SUNDAYS IN THE FLANAGAN HOUSEHOLD always began and ended in the same way. In the morning, Pup’s mom went around the house trying to get somebody to go to mass with her, and everybody made some excuse as to why they couldn’t. Exasperated and huffy, Judy Flanagan would eventually give up and go slamming out the door in her white dress flats and matching purse, muttering about the state of her family’s souls, with Pup’s dad calling after her from the couch: “Pray for us, hun!” An hour or so later she came home in a much better mood, filled with the holy word of god and the neighborhood gossip she’d picked up in the vestibule after the service, and started making sauce.
In the evening, all the siblings came over, along with their spouses and kids, for Sunday dinner. Pup’s mother always made the same thing: ten pounds of spaghetti Bolognese, a tossed salad in the gigantic wooden bowl she’d gotten from her great-aunt as a wedding gift, and about twelve loaves of garlic bread. The Flanagans weren’t Italian, but pasta was the cheapest food you could get to feed a small army of offspring. Plus, Pup’s mom had learned how to make the sauce from her childhood neighbor, Mrs. Tagliaferri, who’d grown up in the Apennine mountains of northern Italy and, so the story went, had hired Pup’s teenage mom one summer to help slaughter chickens in her backyard coop, paying her not with money but with recipes.
The dining room in Pup’s house was filled almost wall-to-wall with a giant wooden slab of a table lined with long benches that, if you really crammed, could fit everyone in the family except for a handful of the youngest kids, who ate their dinners in adults’ laps or at a card table in the kitchen. It was a tight squeeze, but nobody minded, because the Flanagans were the type of family who believed in togetherness. All twenty-five of the Flanagan children and grandchildren lived within the same pizza delivery zone, a two-mile radius that fanned out around the central point of their house. This meant that in Flanland—which was what Carrie had nicknamed their neighborhood way back when she’d first started dating Luke—you were expected to spend a lot of time with your family, whether you wanted to or not. Pup never understood why people got all paranoid about drones and government surveillance. That was his normal life. Dozens of pale blue eyes, all the same shade and sprung from the same gene pool, followed him wherever he went. One time, he’d been walking down the street and sneezed, and his brother-in-law Mike called out “Bless you, Pup!” from a passing car. The first and only time he’d ever tried smoking a cigarette, standing in the alley behind the 7-Eleven with his buddies Robbie and Jeremy and a pack of Kool Milds stolen from Jeremy’s aunt, Pup barely had a chance to take his first-ever puff before his sister Mary had whizzed by on her bike and, without even slowing down, reached out and plucked it from his mouth.
Sunday dinners were the cornerstone of Flanland life. Work schedules and vacations were planned around them. Pup’s sister Noreen had famously shown up to Sunday dinner one day after giving birth to her third child. These meals were loud, they were chaotic, and they were sacred. If you were going to miss one, you had better have a good reason—and in his almost seventeen years of life, Pup never had. But on the Sunday after Izzy’s “party,” Luke, without sending out so much as a vague explanatory text, didn’t show up.
His absence was noticed by all, but openly discussed by none. It was not brought up except in whispered one-on-one conversations between the siblings and spouses as they helped set the table or corralled their children: Anybody seen Luke? Somebody call him. Maybe he’s studying. He’s got the bar exam coming up in, what, six weeks? Yeah, and I’ll be glad when it’s over. He has been so prickly lately. You can’t talk to him about anything. Poor Carrie, having to put up with him for all these years. Hey, somebody text her—she’ll know where he is. No, she works at the restaurant on Sundays. Quiet, quiet—here comes Mom.
Throughout the meal, the family stuck to its favorite feel-good topic: the glorious achievements of Pup’s nephew, Declan. Declan was Pup’s oldest sister Jeanine’s oldest son, and he was actually older than Pup by two months and five days. They were in the same grade at Lincoln, though few people ever connected the two of them, and why would they? Declan was effortlessly athletic, smart, handsome, and popular. Not only that, scouts from several prestigious universities were already recruiting Dec to play college basketball. He’d been a starter on Lincoln’s varsity team since freshman year, when Pup had warmed the bench for the B team before being cut during sophomore JV tryouts. Declan had received a brand-new car for his sixteenth birthday, while Pup was lucky if his parents let him borrow their boat-length sedan to drive three blocks to the gas station for the occasional Snickers bar. One of Declan’s favorite things to do when he saw Pup in the hallways at school was to call out, “Hey, Uncle Pup!” which always got a laugh from his teammates and hot girlfriend, Muriel. It made Pup furious, but there was nothing he could do about it, because he was Declan’s uncle, ridiculous as it seemed.
