She gave me a long-suffering look. “I know what’s wrong with you,” she informed me. “You got a bad pint last night, and your bowels are in tatters. That does always put fellas in a mood. Am I right?”

My phone rang again: Kevin. I said, “For fuck’s sake,” more viciously than I meant to. Giving him the number had made sense at the time, but give my family an inch and they’ll move into your house and start redecorating. I couldn’t even turn the thing off, not with people out there who could need me anytime. “If bloody Kev is always this bad at taking hints, no wonder he doesn’t have a girlfriend.”

Jackie gave my arm a soothing pat. “Don’t mind him. You just let it ring there. I’ll ask him tonight was it anything important.”

“No, thanks.”

“I’d say he just wants to know when can yous meet up again.”

“I don’t know how to get this through to you, Jackie: I do not give a tinker’s damn what Kevin wants. Although if it turns out you’re right and he wants to know when we’ll meet up, you can tell him this from me, with love and kisses: never. OK?”

“Ah, Francis, stop. You know you don’t mean that.”

“I do. Believe me, Jackie, I do.”

“He’s your brother.”

“And as far as I can tell, he’s a very nice guy who I’m sure is loved by all his wide circle of friends and acquaintances. But I’m not one of them. My only connection to Kevin was an accident of nature that tossed us into the same house for a few years. Now that we don’t live there any more, he’s nothing to do with me, any more than that guy on the bench over there. The same goes for Carmel, the same goes for Shay, and the same very definitely goes for Ma and Da. We don’t know each other, we have exactly fuck-all in common, and I can’t see any reason on God’s green earth why we would want to meet for tea and cookies.”

Jackie said, “Cop on to yourself, would you ever. You know well it’s not that simple.”

The phone rang again. “Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

She poked at leftover leaves with a toe and waited for the phone to shriek itself into silence. Then she said, “Yesterday you said you blamed us for Rosie walking out on you.”

I took a long breath and lightened my voice. “I’m hardly going to blame you, chicken. You were barely out of diapers.”

“Is that why you don’t mind seeing me?”

I said, “I didn’t think you’d even remember that night.”

“I asked Carmel about it yesterday, after . . . I remember bits, only. All the times get mixed up together, you know yourself.”