She knew what he meant. Her life, after all, was not what her family expected it to be. They’d always known that she was smart. They knew she’d go to college—maybe nearby Marywood University. They thought she’d marry a local boy, too, and move from working-class Sixth Street to the grand old homes in the Dunmore enclave the locals called Hollywood.

But Mary had defied their expectations twenty years ago, leaving everything behind, from her family to her faith. Even after her brief marriage failed and she returned to the Scranton area, nothing was the same. She’d seen too much of the world, gotten to know people who were not Irish, Italian, Catholic, or any combination of the three. She came back with a worldview that frightened them, and though they lived in the same town again, Mary and her family were worlds apart.

“How’s Mom?” Mary asked, trying her best to needle her father.

“I imagine she’s worried about you.”

Mary smiled, relishing the uncertainty in his voice before getting to the root of her anger. “That’s right, the two of you don’t talk much anymore, do you?” she spat. “Not since the bastard child and the divorce.”

“Why won’t you let it go, Mary?”

“Because you humiliated my mother in front of everyone,” she said, her lip trembling with anger. “After all that mumbo jumbo about God hating divorce, you went out and had an affair with her friend. In a town as small as Dunmore, you shamed her. You shamed all of us.”

The quiet came again. It was the sound of a strapping man being brought to his knees by guilt.

“I’m glad you’re all right, Mary,” her father said in a near whisper. “Be careful in Philadelphia.”

She waited for the line to go dead. Then she held on to the phone for a moment, and as the traffic eased forward, she allowed the phone to drop to the floor.

Her father was a proud man with rough hands and a tender heart. He was strong when it came to his convictions, and he’d instilled in Mary and her five brothers a love for Catholic doctrine. No sex outside of marriage. No divorce. No birth control.

In the end, when he broke the first of those tenets, it was the third that did him in. Her half-sister’s birth forced him to break the second, and in the end, he was left with nothing.

Mary’s half sister was twenty-nine now. She’d followed in Mary’s footsteps by leaving Dunmore as soon as she was old enough to drive. But her younger sister was a much wiser woman than Mary. She was smart enough to never return.