Marie handed him the roll of paper towels on the floor of the cab, and he pulled off a sheet and blew his nose. He drove us to school through the snow in silence. Outside, branches hung toward the earth, wheels spun and cars crawled, and all the strangeness was magnified by the news that Dad’s mother was dead. I looked up at him and saw a trail like a snail leaves on the carpet, tracked down the side of his face.

When we left Ireland that last time, my grandmother had sobbed in the doorway of the house as we walked down to the road where the car was parked. Even then it had gripped me that she didn’t know the truth about her son’s life in America. That he didn’t live with us, that he lived alone, that he pretended everything was fine for her.

He arrived in Ireland for her funeral during the heaviest snowfall they’d had in thirty years and was stranded in Dublin waiting for the trains to run again. He’d told me that when he was ten, the same age I was then, his mother’s father had died. She hadn’t been able to go to his funeral because of her duties on the farm. He and his brother got on their bikes and cycled up the country forty miles to be there for her. The morning my grandmother Bridget Fox was buried I went into the woods and made a snow angel, then lay there and listened.

Now, I folded the birth certificate and slipped it back into the rubber band. I skipped the petition for divorce: 1973. My mother the petitioner. My father the respondent. I opened his certificate of death, dated 1980. Country of origin: Ireland. Under Education, there was a place to tick the highest grade completed. My father had never been to school beyond elementary; “5th” was ticked. The names of his mother and father appeared again on the certificate of death. Under Marital Status, “Divorced” was ticked, but in the next section it said “Surviving spouse (if wife give maiden name),” and my mother’s name was there: Faye Royston. If she was no longer his spouse, I wondered why her name was on the certificate, how this had been allowed. Our names weren’t on it. There is no space for the deceased’s children on a death certificate, even though I knew he would have said this was the most important detail of his life. I looked down to the end of the certificate, the parts filled out by the certifying physician and coroner.

Death was caused by:

immediate cause: cardiopulmonary arrest

due to or as a consequence of septic shock

due to or as a consequence of sepsis