That Sunday, Jeanine took the floor as soon as the pasta was doled out. “I hate to brag about my kids,” she began, which, as everyone in the family knew, was her standard line before she started bragging about her kids, “but as you know, we’ve always told Dec that he’s a scholar-athlete, and not an athlete-scholar. Academics always come first. And clearly, he’s been listening.”
“Mom,” Declan protested weakly, but he knew it was pointless because once Jeanine got going there was no stopping her.
The rest of the family waited politely as she looked around the massive table filled with plates heaped with steaming spaghetti, and made sure everyone was paying attention before she unfurled her news.
“We received a call from Georgetown University on Friday,” Jeanine said finally, smiling adoringly at her oldest son. “Dec? Do you want to tell them?”
“Mom,” Dec said. “Come on.” Pup rolled his eyes across the table at Annemarie. She winked back at him. They weren’t fooled: Declan liked to play the humility card, but they both knew he was loving this.
“Go on!” chirped Jeanine. “If you can’t brag to your family, who can you brag to?”
Across the table, Annemarie caught Pup’s eye and mouthed, Everybody.
“Okay,” said Dec at last, now that the suspense had reached peak levels. “I got offered a scholarship. A full scholarship.” He smiled then, baring his perfectly straight white teeth, which had recently emerged from several years of expensive orthodontics to reveal a megawatt smile just ready and waiting for the ESPN cameras. Pup subtly moved a hand to cover his own overbite. Damn, Pup, his brother-in-law Matthew had once observed. With teeth like those, you could eat a head of lettuce through a tennis racket!
“It’s nothing formal, yet,” Dec said after the applause around the table had died down. “The formal offer won’t come until senior year. But I’ve given them my commitment. So I guess it’s official: I’m going to be a Georgetown Hoya!”
“Georgetown.” Pup’s dad rummaged through his pasta in search of a meatball. “Is that a good school?”
“Ted!” Jeanine’s husband, Matthew, laughed indulgently. “It’s a great school. One of the best in the country. Presidents went there. Supreme Court justices went there. Bradley Cooper went there.” Matthew ruffled his handsome son’s hair. “And one day, people are gonna be sitting around dinner tables and saying, ‘Declan Spenser went there.’ We couldn’t be prouder.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Declan said, shrugging with fake modesty. “People act like it’s so hard to get into an elite college, but it’s really not, if you put your mind to it, you know?”
“Dick,” Pup muttered. Everyone looked at him, because Pup barely ever made a peep during Sunday dinners. Usually, he just wolfed down his food and disappeared out to the alley to shoot free throws, or into the kitchen to hang out with his younger nieces and nephews, who were so much more fun to talk to anyway.
“Pardon me, Pup?” Jeanine was leveling him with her sister-mom stare that indicated she’d heard exactly what he’d just said.
“Nothing.”
“Hey, Uncle Pup,” Dec said, shining his blazing smile in Pup’s direction, like an interrogation lamp. “I forgot to ask. How’s your art grade?”
A couple dozen pairs of eyes rested on Pup. Even his niece Chloe, who’d been sitting on his lap and happily gumming a piece of garlic bread, stopped what she was doing and swiveled around to train her big blue eyes on his face. He could feel the spaghetti he’d eaten like a brick in his stomach.
“That’s right!” Jeanine clapped her hands so that her fat diamond rings clattered together. “I always forget you two are in the same class! Pup, do you have a college plan yet?”
“Not really,” Pup said, running a nervous hand over Chloe’s mostly bald head. “I mean, I’m only a junior.”
“Exactly. You’re already a junior, and almost a senior. You should have started thinking about this months ago. Who’s that counselor at school that you like? Mrs. Barbero or something?”
“Mrs. Barrera.” Pup leaned over to feed Chloe a tiny chunk of meatball.
“Well, why isn’t she talking to you about college? Is she going to write you a letter of recommendation?”
