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“Laid off, like the rest. But getting by, you know yourself. It’ll work out.”

The brothers didn’t want to say how worried Sean was because he wouldn’t like that.

“Where is he?” Mac asked Barry under his breath. “I have to go.”

“Why?”

“No reason.”

“You have a date.”

“Yeah.”

“Who? That dark-haired girl from Galway I bet.”

Mac shrugged.

“Well, that’s interesting,” Barry said.

MARTIN LEE HAD A HOUSE of his own now between Teaberry and Livingston. He’d gotten married that May and invited Mac, but between Sean not working and a second baby on the way, and Barry’s wedding and the money Mac put into the envelope for him, and all of them helping Thomas out until he got better work, Mac couldn’t do it. Unlike his brothers, Thomas was not there legally, so on top of citywide construction coming to a halt, he had that problem too. Plus, a part of Mac didn’t want to go back to that beautiful place. In his memory, Larkspur, all of southwest Montana, the Yellowstone River, Paradise Valley—it was all so blue and perfect.

The funny thing was that in Montana, despite the vast distance between places, he’d interacted with far more actual Americans. Since coming to New York he’d interacted with very few. His whole building, his block, his neighborhood, his job, the sheer population density of the city—all of these brought him into contact with a lot of people, all of whom were from somewhere else.

Martin said that even though the ranch no longer belonged to the Cunningham family, the Larkspur sign still stood over the main gate, lending some historical authenticity to the subdivisions that were still being constructed. Bill’s house and the larger of the two barns had been converted to event spaces, places to hold weddings or parties. PJ and Jenny’s house had been knocked down and the waste of it, all that solid timber, felt to Mac like a sin in the truest sense of the word. Part of the ranch had been converted to a two-hundred-acre golf course, and now there were collared shirts sold in the pro shop that said Larkspur on the pocket.

“You know where the pro shop is?” Martin asked on the phone one Sunday. “It’s in the very same spot where we found the calves after the big blizzard.”

“No kidding,” Mac marveled. “And all this was done so fast?”

“Fast! Between the permits and the design approval and building it and even growing the fecking grass it’s taken most of a decade.” Jenny had inherited a bundle, according to Martin, but sometimes she said she’d give it all back just to have the ranch returned to the way it was. To this, Mac imagined PJ’s face and laughed. No one was giving anything back. Martin said it was too upsetting to her to drive by the sign every day, so PJ had a secondary road cleared that led directly to their new house, bypassing the old entrance.

“It’s nice though? The golf course?” Mac asked.

“It’s lovely. I’m going to take a few swings one day to see what it’s all about. Peter got clubs. He’s pretty good! Come see it, Macdara. We’d all love to have you visit.”

MAC CRAVED FRESH AIR AND elbow room, but now there were small Joyce babies being born in New York, sisters-in-law organizing get-togethers at the weekends. He hadn’t expected how much he’d like having these not-quite-sisters, but he enjoyed hearing them boss his brothers around. When they were all together they told him if he looked too thin or too pale. They discussed whether he should grow a beard or a mustache. They told him which of his shirts looked best. They set him up with their friends.

Sean’s elder daughter, Delia, age two, was passed from uncle to uncle at these get-togethers, and Marie admonished them if they bounced her too roughly or threw her up in the air. Mac loved how serious Delia’s expression became when she studied each uncle’s face, like she was memorizing the differences between them. Of the uncles, she said “Mac” first, but that was only because his name was easiest. She had fine curls like her mother so far, and not the broom-like Joyce hair, but something about the triangle her bright eyes made with her little nose reminded him of Rian.

“You know what?” Mac said one day when he was holding her. “This little girl looks like her uncle.”

“Yes,” Fearghal said immediately, and Noel nodded too.

Marie, thinking Mac was referring to himself, looked back and forth between their faces and said she couldn’t see it. But the brothers knew.

Once in a while, because the story was somewhat known in Irish circles, the subject of Rian would come up with a girlfriend or someone new to them and Mac would realize that no explanation of the space Rian took up in his mind would suffice. “So you think about him pretty often?” a girl asked him once, finding out about this lost brother through girlfriends who’d dated other Joyces or had friends who had. She had a dreamy look in her eyes that annoyed Mac, though he couldn’t have said why. She asked him in a way that implied it was a tragedy he couldn’t speak of, but why would she assume that? They didn’t know the ending yet. And it wasn’t that Rian popped into his mind from time to time like she seemed to assume—it was more that he was always perched there, overseeing his thoughts on every subject. It was as involuntary as his heart beating.

Now that they were married, Marie and Regina knew more of the story and though they no doubt discussed it at home with Sean and Barry, they never brought it up when they were all together. The most recent rumor they’d heard was that Rian was working in England under the name Johnny Walsh. They heard he’d been seen several times at an Irish-speaking pub in Peckham, outside London. It was the most specific rumor they’d heard since the day he left. The story was that this Johnny Walsh got into a fight there very recently and had to go to the hospital, that he had broken ribs and maybe other injuries. In Ireland, someone went to see Cathal to tell him the same, so Cathal called the apartment to find out what they’d heard in New York. On both sides of the Atlantic, they heard this Johnny Walsh was known for fighting—that he could sometimes take a joke but at other times absolutely could not. A neighbor from the Cuan who lived near Peckham himself, and knew this pub, went over there to ask questions and report back. Sean, Macdara, and Barry felt so certain it was him that they made a plan to meet at the travel agents that very weekend to book their tickets for England. In all those years it was the first real lead. But when the old neighbor who lived in Peckham called back with his report, he told Mac the owner of the pub said Walsh had only started coming around lately, and no one knew much about him. He was of average height and build and spoke a Connacht dialect. They figured out the hospital where he would have most likely been taken but by the time the neighbor got there—fully a week after the fight—Johnny Walsh had long since detached himself from the various machines and disappeared.

“Do you think it was him?” Mac asked the neighbor.

“I’d say it was,” he said.

“What was the fight about?” Mac asked.

“Apparently it started over a question of which boxing division required the greater all-around athlete. Rian—if it was Rian—said welterweight. The other man insisted heavyweight. Everyone started giving their opinions and next thing there was a brawl.”

That’s him, Mac thought.