“Catherine. Catherine Mulroney.” Pressing his hands as if in prayer to his lips, he sighed. “Finest girl you’ve ever seen—in the Irish way. She was older: twenty; I was fifteen. We kissed just once before she left for New York. We wrote. Love letters—sure and they got spicy, I’ll tell you. I’d send them to a friend of hers, Sharon, who had a proper address. Soon’s I could, three years later, I went to find her. And I did, in this filthy rooming house. Two kids, she had. Sure, it was a desperate place—rats everywhere, people coughing their lungs out in every room. There she was: woman of my dreams. In all those letters, she never told me she was married with kids. Told me she worked in a hat shop, said she’d wait forever. Fantasy for her, I s’pose. For me it was everything. Before we can say two words to each other, the husband turns up—first time home in a week. She tells him I’m her little brother, and he takes me drinking. Doesn’t take long to get the measure of him; one minute he’s warning me against marriage—man’s curse, he says—the next he’s crying about how much he loves his babbies and what a saint she is, while winking at me and saying, sure, he could make a hole in another pint. Top it off he meets some woman he knows in the pub—and there was only one kind of woman in that place—and he slaps my shoulder and winks at me again and says he understands I want to spend time with my sister, but if he’s to stay away for the night he needs some of the readies and it was his wife after all.