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know, ended the abstinence.”
    Dad had invited his brothers to Mom’s funeral. I was standing next to him when he called Seamus, his younger brother in New York, and he let me listen to the answering machine message, which said he was off sailing with a woman friend in Nova Scotia. At least with Seamus you didn’t get misdirection. Dad’s older brother Colin, a doctor in Minneapolis, was too tied up at the hospital to get away for the funeral and sent a huge wreath in the shape of a horseshoe. It seemed as if Dad and his brothers were victims of mobility, the way they’d scattered to different parts of the continent to make families with strangers. Now, they were as much absent from each other’s lives as Ashley Carlisle had been from her brother’s.
    Most of what I knew about Dad I’d learned from someone else, including Seamus, who stayed with us one night on his way to Alaska to work on a fishing boat when I was in eighth grade at Saint Augustine and I sat on the floor of my bedroom pumping him with questions. Seamus was good-looking like Dad, with a fetching Rugby jaw and unruly hair, but most important he treated me like an adult. He had those thick Scanlon eyebrows and devil’s bumps on the tops of his ears that he said were a sign of intelligence.
    â€œYour dad didn’t have brain one when he was your age,” he told me. The way he said it, of course, I knew he meant just the opposite. “Our mom was always getting up and going to six o’clock mass so we’d grow up to be good boys. She wanted Tom to be a priest so bad she could taste it.”
    â€œWhy Dad?”
    Seamus rolled his eyes and hoisted his eyebrows. “Tom always made the nicest doilies for Mother’s Day, I guess, all put together so the paste didn’t show.” We both laughed. “And he composed little prayers that he’d read at holiday dinners. Tom always had a freaky mysticism about him.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, mysticism?”
    â€œYou know, contact with deeper truths.” Seamus shook his head as if disbelieving my dad could really be his brother. “Tom liked words. Me, I’d rather squeeze it between my fingers or suck on it, but Tom wanted to write about it. Mom had an old Royal typewriter, one of those black jobbies that weighed fifty pounds, and he typed his prayers on the back of handbills and crammed them into a brown expando. Like some junior Gutenberg in cutoffs. Course, Mom didn’t know he was pounding out adolescent erotica in between his dinner prayers. Colin folded one into her missal once, but she refused to believe it was Tom’s.”
    Seamus paused and looked around my room at the bulletin board with my Blessed Virgin bookmarks and ribbons from spelling bees, and I thought he’d remember he was talking to a child and cut me off. I probably should have stopped him, knowing that it wasn’t fair to hear these stories without getting Dad’s version, but Seamus mesmerized me. This was real life and I hungered for it. Finally, he took a deep breath, ruffled his hair, and plunged ahead again.
    â€œWe had this pimply babysitter named Judy who used to come over on Saturdays when Tom was working as a box boy and Tom would sneak home on his lunch hours and neck with her on the couch.”
    â€œMy dad?”
    â€œHe’d get his hair all mussed up and have to reattach his little black clip-on bowtie before going back to work.”
    â€œDid you ever tell your mom about it?”
    â€œNo. I kinda liked the idea that Tom was aiming away from the priesthood.”
    â€œWas your mom disappointed he didn’t become a priest?”
    â€œSure, then she thought he’d be a lawyer. Everyone did.”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    â€œHe took a part-time job in college as a cub reporter for a local daily and fell in love with the newspaper business. ‘Why would I want to be someone else’s mouthpiece?’ he