“I believe I may be the only bona fide veteran of a world war who’s against this nonsense.” Uncle Phil is her father’s younger brother. He and her father—the Malloy boys, they once called themselves—went to their local college together, enlisted in the Navy together, and moved in tandem across the lily pads of aircraft carriers and destroyers and destroyer tenders off the coast of Japan. Her father, having ascended to the rank of captain, died in combat—an event Uncle Phil witnessed and refuses to talk about beyond saying there was a storm, and they were transporting Sean from one ship to another with a pulley system and a swinging metal chair. The storm was bad and there was an accident—no fault of the Navy’s. You were somebody important if they put you in that chair. Ten years later, when her mother died from TB, Teresa would have been without any family at all if it hadn’t been for Uncle Phil. He’s fifty-five and has never married. He lives in Alexandria and does something for the Pentagon, which he won’t discuss. He drinks. He’d been glad when Teresa had married a man with a solid job (Dermot worked as a desk clerk at the Westmeyer Hotel), but as soon as Dermot took off, Uncle Phil said he’d never trusted him and had expected as much. Because of the drinking—a chronic hint of gin lingers on his breath, and on his neck like cologne—Uncle Phil looks more Irish than he did ten years ago. His nose is a knobby map of river lines. His face looks like a partially deflated punching bag framed by a thin white beard. But he comes by the apartment weekly and makes regular offers of money. “We’re doing okay,” Teresa told him recently, and he frowned at her doubtfully, glanced around the room—its undecorated walls, her folded sheets and pillow stacked alongside the couch where she slept—and then dropped his gaze to the newspaper.