“Maybe? I don’t know.”
“Well, if she won’t even write you a rec letter, what good is she?”
“She isn’t that kind of counselor,” Pup explained, trying to keep his patience. “She’s a social worker.”
“A social worker?” It was now Mary’s turn to jump in. “I need a social worker. You should’ve seen the call I was on last night. Neighbors called 911, reported this awful smell. We go into the apartment building, find this poor old guy in the upstairs unit who’s been dead on his bathroom floor for two solid weeks. With the radiator on full blast. He’d practically turned into soup!”
“Mary, not while we’re eating!”
“Sorry, Mom. I’m just saying—that kind of thing can scar a person. But what the heck do you need a social worker for, Pup Squeak? When’s the last time you had to scoop a pile of human stew into a body bag?”
“Not while we’re eating, for Chrissake!” Pup’s dad threw down his fork.
“She’s got a point, though,” Jeanine said, which was typical, because the sister-moms always had each other’s backs. “I thought social workers were there to report the kids in black trench coats before they go shooting up the school! You’re not planning on shooting up the school, are you, Pup?”
“Yes, Jeanine.” Pup sighed. “I can’t wait to get to first period tomorrow so I can detonate my homemade bomb.”
“You shouldn’t make jokes like that.” She pointed her garlic bread at him. “Not in the climate we’re living in these days.”
“And you shouldn’t be so ignorant about what social workers do,” interrupted Annemarie. “They help kids with all sorts of issues.”
“Right,” said Elizabeth, crossing her arms over her massively pregnant belly. “But what’s Pup’s issue?”
“I don’t have an issue.” Pup shrank into his seat while Chloe squirmed on his lap. “God.”
“See, that’s the problem with your generation, Pup. Gen Z or whatever they’re calling it.” Matthew could never resist an opportunity to blame a given problem on kids these days. He never included his own children in these critiques, of course. “Every kid’s got an issue. Depression. Anxiety. ADHD. What’s the thing that teacher told Pup he had once? Executive functioning disorder? Come on. What a load of crap. What Pup needs is a college counselor to talk to him about his applications and to write him a stellar rec letter that makes up for his crappy grades. Not some kumbaya social worker.”
“Seriously,” agreed Mary. “He’s the most well-adjusted kid I know.”
“Except that he’s failing art,” added Declan.
“I’m not failing art,” said Pup.
“Dammit,” said Pup’s father. “Judy, I told you we forgot to ask him about his grades.”
“Pup,” Jeanine scolded, “how can you be failing art?”
“Hey.” Annemarie’s voice was sharp; it cut through the din of clinking forks and nosy questions. “Will you guys all shut up already and let the kid eat his dinner? Jesus.”
Jeanine’s face immediately crumpled into a pile of hurt.
“There’s no need to be rude about it, Annemarie,” she said. “I only wanted to include Pup in the conversation.”
“You’re not including him. You’re prying into his business and talking about him like he’s not even there.”
“Prying?” Jeanine lifted an offended hand to her heart. “I would never—”
“Judy,” Sal, Annemarie’s fiancée, interjected, “this Bolognese tastes especially delicious today. You really are an amazing chef, you know that?”
“Oh!” came the squeak of surprise from Pup’s mother, her neck and cheeks mottling pink. Judy Flanagan had been feeding her family Sunday dinner for so long that it no longer occurred to anyone to compliment her, or even notice, the prodigious effort it took to make sauce from scratch every week for over two dozen people.
“I actually added some veal this week,” she explained. “Just to try something different.”
“Well, it’s just wonderful.”
Good old Sal. Annemarie’s fiancée had been around long enough to know that changing the subject was usually the best way to defuse a family crisis. The rest of Sunday dinner was enjoyed in a cautious peace. Georgetown was not brought up again. Luke’s absence continued to be carefully and thoroughly ignored. Shamed a little by Sal’s kindness to their mother, everybody went out of their way to rave about the veal.
Pup didn’t even wait for the pineapple upside-down cake to be served before he made his escape out to the alley to shoot free throws. Privacy was a nonexistent commodity in his house, but he at least hoped for maybe five minutes to himself before one of his sisters or nieces or nephews came out and annoyed him some more. And sure enough, he hadn’t even made it through his warm-up before he heard the squeak of the chain-link gate and footsteps into the alley.
