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LILLIE HOSTED A GET-TOGETHER A few weeks later, for Annie’s high school graduation. They had cake, Annie accepted congratulations cards, and then the kids wandered out to the driveway to sit in a circle, count up the cash Annie had gotten, and discuss what was happening around back where their fathers were sitting. Every once in a while one of the older cousins sent a younger one to get more chips or to steal a few beers. Thomas’s youngest boys, twins in seventh grade, showed them wrestling moves and begged their cousins to let them demonstrate on them. The five Joyce brothers who lived in America were on the back deck, arms folded, faces stern, and something was very obviously in the air although no one seemed to be saying anything. The wives hovered and glanced at one another. They had opinions, too, but they knew not to share them until they were back home with their own husbands.

“Did someone die?” Barry’s youngest son, John, asked the group on the driveway as he cracked a beer. Most of them knew by then. They’d overheard their parents discussing. They’d all heard different versions of that time, informed by whatever age their father had been on the day their grandmother died and when Nuala arrived, and how old they’d been when Rian left.

“You know we have another uncle, right?” Mary said to John as Frankie took the beer away from him. It was his third and he was only sixteen. “Rian. The one who ran away when he was thirteen. They just found out where he is. I guess the stepmother was pretty evil and that’s why he left.”

But there was murmuring. Some of them had never heard that about Nuala. They’d only heard that Rian was difficult.

“You shouldn’t say that, Mary,” Frankie said. “You don’t know.”

“I know she was abusive to Rian.”

“Abusive?” Frankie looked skeptical.

“I doubt she was evil,” John said. “I would have heard about that.”

“You don’t even know what you’re talking about, John,” Mary said. “You didn’t even know they found out where he lives.”

John went around the circle asking each of them, one by one, if they already knew about this, and why hadn’t he been told with everyone else.

“Told? No one was told,” Mary said. “We just pay attention and you don’t.” And then, taking the entire bag of chips, she went inside and upstairs to the bedroom she shared with Bridget.

“Draaammmmaaaa,” Bridget crowed when she came in a few minutes later to get a sweatshirt. “I’ll tell you later,” she added as she breezed out again.

Mary knew that they wouldn’t decide anything about going to Montana on the night of Annie’s party, or about whether Cathal should be told. It was the kind of thing they’d talk around for a while, weeks would pass, and then all of a sudden one or two of them would up and go. But it wouldn’t be Mac, Mary felt certain of that. If the rest of them wanted to go that was fine, but he wouldn’t risk Rian not wanting to see him, closing a door in his face. He wouldn’t want to say whatever he needed to say to Rian with so many others listening.

MARY BROWSED APARTMENT LISTINGS AT the back of the Village Voice she’d picked up in Grand Central that week. She called her friends. “I need to get out of here,” she said. “My family is driving me nuts.” She couldn’t believe they’d had a rent-controlled apartment in the family for so long and had given it up. She could be living almost for free.

“You’re living for free now,” Lillie pointed out when she mentioned this recently, and Mary could hear her father laugh from the next room. The point was that she had to figure out what she was doing, the years were ticking by and she didn’t want to proofread corporate merger contracts forever. She didn’t want to spend her best years on the fifty-sixth floor of an office tower, her skin never feeling sunshine. She felt stuck, like she’d better figure out what she wanted to do with her life and soon, or else she’d find herself on a path she didn’t want to be on. She’d arrived home from work one Friday to find her book of CDs missing. Annie had just gone into her bedroom and taken it and then left it at a friend’s house. Another day, she came home and could tell with one look that Bridget was wearing her brand-new Victoria’s Secret padded bra. She reached out and squeezed Bridget’s boob to be sure and felt nothing but foam, just as she suspected. Bridget protested when Mary made her reach under her shirt and take it off on the spot. That bra had cost her forty-two dollars. The next Friday she came home and noticed that her closet was open and the dress she’d just purchased from Banana Republic was missing.

“Eileen was here,” Lillie said, when Mary brought the investigation downstairs. Mary and her cousin Eileen were the same size.

“Bridge said I could,” Eileen said, when Mary called her. “Come on. I really don’t want to buy a dress I’ll only wear once if you have a perfectly good one hanging there.”

“It still has tags on it!” Mary said.

“I’ll dry-clean it,” Eileen said. “God, Mary. Relax.”

MARY HAD BEEN TO IRELAND once on her own. When she was in college, she saved up and booked a ticket to Rome to visit a friend who was studying abroad. When else would she have a free place to stay in Italy? Mac and Lillie were shocked that she hadn’t included Ireland on this trip. They told her it was unthinkable to pass over Galway without dropping in to see her grandparents and her family. Mary could usually anticipate when she was going to be in trouble for something, but that took her by surprise.

“You can’t drop in on Galway when you’re in the south of Italy,” she said.

“Sure you can,” Lillie said, and that if Mary didn’t have the money to change her ticket to add another stop, they’d give it to her just this once. She thought her father would see reason, but he was one hundred percent on her mother’s side.

“But my break is only eight days. If I spend two days in Ireland, I’ll only be in Rome for six unless I miss classes.”

“That’s for you to figure out, my love,” Lillie said. The bottom line was her grandmother and Cathal would be very hurt if they found out she’d been so close by and not seen them. They wouldn’t understand that at all.

“How would they even know? Mom. I’m not being rude, I swear, but do you want to look at a map? Rome and Galway are not close to each other.”

“I know perfectly well where Rome is,” Lillie said. “That’s not the point at all. You’re going to Europe. Ireland is in Europe. And what do you want with Italy anyway? You don’t even have family there.”

Mary looked first at Bridget, and then at Annie, who were sitting at the kitchen table as always and trying not to laugh. “I give up,” Mary said.

Mary added a stop to Ireland on her return journey. She was tanned from six days in the Italian sun, six days of sipping spritzes with her friend Katie and boys named Enzo and Giovanni. Landing in Ireland, stepping out of the airport into a dreary April day, gave her a chill that reached her bones. Lillie’s mother had recently been moved to a care home, and Mary felt awkward visiting her there, creeping into her room like a pushy American. Mary could tell that the poor old woman had no idea who she was, despite the visits she’d made with her mother when she and her sisters were growing up. They sipped tea, but her grandmother’s dementia was advanced, so the tea was lukewarm and the aide only filled the cups about an inch. To help fill the silence Mary told her about her mom and sisters and aunt and her American cousins on her mom’s side, but her grandmother only looked out the window with milky eyes and whispered what Mary knew were prayers.

“Bye, Nana,” she said when it came time to leave, surprised at how moved she felt, maybe because the woman looked like her mother, or maybe because she was sure she’d never see her again.

She spent the evening with her cousins—a fun night out in town—and then the next day her uncles Seamus and Noel picked her up to bring her to the Cuan. Cathal welcomed her, fussed over her, showed her where she’d sleep. He had food waiting—salmon, salads, sliced brown bread—and had already turned on the electric blanket in case she was tired and wanted to rest. But Mary was full of energy, said she wanted to take a long walk into the hills if it was all right with him. “Go on then,” Cathal said, shooing her outside. “It’s the best place to be.”