I reached for the bundle that held my father’s things. His birth, marriage, and death certificates. His passport. His green card. The divorce decree. I started with the birth certificate. The last time we touched it, Marie had said it smelled like Ireland. I don’t know why we’d started doing this, looking at the documents. Maybe it was just finding proof of things that were never talked about. I unfolded it carefully and held it up to my face and breathed it. His birth was entered in handwriting. Black fountain pen. “Father and Mother: Sean Gallagher and Bridget Fox.” It was a last name I loved and sometimes pretended was my own. Libby Fox. I imagined his mother and father, Sean and Bridget, traveling into town to register the birth of their newborn son. I saw it in black and white, a long, long time ago. They had written their occupations: “Farmers.”

I’d met my grandmother, Bridget Fox, just once that I could remember, when I was ten. We’d been to Ireland before, but I was so young I didn’t remember her from those earlier trips. I only remembered her from the time that just Dad and I went. The day we were leaving to go home, she held on to my father and wouldn’t let go. Her black skirts reached the ground, and she had a gray bun and hairs growing from her chin. She was so small she didn’t reach his shoulder, and he wasn’t a tall man. She cried little sounds and clung to him. She spoke to me, but I couldn’t understand her; I had hardly understood a word she said the whole visit.

It was the last time my father saw her. She died the following winter during a snowstorm. We had been home from school for a few days, and the morning that school reopened, the phone rang very early. I knew it was Ireland calling because the phone always beeped at the start of the call. A voice that sounded far away asked for Dad, giving his full name. I said he had gone to shovel driveways, because we were never to tell them in Ireland about his not living with us. He had no phone in his apartment. When he arrived in the pickup truck that morning to take us to school, we sat in the truck while he went inside to make the phone call home. He walked back to us in the truck, his black wool hat pulled low. He put his two hands on the wheel as if to drive and just kept them there.

“What is it?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. A few times he cleared his throat as if he was about to speak. He coughed out his first word and then tried again. “I can’t speak right now; my mother died this morning.” He looked out the driver’s-side window, away from us.