In the last year or two before he died, when he would go on like that, complaining about America and Americans, it embarrassed me. He seemed angry a lot of the time, angry that Americans didn’t know geography or where the olive in their martini came from or how to grow things. They just consumed, he said—consumed and discarded. When he was like this, and maybe had been drinking, and was collecting me at someone’s house or from a hockey game, my friends or my friends’ parents or whoever we were with would be uncomfortable. I knew they were because they would say nothing or just sort of agree with him about Americans to make it stop. They wouldn’t argue with him, which would have been better, at least to show his views some respect. They just shut down. I felt shame in those moments, and I think he knew it, sensed it in how I looked away, interrupted to say we’d better go or just fell silent, leaving him alone, adrift in the conversation.

Not long before my dad left for New York, Sage had told me that she thought he had changed, that she used to think he was always smiling and happy but not lately, not anymore. “Maybe he’s unhappy,” she said. “Maybe he should go home to Ireland.” Even the memory of it hurt. Sage’s honesty. I knew that I’d held these things against her, had resented her for being there, for being so close that she could see the things I couldn’t or didn’t want to. I hated myself for having told her anything and her for listening, for witnessing things and sometimes saying them back to me.

There are superstitions about new moons. It’s important to see them in the open air outside. On our last trip to Ireland we waited for the sun to fall—which was nearly midnight, because the days are very long in the summer where it’s so far north—and went outside to look for the waxing crescent because seeing it through glass was unlucky. It was there just as the sun dropped, a thin silver arc on a dark shape. We stood and watched as it faded and then disappeared. I started to walk back to the house, but Dad said to stop and listen. At first I didn’t hear it, but then I did, a distant rumble.

“That’s the sound I miss the most when I’m away from here,” he said. I hadn’t noticed it before.

“What is it?”

“The sea.”

We listened, and after a while we heard another sound from the long grasses near the pines where the pheasants roosted, a grating squawk. I thought it was the female pheasant that he’d pointed out to me over and over, a sound almost like a hoarse bark. I was wrong.