It was a taboo subject among the men, how families disappoint. Maybe you could complain about your old drunk father but not about the wife—not really. Joking, harsh joking, might be OK but nothing too personal, private. Nothing about the wife’s health. Mention chemo and your best friend’s eyes go blank. And talking of children, grown-up kids and how they turn out—pretty much forbidden.

If you love them something terrible happens to them. Though if you stop loving them the pain is worse, like a limb torn off.

Never forgive Violet. His baby Violet Rue.

Jerome Jr. and Lionel he’d forgive, before her. His sons had made stupid choices. It was drinking that had been the stupid, fatal choice—every bad decision that night had followed from that.

Ran in the family. Irish genes. Everybody knew: drinking made you drunk, and drunk made you stupid.

Though they were sober when they’d lied to him. To him. Claiming they were scared, didn’t know what to do, panicked and drove away and afterward begging him to forgive them and so he’d forgiven them eventually, though he was disgusted with them, and disgusted now when he recalled. His grief at losing Jerome Jr. was contaminated with this disgust and with the fury of disgust that his sons, his oldest children, had so betrayed him.

But the daughter had never said she was sorry. She’d never asked to be forgiven. Wanted to be loved as if nothing had gone wrong between them.

His heart had been lacerated, the daughter’s betrayal was an open wound even years later. For he’d loved her best.

It wasn’t that she’d spoken to the police about her brothers but that she hadn’t come to him first, to tell him. Together, they’d have worked out what to do. But she had acted heedlessly, without consulting him. Her father.

She had gone outside the family, that was the unforgivable sin. And old enough to know, not a child.

Thinking of this, how his daughter had betrayed him, felt as if his heart were lacerated anew, he could not bear it. His breath came short, a vise seemed to be tightening around his chest. His anger, his fury—collapsed into a pounding fist.

“Hey mister—you OK?”

He was on his knees. The ignition key had slipped from his icy fingers. Pulses beat harder, harder—he pitched forward onto the pavement with a strangled cry as the boys approached cautiously, staring at him.

“Mister? Hey?”

“He’s drunk?”

“Somethin wrong with him, see—his face . . .”

Warily they circled him. A white man, looked like an older man, they’d be blamed for knocking him down, taking his wallet. But couldn’t just let him lie there struggling to breathe so one of them ran into the Shamrock Tavern yelling there’s a man fell down outside, somebody call 911 for an ambulance.