Danny waved at the fumes. “Yes or no? Do you want the assault charge?”

Quentin said, “No.”

“Are you going home as soon as you get out of a hospital?”

“Yah, yah.”

“Good lad.” Danny stood. “Because if you don’t, God is my witness, Quentin?” He looked down at him. “I’ll send you back to the Old Sod a fucking cripple.”

Thomas was out on the stoop when Danny returned. The taillights of his father’s car glowed red as his driver, Marty Kenneally, braked at an intersection two blocks up.

“So Marty’s driving her someplace?”

His father nodded. “I told him I don’t want to know where.”

Danny looked at the windows of their home. “What’s it like in there?”

His father appraised the blood on Danny’s shirt, his torn knuckles. “You leave anything for the ambulance driver?”

Danny rested his hip against the black iron railing. “Plenty. I already called it in from the call box on J.”

“Put the fear of God into him, I’m sure.”

“Worse than God.” He fished in his pockets and found his Murads and shook one out of the pack. He offered one to his father and his father took it and Danny lit both with his lighter and leaned back against the railing.

“Haven’t seen you get like that, boy, since I had you locked up in your teens.”

Danny blew a stream of smoke into the cold air, feeling the sweat beginning to dry on his upper chest and neck. “Yeah, it’s been a while.”

“Would you have honestly hit me?” his father said. “When you had me against the tree?”

Danny shrugged. “Might have. We’ll never know.”

“Your own father.”

Danny chuckled. “You had no problem hitting me when I was a kid.”

“That was discipline.”

“So was this.” Danny looked over at his father.

Thomas shook his head softly and exhaled a blue stream of smoke into the night.

“I didn’t know she left a child behind back there, Dad. Had no idea.”

His father nodded.

“But you did,” Danny said.

His father looked over, the smoke sliding out of the corner of his mouth.

“You brought Quentin here. Left a trail of bread crumbs and he found our door.”

Thomas Coughlin said, “You give me too much credit.”

Danny rolled his dice and told the lie. “He told me you did, Dad.”

His father sucked the night air through his nostrils and looked up at the sky. “You’d have never stopped loving her. Connor either.”

“What about Joe? What about what he just saw in there?”

“Everyone has to grow up sometime.” His father shrugged. “It’s not Joe’s maturing I worry about, you infant. It’s yours.”

Danny nodded and flicked his cigarette into the street.

“You can stop worrying,” he said.

CHAPTER twenty-three

Late Christmas afternoon, before the Coughlins had sat for dinner, Luther took the streetcar back to the South End. The day had started with a bright sky and clear air, but by the time Luther boarded the streetcar, the air had turned indistinct and the sky had folded back and fallen into the ground. Somehow the streets, so gray and quiet, were pretty, a sense that the city had gone privately festive. Soon the snow began to fall, the flakes small and listing like kites at first, riding the sudden wind, but then as the streetcar bucked its way over the hump of the Broadway Bridge, the flakes grew thick as flower heads and shot past the windows in the black wind. Luther, the only person sitting in the colored section, accidentally caught the eye of a white man sitting with his girlfriend two rows up. The man looked weary in a satisfied way, and his cheap wool flat cap was tilted down just so over his right eye, giving a little bit of nothing a little bit of style. He nodded, as if he and Luther shared the same thought, his girlfriend curled against his chest with her eyes closed.