I’m not sure what kind of look I gave him, but he held up a hand in apology.

“Touchy subject,” he said. “I forgot.”

“What’s your point here, Phil?”

He shrugged. “Angie can’t say good-bye, so she’ll work hard to keep me in her life.”

“And?”

“And I won’t let her. I’m an albatross around her neck. Right now, I need us to—I dunno—heal a bit more. Get some closure. So she knows completely that I was the bad guy. It was all, all, all me. Not her.”

“And when that’s done?”

“I’m gone. A guy like me, I can get work anywhere. Rich people are always remodeling their homes. So soon, I’m hitting the road. I think you two deserve your shot.”

“Phil—”

“Please, Pat. Please,” he said. “This is me. We been friends since forever. I know you. And I know Angela. You might have something real nice with Grace now and I think that’s terrific. I do. But know yourself.” He bumped his elbow into mine and looked hard in my eyes. “Okay? For once in your life, buddy, face yourself. You’ve been in love with Angie since kindergarten. And she’s been in love with you.”

“She married you, Phil.” I bumped his elbow back.

“Because she was pissed at you—”

“That’s not the only reason.”

“I know. She loved me, too. For a while, maybe, she even loved me more. I don’t doubt it. But we can love more than one thing simultaneously. We’re human, so we’re messy.”

I smiled, realized it was the first time I’d smiled naturally in Phil’s presence in a decade. “We are that.”

We looked at each other and I could feel the old blood rippling within us—the blood of sacred bonds and shared boyhoods. Neither Phil nor I ever felt accepted in our homes. His father was an alcoholic and an unregenerate womanizer, a guy who slept with every woman in the neighborhood and made sure his wife knew it. By the time Phil was seven or eight, his household was a DMZ of flying plates and accusations. Anytime Carmine and Laura Dimassi were in the same room, it was about as safe as Beirut, and in one of the great perverse misinterpretations of their Catholic faith, they refused to divorce or live apart. They liked the daily skirmishes and nightly makeup sessions of passionate lovemaking that had them thumping against the wall separating their bedroom from their son’s.

I was out of my house as much as possible for different reasons, so Phil and I took refuge together, and the first home we both felt comfortable in was an abandoned pigeon coop we found on the roof of an industrial garage on Sudan Street. We cleaned all the white shit out and reinforced it with boards from old pallets and slid some abandoned furniture in there, and pretty soon we picked up other strays like ourselves—Bubba, Kevin Hurlihy for a while, Nelson Ferrare, Angie. The Little Rascals with class rage and larcenous hearts and complete lack of respect for authority.