“Let’s not.”

“What?”

“Discuss this,” Danny said.

“The AFL’s left many a fledgling union hanging out to dry when the pressure got upped.”

“Dad? I said let’s leave it.”

“Fine, fine,” his father said.

“Thanks.”

“Far be it from me to change your mind after such a triumphant night.”

“Dad, I said quit it.”

“What am I doing?” Thomas said.

“You know damn well.”

“I don’t, boy. Do tell me.”

His son turned his head and his eyes were filled with an exasperation that gradually gave way to humor. Danny was the only one of his three sons who’d picked up his father’s sense of irony. All three boys could be funny—it was a family trait that probably went back several generations—but Joe’s humor was the humor of a smart-aleck boy and Connor’s was broader and borderline vaudevillian on the rare occasions he indulged it. Danny was capable of those kinds of humor as well, but more important, he shared Thomas’s appreciation for the quietly absurd. He could, in effect, laugh at himself. Particularly in the most dire hours. And that was the bond between them that no difference of opinion could ever break. Thomas had often heard fathers or mothers over the years claim they didn’t favor any of their children. What a load of bollocks. Pure bollocks. Your heart was your heart and it chose its loves regardless of your head. The son Thomas favored would surprise no one: Aiden. Of course. Because the boy understood him, to his core, and always had. Which wasn’t always to Thomas’s advantage, but then he’d always understood Aiden, and that kept the ledger balanced now, didn’t it?

“I’d shoot you, old man, if I had my gun.”

“You’d miss,” Thomas said. “I’ve seen you shoot, boy.”

For the second time in as many days, he found himself in the hostile presence of Nora. She didn’t offer him a drink or a place to sit. She and Danny went over to one corner of the room by themselves and Thomas crossed to his youngest son, who sat at the table by the window.

The boy watched him come, and Thomas was immediately shaken to see a new blankness in Joe’s eyes, as if something had been hollowed out of him. He had a black eye and a dark scab over his right ear and, Thomas noted with no small regret, that his throat still bore a circle of red from Thomas’s own hand and his lip was still swollen from Thomas’s ring.

“Joseph,” he said when he reached him.

Joe stared back at him.

Thomas went to one knee by his son and put his hands on his face and kissed his forehead and kissed his hair and pressed him to his chest. “Oh, Jesus, Joseph,” he said and closed his eyes and felt all the fear he’d trapped behind his heart these last two days burst through his blood and his muscles and his bones. He tilted his lips to his son’s ear and whispered, “I love you, Joe.”