Devlin stopped dancing. He felt like a man gripping the bayonet stuck in his chest to keep from falling down dead. Alice’s eyes widened. “You thought—?” She laughed again. “Oh, no; oh, no. She was wise to you. You didn’t even send her a Christmas card. So, she said to hell with you. I don’t blame her, except she was stupid and got nailed.” Alice saw he was taking it badly. “Come on, you’re not going to be one of those guys who’s always an asshole about women, are you?”

He didn’t know if he answered her or not. Years went by before he allowed his thoughts to pass over the moment again.

Alice’s mother died, and two years later, Alice’s husband beat her up and put her in the hospital. After the divorce she married a fat guy who bit his fingernails and thought he could be rich if only he had start-up capital. He didn’t like Devlin’s clothes, New York City, or the memories Devlin and Alice shared. Alice had six more babies, and then she and the fat guy migrated to rural Florida. Years later Devlin’s mother learned the rest of Alice’s story through the Monahan family grapevine, but she didn’t tell her son until he was clear of the Brennans and clean and sober.…

Are you always going to be an asshole about women?

The truth was that being thrown out by Brennan had plunged him to the bottom, and then to A.A., but he had never even thought of hitting the booze when his parents died. Never. And this was not life, the force of nature. Someone was after him. Devlin thought again of last night’s dream; the images suddenly jumped into his consciousness. He remembered how the dream had turned sour and dark. He and Alice had been sitting at a kitchen table covered with cake boxes and coffee cups.…

He had no trouble remembering now.

It had been the last time he saw Alice, in the fall of 1968, in Sussex. Maryellen had been there. She hadn’t wanted to make the trip. They were people she didn’t know, she’d said; never mind that Alice was his family, or that his presence in Sussex was a sacred duty.

Alice’s seven-year-old daughter had died in a school bus accident, one of five very unlucky children. Funerals all over town, one farmer said.

Devlin had gotten the news from his mother, too sick herself to make the trip. No point in asking his father. The family had already disintegrated by then; Devlin’s aunt, Alice’s mother, was long dead, and Buddy had become a drunken derelict who appeared, bleary and ripe, only at odd moments. And by then Devlin had developed a warm sentimentality about those already distant summers with Alice, young Ev, and Pamela, riding around in the Oldsmobile.…