“Sorry about that in there.” Annemarie handed him a slice of cake wrapped in a paper napkin. “The sister-moms can be pretty intense.”
“Maybe I should start skipping Sunday dinner.” Pup rolled the basketball to his sister and took a large bite of cake, wiping the crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Luke may be on to something.”
“Seriously. I love how Mom thinks he’s at study group.”
Pup blinked. Apparently he wasn’t the only one with suspicions.
“You think he’s lying?”
“Of course he’s lying. When I was in law school, those study groups always met on Saturdays. Only the most hard-core nerd would be in two study groups a weekend. And that’s not Luke. I guarantee he’s off somewhere drinking and watching the Cubs. Or just drinking. Either way, he’s not studying. But we’ll let Mom have her little fantasy.” She picked up the ball, bent her knees, and shot from the chalked-in free-throw line. It went straight through the net.
They took turns shooting free throws for a while, lapsing into an uncharacteristic silence that Pup knew could only mean one thing: Annemarie was waiting for him to talk. She was good at that, at waiting him out until he just started confessing. It was why she was such a successful lawyer.
“Can I ask you something?” Pup finally said, shoving the last bit of cake into his mouth and slumping down against the garage.
“Anything, anytime.” Annemarie heaved the ball under her arm and sat down next to him. “You know that.”
“What was your worst day of high school?”
“Hm. That’s a tough question.” She laughed. “There are so many to choose from.”
“I mean the absolute worst.”
She thought for a minute, looking up at a squirrel scrambling across the power lines above them.
“Okay,” she said at last. “It was the day when someone wrote ‘DYKE’ across my locker in red Sharpie.”
“What?” Pup sat up. “You’ve never told me that story before.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not exactly the type of pleasant memory that I like to tell around the campfire.”
“Who did it?”
“Well, they never caught anyone, but I’ve got my own ideas.” She began spinning the ball between the tips of her fingers. “Anyway, that wasn’t even the worst part of it. The worst part was that I’d been all ready to come out to you guys. I was planning on doing it right after I graduated, at Sunday dinner, which was, like, three weeks after it happened. But I figured, if there are kids my own age who are still homophobic assholes, then how the hell are my old-school Catholic parents going to take the news? So I ended up waiting three more years, until the pretending became so excruciating, I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“So I was, what, seven, when you told everybody? I don’t even remember it.”
“Well, that’s probably because it was pretty anticlimactic. I don’t know why I was so afraid. I should have given Mom and Dad more credit—they were totally fine with it. Everybody was fine with it. Even Matthew and Jeanine, who, as you were reminded tonight, can be real pains in the ass.”
Pup took the ball from her and started spinning it through his fingers in just the same way Annemarie had. It was a family habit. The cool, nubby surface was comforting to him, like a loved blanket, a tactile memory of his childhood. “When you came out,” he said. “What did Patrick say?”
“Patrick?” Annemarie looked at him quickly. “Oh, he just gave me a hug and said he loved me. You know what Patrick was like.”
But that was the problem. Sometimes Pup felt like he didn’t know. Not anymore. Sometimes he felt like he was no closer to getting over it, or getting through it, as Mrs. Barrera would say, than he was the moment he walked out of that central Illinois hospital into the darkness and the rain.
“What are you asking me about my worst day of high school for, anyway?” Annemarie asked. “What’s going on? Don’t tell me this has something to do with Izzy.”
Pup looked down at the spinning ball between his hands and nodded.
“Oh no. What happened?”
“Nothing happened, exactly. I just realized that I have no chance with her. All this time, I’ve been kidding myself.”
“Oh, Pup.” Annemarie reached out to pet his hair, like she’d done when he was a little boy, but she stopped herself in time and her hand fell back to her lap. She knew he hated that gesture, now that he was nearly seventeen.
“I know you’re not going to want to hear this,” she said, “but I think this is a good thing. Now you know for sure. So now you can let her go.”
Just like you did with Pat, he thought, remembering the day, a few weeks after the funeral, when she and Sal had come over to gather up Patrick’s biology textbooks and donate them to a program for underserved high school students. Patrick would have wanted this, they’d said, which of course was true. But still.
