I watched the clergyman now as he read: “‘Jesus said, let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.’”

He looked shrunken in his vestments, his gaze through wire-rimmed glasses touched with uncertainty. I sensed his isolation: a middle-aged man repeating an inherited ritual in a reedy voice and doubting his own efficacy.

—Brian wore the priest’s collar I could never quite believe. “Good God, man,” he said, “you send Mother money instead of visiting, can’t bear to see the old neighborhood or anyone in it, and live outside the Church, beholden to a man you despise. For all your beautiful Kris Ann and fine house you’ve at last no sense of who you are.”

“Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest,” I jibed.

“Don’t spar with me, Adam. You can make a sadness of your own life, but our mother deserves better.”

“I’m here now.”

“For our uncle’s funeral. That’s quite a gesture.”

“Dammit, Bri, since I was twelve all I got from her was ‘don’t be like your father, don’t look up to what he did’ and all the time knowing she hated him for being killed. Hell, she’d say I looked like him and it was like a curse. So I did as she wanted, and if that’s taken me other places, so be it.”

Brian raised a finger to his lips, glancing toward the stairwell. Upstairs my mother had said the Rosary and slept alone, as she had for the twenty years since my father was shot and killed and buried in a spring drizzle like the one that spattered the windows, reminding me of the smell of wet earth. Instead, drinking wine with Brian in the living room, I smelled the same trapped mustiness. A small lamp lit the familiar things of my mother: a Belleek china cup, lace on the couch, the tortured Jesus, the cameo of my father, wolf-faced, with cold blue eyes. I sat in his chair. Brian faced me, a brown-haired replica of the pale sleeping woman. “I know you paid the price for Da’s dying,” he said.

I shrugged. “At least it didn’t make me a celibate.”

He nodded in wry acknowledgment. “No doubt I found comfort in the Church, if only the sense that someone was looking after me. Who’s to say that’s a bad thing?”

“Well, what I remember is our dried-out priest mouthing all that cold business of God’s will, and me knowing all the time that we were losers in an arbitrary and very nasty lottery. I’ve not become so weak-minded as to cherish that.”