Danny said, “You can have two families in this life, Joe, the one you’re born to and the one you build.”

“Two families,” Joe said, eyeing him.

He nodded. “Your first family is your blood family and you always be true to that. That means something. But there’s another family and that’s the kind you go out and find. Maybe even by accident sometimes. And they’re as much blood as your first family. Maybe more so, because they don’t have to look out for you and they don’t have to love you. They choose to.”

“So you and Luther, you chose each other?”

Danny cocked his head. “I was thinking more of me and Nora, but now that you mention it, I guess me and Luther did, too.”

“Two families,” Joe said.

“If you’re lucky.”

Joe thought about that for a bit and the inside of his body felt splashy and ungrounded, as if he might float away.

“Which are we?” Joe said.

“The best kind.” Danny smiled. “We’re both, Joe.”

At home, it got worse. Connor, when he talked, ranted about the anarchists, the Bolsheviks, the Galleanists, and the mud races who constituted their core. Jews financed them, he said, and Slavs and wops did their dirty work. They were riling up the niggers down South and poisoning the minds of the working whites back east. They’d tried to kill his boss, the attorney general of the United States of America, twice. They talked of unionization and rights for the workingman, but what they really wanted was violence on a national scale and despotism. Once turned onto the subject, he couldn’t be turned off, and he’d just about combust when talk turned to the possibility of a police strike.

It was a rumor in the Coughlin home all summer, and even though Danny’s name was never said, Joe knew that he was somehow involved. The Boston Social Club, his father told Connor, was talking to the AFL, to Samuel Gompers about an impending charter. They would be the first policemen in the country with national affiliation to a labor union. They could alter history, his father said and ran a hand over his eyes.

His father aged five years that summer. Ran down. Shadowed pockets grew below his eyes as dark as ink. His colorless hair turned gray.

Joe knew he’d been stripped of some of his power and that the culprit was Commissioner Curtis, a man whose name his father uttered with hopeless venom. He knew that his father seemed weary of fighting and that Danny’s break from the family had hit him far harder than he let on.

The last day of school, Joe returned to the house to find his father and Connor in the kitchen. Connor, just back from Washington, was already well into his cups, the whiskey bottle on the table, the cork lying beside it.

“It’s sedition if they do it.”

“Oh, come on, boy, let’s not be overly dramatic.”

“They’re officers of the law, Dad, the first line of national defense. If they even talk about walking off the job, that’s treason. No different than a platoon that walks away from the field of battle.”