Patrick had been the first in the family to meet Natalie. They liked each other from the start. They were an unlikely pair—her brother, still clinging to the Boston tough guy thing, a guy who ran a bar and had never been to college. And Natalie, who graduated from Barnard, who did Pilates three times a week, who spoke in the calmest tone, the voice of someone who actually meditated rather than just thinking about it from time to time. But they got along, bonded over the Red Sox and a shared love of Frank Sinatra.
Bridget hadn’t introduced them on purpose. On a Friday night in October 2004, when the Red Sox had just won the World Series, she and Natalie got drunk on margaritas at a Mexican restaurant in Midtown. They had only been dating a few months, but already it felt serious. Sometime around nine, Natalie joked that they were so close to Port Authority they should probably jump on a bus up to Boston for the victory parade. By two a.m. the joke had turned into a plan.
As they sped up 95, the bus full of happy, drunken idiots like them, Bridget thought of how she had never been to Boston without telling her family. There was something liberating about it.
They took a long walk at dawn, then went for breakfast. An hour later, coming out of a diner by South Station, they ran smack into Patrick and Brian and their cousins Matty and Sean. She remembered how the back of her hand was touching the back of Natalie’s. The look on Natalie’s face when she pulled away.
They chatted with the guys, who, it turned out, had the same plan in mind. All five of them went to a bar by Government Center for early morning beers.
When Natalie was in the bathroom, Pat said, “Awesome girl. Cute too. Ma know about her?”
“No.”
“Have you ever thought of telling her?”
“Patrick, I’ve thought about it my whole life.”
“Tell her, then. Believe me, Bridget. She has secrets of her own worse than that.”
9
YEARS AGO, Pat hung a clock over the bar. An illuminated glass dome the size of a beach ball. On the hour, the Budweiser Clydesdales marched in a circle around the edge.
They mocked him for it at the time.
“What?” Pat said. “The guy gave me a great deal.” And Fergie said, “The only deal that makes sense is if he paid you to take that thing off his hands.”
Brian watched now as the Clydesdales made their move and the clock struck one in the morning. He and Fergie had decided to stay open, to honor his brother. The bar filled up early, people standing shoulder to shoulder, wanting to pay their respects. Out front, someone left a tall candle flickering at the curb. There were several bunches of flowers too. Drugstore roses, the petals tinged brown. Tulips in clear plastic sleeves.
It was closing time, but Brian and Fergie didn’t tell anyone to go. The bar was boiling hot, even with the door cracked, even in January. Men’s long sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and women’s hair pulled up off their necks. Sweat pooled at their temples. Brian tried to float on top of the voices. Whenever someone offered to buy him a shot, he threw it back like it was the antidote that would save his life. Still, he couldn’t keep the thoughts from rushing in.
He came out from behind the bar now and made his way toward Patrick’s office, pushing through the crowd. He’d been working up the courage to go back there all night. As soon as he was in, Brian closed the door. He switched on the light, looked around. He was looking for a note, even as he hoped there wouldn’t be one. A note would settle it. There was an old slip of paper taped to the desk. Printed with the last lines of the Act of Contrition: I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasions of sin.
It was a joke. That was what Fergie called Patrick sometimes: the Near Occasion of Sin.
There was a bottle of whiskey with only a thin coating of brown liquid left at the bottom. Brian picked it up, turned it over in his hands.
Yesterday had seemed like nothing special. But now the memory of it would be more important than any other day. Patrick still here. Nora not yet transformed into whatever her grief would make of her. Brian should have insisted on driving his brother home or forced him into a cab. He would regret it for the rest of his life. That was why he’d run off when his mother told him the news. He couldn’t face her.
How could a drive Pat had made a million times before end like that? How could someone so entirely alive just disappear? Brian’s mind hadn’t yet accepted it as fact.
He closed his eyes, determined to focus. He would go over every second of Patrick’s last day, find the signs, as if he might change the outcome if he got it right.
“Start at the beginning,” he said out loud.