“Me and Izzy have been through a lot together,” Pup said. “And she helps me with my homework sometimes.”
“Well, shit. Let’s award her the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Pup couldn’t think of a witty response, so he said nothing.
“Pup, let me ask you something: What do you actually have in common with Izzy?”
“Lots of things.”
“Name one.”
“Um, we’re both juniors at Abraham Lincoln High School, for starters. We were born in the same month. We both like sports.”
“Izzy does not like sports.”
“She does! Remember she came over to our house last year to watch the World Series?”
“The Cubs won the World Series last year for the first time in over a century. Every single person in the city of Chicago watched it, even people who don’t know the difference between a home run and a hole in one.”
“What’s your point, anyway?”
“My point is, if you really stop and think about it, if you really sat down and listed to yourself the reasons why you think you love Izzy Douglass, you couldn’t do it.”
“Because love isn’t about lists! Jeez, Annemarie, will you stop being a lawyer for five seconds?”
“This has nothing to do with me being a lawyer. Face it, Pup: The only thing you two have in common is that you both have brothers who died. That’s it.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not nothing!”
“I know that! But it’s also not everything!”
“I’m going inside.” Pup scrambled to his feet and tossed her the basketball, a little harder than he meant to.
“Wait!” Annemarie caught the ball and hugged it to her chest. “I’m sorry. I know you think I’m being harsh. But I’m just trying to tell you, Pup. In high school, relationships evolve. And sometimes not for the better. You know, the day after somebody decorated my locker with hate speech, I remember sitting in history class next to my best friend, Andi Trotter. My pen ran out of ink, so I asked her if I could borrow one of hers. When she opened her pencil case, guess what it was full of?”
“Um. Pencils?”
“Red Sharpie markers.”
Before Pup could respond, the alley was flooded with white light as a car screeched around the corner and came barreling toward them. It swerved to avoid some recycling bins, and in doing so, caught the corner of the D’Amatos’ garbage can, which sent two bags of rancid trash exploding down the alley. Pup and Annemarie scrambled out of the way to avoid being hit just as the car jerked to a stop in front of the garage right beside theirs. The headlights switched off, the driver’s-side door swung open, and Luke, with two-day stubble and the beginnings of a black eye, tumbled out of his white Jeep.
Annemarie dropped the basketball and ran down the alley to where her younger brother, swaying on his feet, was standing in front of the neighbors’ garage, holding his arm out in front of him with great concentration.
“Luke!” Annemarie, the tallest of the five sisters, was the only one with the height to look her brother in the eye, and she was staring him down now with a fierceness that might have scared him if he hadn’t been too drunk to notice. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I am trying,” he said grandly, waving a small black device in the air, “to open the garage door, except the stupid thing doesn’t seem to be working.”
Annemarie snatched the opener out of his hand, marched over to where Pup stood, pointed the opener to the Flanagan’s garage, and pressed the button. A grinding noise filled the alley, and the garage door began creaking upward.
“Oops.” Luke laughed, leaning against his hood as the door yawned open. “Stupid garages all look alike. We need to paint ours different. Stripes. Polka dots. A great big ‘F’ for Flanagan.”
“Or ‘Felony DUI.’ Give me those fucking keys.” She yanked the keys out of his hand, pushed past him and climbed into the driver’s seat. “Get out of the way. I’m parking this for you.”
“No, you’re not.” Luke hoisted himself up on the hood and lay sprawled across it, facedown. “I’m staging a sit-in,” he called. “Conscientious objector. I will not go gently into that good night. Brother’s rights! Justice for Luke!”
“Pup, help me,” commanded Annemarie. “Get him off of there.”
Pup hesitated. When Luke was this drunk, he was completely unpredictable. He might seem fairly harmless at the moment, laughing as he spread-eagled across the hood in mock protest, but it was entirely possible that in another moment he might veer into darkness, even violence. Pup had learned this the hard way. Just a few weeks earlier, Luke had come crashing up the stairs in the middle of the night, kicked his pants off, and starting peeing all over the clean clothes in Pup’s laundry basket. When Pup had tried to stop him, tried to steer him in the direction of the bathroom, Luke had looked up at his younger brother with a flat blue lolling gaze and, with pee still splashing all over Pup’s clean T-shirts, had taken a lazy, wobbling swing, which had just connected with the corner of Pup’s jaw. It hadn’t hurt—much—but it hadn’t exactly been pleasant, either. After Luke passed out on top of his covers, underwear still tangled around his ankles and bare ass gleaming white in the moonlight, Pup had to spend the rest of the night with a sore jaw, rewashing all of his soaked clothes in the basement so that his mother wouldn’t know what had happened.
