THE WEEK AFTER LUKE RETURNED to them, Pup’s mother did something unprecedented: she moved Sunday dinner to a Tuesday night. It was the eve of the Fourth of July, and while Carrie and Pup’s older sisters busied themselves chopping tomatoes and slicing watermelon in the kitchen, Pup and Declan wandered the backyard, supervising the younger nieces and nephews as they threw Snaps at each other’s feet on the concrete path leading to the garage. Jeanine and Mary had made an executive decision that it was too hot for Bolognese and had made a trip to Costco for crates of frozen hamburger patties and giant bags of corn chips. Inside, Noreen’s husband, Dan, sweated before the stove, slowly stirring a large pot of honey-baked beans, while Mike and Frank, two more of Pup’s brothers-in-law, dragged two huge coolers out to the deck. They filled up the coolers with ice and drinks—but nothing stronger than pop, bottled water, and juice boxes for the kids. Pup’s mother, who was usually the sole cook for their weekly family parties, sat idly on the deck, her eyes hidden by a pair of prescription sunglasses, her slinged arm tucked into her body, and watched her grandchildren play. His father, seated next to her, was quiet too. He didn’t speak to anybody, except to occasionally remind the children not to trample his vegetables. They both seemed preoccupied, nervous, as their eyes drifted again and again to the alley gate, waiting for the arrival of their invited guest.
This wasn’t an intervention, because Luke was already in rehab. Thirty days of inpatient treatment, followed by another month of outpatient, followed by enrollment in an aftercare recovery program. He’d been there for six days now, and nobody knew how it was going because Luke wasn’t allowed to speak to anybody on the outside. All they knew was that he was still there, that he hadn’t checked himself out or snuck away in the middle of the night, and, lacking any other kind of information, they had all decided to take this as a good sign.
So, no, it wasn’t an intervention. But it wasn’t a normal family dinner, either, and not just because they’d changed the menu and moved it to a Tuesday and Carrie was there but Luke wasn’t. Once the counselor at the hospital had heard Luke’s story, she’d suggested family therapy as an important piece of his recovery. Pup’s parents had immediately refused. “I don’t want some stranger coming into our home, poking around in our lives,” his mother had said. His father had agreed with her, and so had Jeanine and Matthew. And that probably would have been the end of it, if it hadn’t been for Pup’s idea.
“What if,” he’d suggested tentatively, the morning after Luke shared his awful secret, “it wasn’t a stranger?”
And that was how Mrs. Barrera ended up as the special invited guest to their Sunday-dinner-on-a-Tuesday, balancing a paper plate on her knees and accepting offers of more baked beans, more fruit salad, another pickle, a Sprite?
That first session of family therapy was not as painful as Pup had imagined it would be. While the dusk settled over the neighborhood and the younger nieces and nephews ran around in the yard, waving their sparklers and trailing glitter in the darkening air, the older family members—Pup and his sisters and their spouses and Carrie and even Declan and his fourteen-year-old sister, Clare, sat in a circle of lawn chairs on the deck and talked about what they could do for Luke once he was out in the world again, how to help him cope, how to help him avoid the temptation of alcohol, which, Mrs. Barrera warned them grimly, would be everywhere. It was a painful and long-overdue conversation, and it was a good thing Mrs. Barrera had brought a “listening stick”—an old broom handle that she’d hot-glue-gunned all over with sequins—so that Jeanine and Matthew couldn’t commandeer the conversation.
After that, spurred on by some gentle prodding by Mrs. Barrera, they talked about Patrick. They talked about his death, for a little while. But then, for much longer, they talked about his life. They unearthed their memories, they aired out their love for him. They cried a lot. They laughed a lot more. The sun finally sank completely and as soon as true darkness settled over the neighborhood, the booms and pops and fizzes of the alley fireworks began, the air thickening with sulfur and grill char. Smoke filled the dark sky. Above the rooftops, the people who just couldn’t wait one more day began blowing off their grand finale fireworks. Red and silver and blue showers, low, rumbling booms, crackling fountains of light arced across the sky like man-made stars.
It was late before that first session of family therapy ended, before they took turns hugging Mrs. Barrera goodbye and, one by one, Pup’s older sisters gathered up their children and pushed their strollers or drove their minivans back to their own corners of Flanland. His parents, as usual, fell asleep five minutes into Antiques Roadshow. He switched the television off and covered their legs with the lightweight blanket folded over the back of the rocking chair. Then he went up to bed.
On the seventh step, Pup lifted his arm, out of rote habit, to flip off the fat angel in its frame, but before he had a chance to extend his middle finger, he froze.
The angel was gone.
Someone—his mother, his father, he didn’t know—had taken it down. In its place was Patrick’s high school graduation photo. He’d switched out his Cubs hat for a stiff black mortarboard, perched at a jaunty angle on his head, and he was smiling hugely, completely unselfconscious of his crooked front tooth. His eyebrows were black and thick and almost touching above his wide blue eyes, which looked eagerly into a future he must have believed—had every right to believe—would last many years, decades, half a century or more.
Pup stepped back. He looked at his brother’s face. Then he leaned his forehead against the glass, living eyes gazing into pixelated eyes, a one-way stare, living breath fogging the plate between them. He’d once feared that his memory was fading, that the day would come when he could no longer remember Patrick the way he wanted to. But he had fought against the fading, and he would keep fighting. They all had, and they all would, all of the Flanagans, all in their own private way. The years would spool onward, but as Pup stood before Patrick on the seventh step, he swore to do whatever he could to shorten the distance between the linear measurement of those lengthening years and the feeling of them, a feeling that didn’t move in lines at all, but in waves, sometimes moving forward toward healing, toward happiness, but other times drawing back upon itself so that the ache felt fresh as ever. What could he do but keep swimming?