Absolute, frozen silence. The others were all staring at me; Jackie had her glass raised and her mouth half open, caught in midsip. I realized, slowly, that I was on my feet, swaying a little, and that my voice had been right on the edge of a roar. I said, “Leaving school is nothing; a few slaps are nothing. I’d have taken all that, begged for it, sooner than lose Rosie. And she’s gone.”

Carmel said, in a flat stunned voice, “You think she left you because of us?”

I knew there was something wrong with what I had said, something that had shifted, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. As soon as I stood up, the booze had hit me right in the backs of the knees. I said, “What the hell do you think happened, Carmel? One day we were mad about each other, true love forever and ever, amen. We were going to get married. We had the tickets bought. I swear to God we would have done anything, Melly, anything, anything in this wide world to be together. The next day, the next bloody day, she ran off on me.”

The regulars were starting to glance over, conversations falling away, but I couldn’t get my voice back down. I always have the coolest head in any fight and the lowest blood-alcohol level in any pub. This evening was way off course, and it was much too late to salvage it. “What’s the only thing that changed in between? Da went on a bender and tried to break into the Dalys’ gaff at two in the morning, and then the whole classy bunch of yous had a screaming knock-down-drag-out row in the middle of the street. You remember that night, Melly. The whole Place remembers that night. Why wouldn’t Rosie back out, after that? Who wants that for in-laws? Who wants that kind of blood in her children?”

Carmel said, very quietly and still with no expression at all, “Is that why you never came home? Because you’ve thought that all this time?”

“If Da had been decent,” I said. “If he hadn’t been a drunk, or even if he’d just bothered to be discreet about it. If Ma hadn’t been Ma. If Shay hadn’t been in and out of trouble every day of the week. If we’d been different.”

Kevin said, bewildered, “But if Rosie didn’t go anywhere—”

I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. The whole day had hit me, all of a sudden, and I was so exhausted that I felt like my legs were melting into the ratty carpet. I said, “Rosie dumped me because my family was a bunch of animals. And I don’t blame her.”

Jackie said, and I heard the hurt in her voice, “Ah, that’s not on, Francis. That’s not fair.”