“Pup.” Annemarie was already behind the steering wheel, waiting.
“Okay.” He circled the car, squatted down near the front tire so his face was level with Luke’s. “Dude. You gotta get off the car. Just let Annemarie park it for you.”
“Oh, do I.” Luke’s chin rested on his hands. The boozy smell coming off his pores was enough to make Pup’s eyes water.
“Yeah. You do. Please.” He stood very still, silently begging Luke. This was the moment, he knew from experience, when it would go one way or the other. Annemarie sat in the front seat and turned the ignition, and the car restarted with a rumble. Luke, with the engine vibrating underneath him, continued to stare at Pup and the moment grew and grew and Pup braced for it and then it snapped and everything relaxed and Luke rolled off the hood, suddenly compliant.
“What did I ever do,” he asked, propping himself against the door frame and watching Annemarie ease the Jeep into the empty square of concrete next to their father’s Buick, “to deserve not one, not two, but five pushy older sisters?”
“Dude, you shouldn’t drink and drive.”
“The more you know.” Luke hummed the jingle from the PSA, then rummaged around in his pockets and produced a stick of gum. He folded it into his mouth and tossed the foil wrapper on the ground. As Annemarie climbed out of the car and slammed the door shut behind her, Pup could see by the stiff way she walked that she was trying to contain her fury. She cranked her arm behind her head and threw Luke’s keys at him as hard as she could. He tried to catch them, but they bounced off his chest and clattered to the asphalt.
“Try to imagine the sound of a two-thousand-pound vehicle slamming into a human body,” she said.
“Jesus.” Luke bent down to pick up the keys. “I didn’t hit anyone. Except that garbage can just now. Are you gonna file a wrongful death suit on behalf of the D’Amatos’ leftover chicken bones?”
“Okay, then. Try to imagine how it would feel to have to explain to Mom and Dad why you weren’t allowed to sit for the bar exam because of your DUI conviction. Are you really willing to throw away three years of law school because you’re too stupid to call an Uber?”
“I was at Mishka’s. It’s, like, two blocks away.”
“It’s nearly two miles away, and if I ever see you drinking and driving again, I will call the police on your ass so fast you’ll be in jail before that last shot is even down your throat.”
“I wasn’t even doing shots.”
“Fuck you, Luke.”
“Guys.” Pup tried to step between them, but, as usual, no one paid attention.
“Good to know you’ve got my back.” Luke smiled contemptuously at her, his swollen face gleaming beneath the streetlights. “You’re just like Carrie. Loyal to the end.”
“What does Carrie have to do with any of this?”
“Carrie doesn’t have anything to do with anything, anymore. But when I find out who she’s sleeping with, I’m gonna track down his address and then I’m gonna go to his house and kill him. You gonna report that to the police too?”
“Do you have any idea how crazy you sound right now?”
“Do you have any idea how crazy you sound always?”
“Guys.”
“Everybody’s still inside, you know,” said Annemarie. “Everybody’s going to see what a drunken mess you are right now.”
“So? You think I give a shit what everyone thinks?”
But as he staggered toward the back gate, Luke seemed to consider this: the thought of walking into the tail end of Sunday dinner, having to deal with four more angry sisters, and their husbands, and their screaming, demanding children, not to mention his aged, fragile parents. He veered suddenly away from the gate and began lurching down the alley, whirling around once to flip Annemarie off before turning at the street and disappearing into the night.
“Where do you think he’s going?” Pup asked.
“Who knows? Who cares?” She glanced over at him. “So Carrie dumped him, huh?”
“Yeah.” Pup walked over to the D’Amatos’ garage, uprighted their garbage can, and began collecting the scattered trash and placing it back in the bin.
“Well, good for her.” Annemarie watched Pup distractedly as he picked up a clot of wilted lettuce and tossed it into the trash. “It’s about time that girl wised up.”