—
Fergie opened up on Sundays. Brian wasn’t due at the bar until six.
He woke with vague plans to do a few chores for his mother—she had been after him to dust the ceiling fans and put the boxes of Christmas decorations back in the attic. He assumed the smell of bacon floating up from downstairs was an incentive to make sure he followed through.
He got out of bed at nine, showered, put on a polo shirt and jeans. Then, as he did every morning, he went to the kitchen, ready to be fed. Nora stood at the stove, her back to him. Brian kissed her on the cheek, sat at the table, and picked up the newspaper. He pulled out the sports section.
She set a plate in front of him.
“Are you coming with me to the ten o’clock?” she said. “It’ll be Father Callahan, I think.”
“Not today,” he said. “I’ve got too much to do.”
He had been avoiding church for weeks. Whenever he went, he saw his old high school coach. O’Leary would give Brian the eye, tap his watch. A reference to a conversation they’d had after Mass a few months ago. When do you plan to retire? Nora had asked. As soon as your son agrees to take over for me, Coach O’Leary said. He followed up the next day by phone to say that he had been serious. Brian had no interest, but Nora never stopped bringing it up. She had even gotten Patrick on her side.
She gave Brian a disapproving look now, but she didn’t push it.
While she was gone, he masturbated. He watched the Celtics game he’d taped the night before. He took a nap. In the afternoon, he played Grand Theft Auto in his bedroom for three hours, until his mother called up, “Four!”
Brian hit pause.
He was the only one of them who had ever lived alone with Nora, her fourth and youngest child. The number four was written into all the tags on his clothes when he was a kid, and even now when she wanted him, it was, Four! Time for dinner! Four, can you change the lightbulb in the hall?
“Yeah?” he called back.
“Did you do the boxes?”
“Yup!”
He got up and did the boxes. The ceiling fans as well.
Before he left for work, they shared a dinner of leftover chicken.
“You’re closing tonight?” she asked.
He nodded. His mouth was full.
“What time?”
“One,” he said. “It’s always one. You know that.”
“But I don’t like it.”
“So you’re hoping the answer will change if you ask me enough times?”
“I suppose so.”
They smiled at each other.
She took a bite of her chicken, chewing it slowly, then taking a long sip of water.
“I was over to see your aunt Kitty after church,” she said. “Brought her her groceries. She said your cousin Conor was there for a visit yesterday, with Marie and the kids. Isn’t that nice? He belongs to the Hoosic Club in Milton. They were on their way there for lunch. Did you know he’s going to retire this year? At fifty! And with a good pension. That’s what Kitty said. It seems like a nice way of life, being a policeman.”
He gave her a look. “Ma.”
“What?” she said. “I’m only making conversation.”
A few minutes later, he was in the driver’s seat of his car, waiting for it to warm up. Her car was parked in front of his in the driveway. For the fir
st time in a while, Brian noticed the shadow of a bumper sticker, long ago scraped off, but for the letters nd In.
He looked away, then backed up into the street.
When he reached the bar, there were only a few of them there.
Joe, by himself today. He was usually with George and Wally and Dick and Ed, a crew of white-haired guys with booming laughs who had lived their whole lives in this neighborhood. They came when it was Dan O’s and they came when it was Colony, and they came when it was Rafferty’s. No allegiance to any particular name on a sign, only to one another. Two seats down from Joe was another old-timer Brian didn’t recognize, a guy with a bald head and a white T-shirt, a combination that put him in mind of Mr. Clean. A young couple sat in a booth. The girl craned her neck to apply lipstick in front of the mirrored wall.
The bathroom door swung open and a guy in a Tom Brady jersey stepped out.
“Hey QB, big game tonight?” Fergie said.
“Screw you, Ferguson,” the guy said.
They laughed.
Brian had come to relieve Fergie, but Fergie didn’t go home. He never did. Instead, he poured himself a beer from the tap. He had the Herald folded in his back pocket. He opened it up, took a seat, and spread the pages out in front of him on the bar.
