Across the street, in a house with no furniture left in it but a kitchen table, two folding chairs, a television on a milk crate, and a mattress in the upstairs back bedroom, Danny Rourke stood at the front window in his shirtsleeves and watched the lights of number 27.
His mother had gone to bed early with a heating pad and a paperback romance and a glass of Canadian whisky, which was her Christmas Eve tradition and had been since 1980, the year his father died. Before that, Christmas Eve at the Rourke house had been a thing that happened to people rather than something anyone did. His father would come home from the tavern on Pearl Road at nine or ten with a bag of oranges and an expansive, dangerous good cheer, and either the cheer would hold until he fell asleep in his chair or it would not. Danny had spent a good deal of his childhood learning to judge, from the sound of a car door closing in the driveway, which kind of night it was going to be. He had been very good at it. He had been good at it the way some kids were good at spelling.
The house was cold. The thermostat in the hall had been set back to sixty for the new owners, a young couple from Parma with a baby on the way who had walked through in November holding hands and asking about the school district. Danny had not turned it up. He found he did not mind the cold. In Port Townsend, the shop where he worked was heated by a single woodstove and the steam box for bending ribs, and he had grown used to working in a sweater and fingerless gloves, the air smelling of cedar and hot water and the salt off the bay. He stood at the window with his arms folded and watched the snow come down past the streetlight in a slow gold column and thought about a girl with a mixing-bowl haircut throwing a wrench at him in 1974.
He had not recognized her. That was the truth. For the first few seconds, with the snow in her hair and her face lit up with a fury that was at least half delight, she had simply been a stranger, a beautiful one, the kind of woman who did not exist in Port Townsend, Washington, where the women wore rubber boots and flannel and had forearms like stevedores. And then she had run into him, and he had looked into her face from four inches away, and for no reason he could name he had seen Frank. Not the features, exactly. Something in the eyes. Something stubborn and amused and grieving, all at once, that sat right behind them.
He took his wallet out of his back pocket and opened it and took out a square of paper folded small. It had been folded so many times that the creases had gone soft as cloth. He unfolded it under the light from the window. On the front was a drawing of praying hands and the words IN LOVING MEMORY, and inside, FRANCIS JOSEPH MARCHETTI, MAY 3, 1930 – JANUARY 11, 1986, and below it the order of service at St. Brendan's, and a poem about a ship sailing over the horizon that Frank would have hated, and on the back, the information about the luncheon in the church hall afterward.
He had stood at the back of St. Brendan's in a borrowed suit that was too short in the arms, beside the rack of pamphlets about vocations, and had not gone forward for communion, and had slipped out during the final hymn. He had flown into Cleveland Hopkins the night before on a red-eye from Seattle with a stopover in Chicago, having heard the news from his mother on a crackling phone line at the boatyard office, two days late, because he had been out on the water delivering a thirty-two-foot ketch to a retired orthodontist in Friday Harbor and there had been nobody to call. He had rented a Chevy Celebrity at the airport and driven to the church in the snow and stood at the back, and later he had driven to Holy Cross Cemetery and waited in the car until the last of the mourners had gone, so that he could stand at the graveside alone.
What had happened at the graveside, he did not think about. He had become, over the years, very good at not thinking about things. It was a skill like the other one, the car door one, and it came from the same place.
He folded the program and put it back in his wallet.