Route 80. Devlin had only a vague idea of where he was, gotten from a glance at a glove compartment map. EXIT 19, HACKETTSTOWN—ANDOVER, the signs said, confirming the directions Mrs. Quinn had given. Devlin might as well be in Nebraska or New South Wales. He had spent three summers in Sussex County back in the early fifties. The woman had said he would drive fifty or fifty-five miles from the George Washington Bridge. At this time of day, it had taken two hours. The traffic had been miserable, mostly trucks, the big ones, hammering dustily into the sundown.

In fact, Frank Devlin had not been outside the city of New York in almost a dozen years, and not so far into western New Jersey since 1960, the spring his cousin Alice married. Practically everything was different. Twenty-six years ago New Jersey had looked like an old abandoned car; now, Devlin thought, it looked like a new abandoned car.

Devlin had been seventeen years old in 1960. The wedding had been held not far from here, he had realized when Mrs. Quinn was dictating the way to her house. In the hours since, Devlin had been remembering summers a few miles to the north of where he was now, when Sussex County had been farms and upland forest—hillbilly country, his parents had called it.

Devlin was wise to memory: always, inevitably, an act of self-deception, events remembered wrong to make the rememberer feel right. At Alice’s wedding he had gotten drunk with his crazy uncle Buddy, the card-carrying Communist who was then becoming a yellow-eyed alcoholic. At the age of seventeen Frank Devlin had been able to pass for twenty-one, the legal drinking age in New Jersey in those years. More probably, the bartender hadn’t given a damn. Not that it mattered. For all Devlin could remember, Alice’s wedding had not been the first time he had gotten headbustingly bombed in the afternoon. He could still remember Buddy raving …

No, wait. Devlin wanted to figure it out. He had started college six months before, so Alice’s wedding could not have been the first time he had gotten drunk in the daytime. He shook his head in amazement at his self-deception. It was still that painful to remember that he had taken his first steps into alcoholism at the age of sixteen. Not even seventeen. Devlin’s father had already given up trying to control him—the truth was, his father hadn’t tried very hard after years of nasty, even cruel bullying. Your father is getting old, Devlin’s mother had said at the time. His mother had been his father’s biggest victim. At sixteen, a know-it-all, Devlin had gloated over the idea that the fire in the old man’s belly was finally going out.…