He had been Patrick’s closest friend since kindergarten. They made a funny pair. Fergie was short and bulky, with shaggy blond hair that he could never seem to figure out what to do with. Next to Patrick—tall and handsome, all thick black hair and broad shoulders—Fergie looked like a disheveled kid. Patrick had a mustache now, a strangely unflattering choice.
On his forty-eighth birthday, he’d partied too hard, gotten wasted, fell face forward into a bar stool. He ended up with a cut above his upper lip, and then a tiny scar. The facial hair was meant to hide it, but Brian thought the scar would have been the better option. Fergie loved to give Pat shit about that mustache, as if it had put them on an even playing field, lookswise, for the first time in their lives.
A girl came in. She looked about twelve, but she was wearing a UMass hoodie. Twenty-one, twenty-two max, Brian thought. He was all ready to ask her for ID when she said to him, “Can I hang a flyer for the Brendan Moynahan 5K?”
“Of course you can, sweetheart,” Fergie said, pointing to the door she’d just come through without looking up from his paper.
The back of the door was plastered in flyers. The Eddie Farrell Memorial Golf Outing. The Terry Sweeney Foundation Auction. The Sons of Éireann Firemen’s Funeral Fund Barbecue.
They watched as the girl added hers to the mix.
“That’s a lot of dead Irishmen when you think about it,” Fergie said.
At six-thirty, Patrick arrived. The energy changed, as it did whenever he entered a room. It was like a famous person had just walked in.
Pat came behind the bar and filled a pint glass with water. His rule was that they could, and did, drink their faces off anywhere else. But not here. Even when they were off the clock, though Pat rarely mentioned that to Fergie.
“You see the new place finally opened across the street?” Fergie said. “Dottie’s Wine Bar.” He held a hand straight up and then tipped his fingers forward.
“I saw,” Patrick said.
“Dottie’s,” Fergie said. “On Dot Ave. Aren’t they clever. Won’t last six months, mark my words.”
Patrick shrugged. “Ehh. Good luck to ’em. Maybe it’ll keep the yuppies out.”
His bar was an old-school dive, five blocks from the house where the family lived before Brian was born. The front windows were small. The room was as dark at lunchtime as it was at midnight. Pat had it set up exactly the way he wanted it. A long wooden bar, red leather banquettes, a concrete floor. A pool table and a dartboard in the back. A jar of pickled eggs on the bar, which nobody ever ate. Cash only. Pat loathed the thought of anything trendy. His motto: “No frills, no food.” They would not serve pressed sandwiches or have karaoke on Tuesdays. They would stick to the basics.
It had taken Brian three months to persuade him to stock a beer besides Bud, Bud Light, and Guinness. He suggested Blue Moon. “Girls like it,” Brian said. “Trust me.” Pat only acquiesced after an arm wrestling best-of-three that left Brian’s shoulder aching for a week.
That Patrick had gotten the place was something of a miracle. He never forgot how lucky he’d been.
When their father was still alive, he came to watch the Patriots games on Sunday afternoons. Sometimes Nora came with him and ordered a cup of tea.
“Does it feel like a pub back in Ireland, Ma?” Patrick asked her.
“I wouldn’t know,” she said.
But Brian could tell she was proud.
The bar was usually full of Pat’s old friends. They knew him from high school, from Little League, from Florian Hall, through a cousin’s friend’s cousin who had dated him in 1989.
“Bri,” Pat said now. “Look alive.”
Joe had lifted his empty glass. He was the only one who ever ordered red wine, but Pat kept a bottle of cabernet under the counter just for him. He had a soft spot for the guy. Joe had two grown sons who wouldn’t give him the time of day. When his gallbladder ruptured, Pat was the only one who went to visit him in the hospital.
Brian found the bottle, refilled Joe’s glass to the top, as he knew his brother would.
“Sorry for the wait,” he said.
“What do you make of this, Raf?” Joe responded, pointing to the TV over the bar.
