His father’s eyelids snapped. “Excuse me, boy?”

“You’re staring, sir.”

“Don’t get lippy with me, son.”

Joe dropped his eyes. It may have been the longest he’d dared hold his father’s gaze in his life. “Yes, sir.”

“Ah, you’re just like him,” his father said and opened his morning paper with a loud crackling of the pages.

Joe didn’t bother asking who his father was referring to. Since the wedding, Danny’s name had joined Nora’s on the list of things you couldn’t speak aloud. Even at twelve, Joe was all too aware that this list, which had been in place long before he was born, held the key to most mysteries of the Coughlin bloodline. The list was never discussed because one of the items on the list was the list itself, but Joe understood that first and foremost on the list was anything that could cause embarrassment to the family—relatives who’d engaged in repeated public drunkenness (Uncle Mike), who’d married outside of the Church (Cousin Ed), who’d committed crimes (Cousin Eoin, out in California), committed suicide (Cousin Eoin again), or given birth out of wedlock (Aunt Somebody in Vancouver; she’d been so completely banished from the family that Joe didn’t know her name; she existed like a small stream of smoke that curled into the room before someone thought to shut the door). Sex, Joe understood, was stamped in bold at the top of the list. Anything to do with it. Any hint that people even thought about it, never mind had it.

Money was never discussed. Nor were the vagaries of public opinion and the new modern mores, both of which were deemed anti-Catholic and anti-Hibernian as a matter of course. There were dozens of other items on the list, but you never knew what they were until you mentioned one and then you saw from a single look that you’d wandered out into the minefield.

What Joe missed most about Danny’s absence was that Danny couldn’t have given a shit about the list. He didn’t believe in it. He’d bring up women’s suffrage at the dinner table, talk about the latest debate over the length of a woman’s skirt, ask his father what he thought of the rise of Negro lynchings in the South, wonder aloud why it took the Catholic Church eighteen hundred years to decide Mary was a virgin.

“That’s enough,” his mother had cried to that one, her eyes welling.

“Now look what you did,” his father said.

It was quite a feat—managing to hit two of the biggest, boldest items on the list, sex and the failings of the Church, at the same time.

“Sorry, Ma,” Danny said and winked at Joe.

Christ, Joe missed that wink.

Danny had shown up at Gate of Heaven two days after the wedding. Joe saw him as he exited the building with his classmates, Danny out of uniform and leaning against the wrought-iron fence. Joe kept his composure, though heat flushed from his throat to his ankles in one long wet wave. He walked through the gate with his friends and turned as casually as he could toward his brother.