathal arrived back home fuming and his sons stayed away, like they were little boys, still. The road had gotten a lot busier over the years, and they worried he’d get knocked into the ditch by a passing car. When he spoke to any of his sons on the phone he always said that people said he was in some shape for his age, no flies on him at all.

“I think it would be too much,” Mac said.

“Maybe,” Barry said. “Maybe it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie. But we have to poll the others. And we have to decide which of us will go to Montana. We don’t want to overwhelm Rian after all this time.”

“Hang on a minute,” Mac said. “He didn’t say anything about wanting to see us. I think we should leave it to him now. If he wants to see us, he knows how to find us.”

“That’s something we’ll discuss with the others too.”