Brian hated when they called him Raf. A name from another life.
He looked up. A blond ESPN anchor in a short skirt was interviewing a Red Sox pitcher, recovering from Tommy John surgery.
“He’s done. He’ll be out for the season,” Brian said.
Mr. Clean two seats over looked at them, wanting into the conversation.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” he said. “It’s January. The kid’s young, he’ll bounce back.”
“Careful there, buddy,” Pat said. “That’s a former pro ballplayer you’re talking to. My brother used to play for the Cleveland Indians.”
He still sounded proud after all these years.
The guy looked impressed. “Is that right?”
“Not exactly,” Brian said.
“Double-A,” Pat said.
Even that was a stretch. Brian was only there for two seasons before they moved him down to Single-A, where he stayed for the rest of his career.
“What position did you play?”
“Second base.”
“A five-tool player, this kid,” Pat said. “All muscle. What did you have, eight percent body fat?”
“Wouldn’t know it to look at me now,” Brian said, to get out ahead of what he assumed they were thinking.
He had gained sixty pounds since he was in peak shape. He never worked out anymore. He let his body get a little flabby, embraced the slight beer gut as an occupational hazard. He thought once that baseball was his whole life before him, but it was just a moment, that was all. He would have preferred never to talk about it again, but the guys at the bar were obsessed. Most days, he let them have their way. When you had lived the dream of everyone else, you weren’t supposed to tell them the truth. If they thought you had gotten the best and still couldn’t be happy with your lot in life, what shot in hell did they have?
Brian was drafted straight out of USC. That first year, every bit of it was a joy. Ten hours a day outside, forty degrees in Akron in April, and he was thrilled. He made less than minimum wage. He only got one day off a month. Traveled by bus. Lived in a motel room with no fridge, no stove. He ate mostly fast food and peanut butter sandwiches; they all did. Hope kept them going. They were in purgatory, but at any minute they might be released up to heaven.
Double-A was full of guys on their way to the big leagues, or else guys who’d come down from the majors for a while to recover from injury. There were a few who moved down further from there, but Brian barely took note of them. He assumed he would only go in one
direction. Then he tore his Achilles in the second game of his third season. They moved him down. “Just for now,” they said.
Five years in Peoria, Illinois. Five years of sleeping on a sofa in a one-bedroom apartment shared by seven guys. Five years of being told that his body was a machine that required the highest grade fuel, when he could barely afford a Big Mac. Everything extra went on a credit card. He would think about it when the season was over.
Brian still loved to play, but there was no dignity in it anymore. Single-A was all about stunts to fill the seats. Once a season, the team brought a live camel into the park. Every night, between the third and fourth innings, four guys dressed as a hot dog, relish, ketchup, and a French fry ran clunky laps around the field, racing to the finish. The crowd screamed out for their favorites, louder than they ever screamed for any player. They didn’t get too used to anyone, since they knew a guy might be called up anytime.
When kids were waiting for him outside the park, wanting his autograph, or standing over the dugout, gloves in the air, their faces saying that if he’d just toss them a ball, it was all they’d ever need to be happy, then Brian felt like he had made it. He’d arrived. But the gimmicks brought him back to earth. They weren’t there for him. They were there because it was SpongeBob SquarePants night.
When he was home in Boston, everyone wanted the details. They asked what the guys in the clubhouse called him, and when he said Raf, that’s what they all started calling him too. His father and his uncles and every guy at Patrick’s bar had suggestions.
“Tell the coach he needs to move you up in the order.”
“Keep your chin up. You’re meant for the majors. You’ll get there.”
They had no idea what it took to get there, how enormous the line was between really good and great.
His fourth and fifth years, Brian got injured again and again. Pulled a hamstring, hurt his back. For a while there, he liked his Oxy a little too much. When Pat caught him popping pills far outside of the season, he said, “What are you doing that shit for? Knock it off.” And Brian did. His brother’s disapproval was more powerful than any twelve-step program.
Saints for All Occasions Page 13
