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“And you must be Rian,” she said. He looked so much like a mix of Cathal and her uncles and her father that she floundered for a second, disoriented. The famous Rian. Well, she didn’t even know him, but she’d already just about had it with him. She wasn’t going to beg. She thought she might like to get to know him, but when it boiled down she had more than enough uncles already, thank you very much. This was ridiculous. She was sorry for whatever he’d been through but how incredibly rude and childish to ignore a knock on your door and just hope the person would go away. Especially if that person is your own father and he’d come all the way from Ireland.

“I don’t know much about what’s going on here exactly, but would you please talk to this very old man for a few minutes? Please.”

Rian noticed the envelope Cathal had slipped through the mail slot. He bent to pick it up and then he looked over Mary’s shoulder to the car.

“All right,” he said. He lifted his hand in greeting to Mac and Cathal, who were standing beside the car.

“All right?” she echoed, surprised. Then she waved at Cathal to come on, to hurry the hell up before he changed his mind. Holding on to Mac’s arm, Cathal hustled up the path.

“Alone if that’s all right,” Cathal said when he got to Rian’s door.

“Are you sure?” Mac asked, looking at Cathal first and then Rian. “Mary and I will be in the car if you need us.”

“Also,” Mary said to Rian. “Another thing.”

“Oh. There’s another thing,” Rian said, and Mac detected laughter in his eyes.

“I’d like to meet my cousin. It doesn’t have to be today. But soon.”

THIRTY MINUTES PASSED. AN HOUR. When Cathal finally opened the door, Mac jumped out to help him down the path. Rian stayed inside.

“Well?” Mac asked. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” Cathal said. “We talked.”

“What did you talk about?”

“A lot of things, Macdara. Don’t be annoying me now, I’m so tired.”

CATHAL WEATHERED THE RETURN FLIGHT to Ireland better than the flight to Montana. Mary flew with them to New York, but Mac accompanied Cathal all the way to Dublin. He didn’t want to, but Cathal sipped water as they crossed the Atlantic. Mac made him get up and walk the aisle several times. He rented a car at Dublin airport and drove him to the Cuan so that none of his brothers would be put out.

Cathal was exhausted when he got home, and barely got out of bed for four days. When he finally did, it was only to his chair to be nearer to the fire. They piled blankets on him. They stuffed rags under the front door so the draft wouldn’t get in, even though it was late July and the weather had been kind that summer. Mac told his brothers he’d stay just a little while, until Cathal had recovered from the journey, and anyway, he was going to be eighty-five within a matter of days, Mac might as well stay for that occasion.

On Cathal’s birthday, Mac did what he figured Lillie would have done if she’d been there. He drove to a bakery two villages away and bought a cake. He had them write Cathal’s name on it.

“What absolute foolishness,” Cathal said when he saw it.

“I’ll have yours in that case,” Noel said, pretending to take his piece from him.

“It’s the circle of life, I suppose,” Cathal said. “Once you get old enough, your own children put a silly hat on you and clap hands like you’re a baby again.”

“Well, now I wish we made you wear a hat,” Mac said.

But they knew their father was pleased. They knew he never minded being celebrated.

“You know,” Cathal said after a while. He cleared his throat and seemed to be thinking about what he wanted to say. The mood was reflective, comfortable, everyone at their ease. They’d finished their cake, were now sipping tea. Mac was thinking that he really had to head back to New York soon, he’d given up so much work. And he’d signed up for swimming lessons to help his back and hips. Two different doctors and a farrier friend had recommended it so he figured: why not? The girls thought it was funny—why now, so late in life?—but they were far too young to know that fifty-five was young too.

Cathal sat up taller in his chair. “While you’re here together and before Macdara goes back to America I might as well say something I’ve been thinking lately.”

Mac, Coleman, Noel, Seamus, and Vincent, who’d arrived that morning, set down their cups to listen. They were used to his impromptu speeches about government and the state of the world, but this felt different.

“The thing I want to say is that you were never any trouble to me.” Cathal coughed, reached for his eyebrow. “I was trouble to you many times no doubt about it and to your mother, God rest her. I wish I hadn’t been, but none of us can go back in time. I wish we could, because I would do a lot of things different. A lot of things. What I can do now is say that none of you boys were any trouble to me or your mother, none of you, no exceptions. You make sure, Macdara, that you tell the ones in America when you return to them. That’s the message. Do you understand?”

They nodded, gravely, like small boys again, and not the group of middle-aged men that they were.

CATHAL SEEMED TO DECIDE SOMETHING, and being the most obstinate man in the world when he decided something he almost always got his way. Mac couldn’t leave, not when he realized what was happening. The day after his birthday, Cathal returned to his bed and decided not to leave it. They brought him food but he wouldn’t eat. When they opened the curtain to let in light, he took the shotgun next to him and banged the butt against the floor. “Out,” he said. “Give me some peace.” He had the most patience with Coleman, so they sent him in there with tea and soup and told him to get him talking, try to get him up, but Coleman wanted to do what Cathal wanted and what Cathal wanted was to be left alone.

He willed it, or at least that’s how Mac put it to Lillie when he called her with the news. As Cathal would have said, it was astonishing what the mind can do when it decides something.