It isn’t the first time law has come around to the house. The ATF raided them two years before. The feds tossed the house but didn’t find the guns, which were buried in a sack, six feet deep, out in the barn, directly beneath the parked John Deere.

The bedroom door eases open. Hank looks in on him.

“Jack? It’s your mother.”

“Oh. Did she come to get me?” He hopes not. He’s perfectly cozy under his blankets, with Beth’s hand gently stroking his hair, and he doesn’t want to get up.

“No.”

Hank McCourt crosses the room and sits down beside Beth. Beth takes his hand and gazes miserably up at him. The round lenses of Hank’s spectacles flash crimson and sapphire.

“Your mother is coming home,” Hank says.

Beth shuts her eyes, the muscles of her face straining against some powerful emotion.

“She is? You’re not mad at her anymore?” Jack asks.

“I’m not mad at her anymore.”

“Did the police bring her home?”

“No. Not yet. Jack, do you know why your mother wanted to leave?”

“Because you wouldn’t let her drink.”

He has been taught this like a mantra over the last three weeks, has heard it from all of them: his father, Beth, Connor. His mother has been sober for two years, but her self-restraint finally split and tore, like a wet paper sack. The only Jack that concerned her now came in a bottle.

“That’s right,” Hank says. “She wanted to go someplace she could drink and take her crazy pills. She chose those things over you. It’s awful to think she needed those things more than she needed us. She was staying in the efficiency apartments near High Street Liquor. So she didn’t have to go far to do her shopping, I suppose. She bought a bottle of gin this afternoon and took it into the bath with her. When she stood to get out, she slipped and cracked her head.”

“Oh.”

“She’s dead.”

“Oh.”

“She was ill, you know. She was ill when I met her. I thought I could make her better, but I couldn’t. It runs too deep in her family. Your mother had peculiar ideas, and she tried to drown them with drink. In the end she only drowned herself.” He waits for Jack to reply to this, but Jack doesn’t have anything to say. Finally his father adds, “If you need to cry, no one will think less of you.”

Jack searches his emotions but can’t find anything yet approximating grief. Later, maybe. When he has time to get his head around it.

“No, sir,” he says.