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nerving proximity to his family. They could have brushed past him in the aisles of the grocery store or stood beside him on the train and it never would have mattered. After all, he had apparently spent the past twenty years in a state of complete oblivion to their presence, and if he could roll back the clock even slightly then he could slip back inside the comfort of all he didn’t know. But no one was offering him yesterday over today. No one got to choose anything where time was concerned. If time could be rolled back then what would be the point in stopping someplace so close? He would go all the way to the year before Bernadette died and find another outcome for her illness by catching it sooner, and in doing so he would lay down a different set of cards for Sullivan as well. This child who presently sat at the wide-planked kitchen table that Bernadette had purchased in Vermont and lashed to the roof of her car would return to the crowd scenes, another face that blended in with so many others, were it not for a fact that too much of life unfolded beyond his control. But then he looked at his son picking at the edges of his peanut butter toast. Had all of their circumstances been different, he doubted very much that Tip would have been different. Tip’s interest in ichthyology was a transcendent force. No matter what had happened in their life, Tip would have grown into a man who saw Jesse Jackson as a waste of his evening, and he would have stood in the snow to argue against attending a reception. If things had been shuffled ever so slightly so that Bernadette had lived and Tennessee had followed them less, who was to say that the car would not have hit Tip squarely in the back last night, snapping his beautiful and much beloved neck as it pushed him forward? Working against every natural inclination, Doyle had to make himself consider that what had happened might not have been the worst thing at all, not by a long shot. It was possible in fact that they had all gotten off easy, everyone except the woman in the hospital. He cleared his a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 180

throat. He forced himself to try again. “Lucky for Tip you stayed close,” he said to Kenya.

“Lucky for all of us,” Teddy said, as he had been thinking much the same thing.

Tip considered the point and then he nodded. “True.” Kenya put her hands flat under her thighs and sat on them. She wanted to compress herself, be smaller. “We weren’t even looking for you last night,” she said, her feelings stung. “It’s not like all we do is follow you around.”

“Then why were you at the Jackson lecture?” Doyle asked her.

“You’re hardly
ever
at the lectures anymore. We go all the time.

We go lots of places where we don’t even think about you.” Kenya knew that her tone was rude but she meant every word of it. “Sometimes one will be really good and my mother will say, ‘I sure wish Tip and Teddy had come to hear that.’ Or it will be boring and long and she’s glad you stayed at home. I wish we got to stay at home more but my mother says we have to hear what they have to say.” Teddy leaned towards her. Anyone could see how patient he was.

He looked like he wanted nothing more in the world than to make sense of what she was talking about. “You have to hear what who has to say?”

“You know, the guys who make the speeches.”

“Why in the world do you have to hear all that?” Tip asked her.

Kenya reached up and gave one of her braids a single sharp yank.

“She likes politics, I guess.”

“So you’re saying that she goes to hear lectures not because she thinks we’ll be there but because she enjoys it herself?” Doyle felt an unmistakable flutter in his chest. No matter how he felt about this woman, he had a desire to slap his hand flat against the table and shout to his sons,
Are you listening to this?

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“I don’t know how much she enjoys it but she thinks it’s something that a person has to do.”

“If that’s the case, then it proves that certain interests can’t be passed on genetically or environmentally,” Tip said.

“I think it’s brilliant,” Doyle said. He patted Kenya’s shoulder and then sent her up to the top floor to get her coat and her mother’s purse. “And get the hat,” he called after her. “You can wear her hat.”

They remained very quiet, the three of them listening to her footfall on the stairs going up and up. “We have an eleven-year-old stalker,” Tip whispered.

“I don’t think we can blame the child. The child just follows her mother,” Doyle said. His coffee was cold and he pushed it away.

Tip stretched his leg up into the chair where Kenya had been sitting. “I was making a joke.”

“Why do we have to blame either of them?” Teddy said.

“Because they follow you,” Doyle said. “They lurk behind bushes without your knowledge. Even if they’re doing it to save your life it is not a natural relationship.”

Teddy stood up and stretched his arms over his head while he yawned. He had gotten up too early. “Forget it. They’re nothing to us, okay? They’re political groupies following a former mayor, but I’m still going to take her over to her apartment and help her pack.

Now that I know where they live I don’t suppose I’ll be gone very long.”

Tip shook his head. “I’ll take her,” he said. “Then we’ll go straight on to the track. After that she can come with me to the lab for a minute. I still have some work to finish and then we’re practically there at Mount Auburn. I’ll take her to the hospital and drop her off.”

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“You don’t think the dead fish could manage one day without you?” his father said, though not unkindly.

“If there isn’t time I’ll do it later.”

“You can’t expect yourself to crutch all over Cambridge in the snow,” Teddy said.

“So go dig the car out and meet me.” Tip swallowed another Percocet and pushed the bottle down in his pants pocket. Normally he would have just left them on the kitchen table and never given it a thought. Normally Sullivan lived in Africa.

“You’re exhausted,” Doyle said to Teddy, then he turned to Tip. “And you’ve got one functional foot. I’m taking her over to Cathedral .”

“I said I would take her running,” Tip said.

But Doyle wasn’t going to budge. Suddenly, with some strong and nameless desire, he wanted the boys at home. “You’ll still take her running. I’ll bring her back here and you can take her over to school in a cab. It will take you that much time to get cleaned up anyway. Then Teddy can get some sleep and we can all meet up at the hospital later on.”

At that moment Kenya was back in her coat and her mother’s deep green hat whose brim swallowed up her forehead and shadowed her eyes. She held up the keys in her hand, two keys on a silver loop. “I can go now,” she said.

Doyle stood up and put his cup in the sink. “Good. I’m ready.”

“It’s okay for me to go by myself,” she said. She hadn’t thought it would be Doyle who would walk her over. She was sure it would have been one of the boys. “My mother wouldn’t mind.”

“But I would mind, and for the time being you’re my responsibility. I don’t want you getting caught in a snowdrift.” Both Teddy and Tip had meant to come along but once Kenya was standing there in the kitchen they didn’t want to argue with r u n

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their father anymore. What they found was that neither one of them was sorry not to go. By telling them they had to stay home, Doyle had made them feel younger than they were, and that, oddly enough, made them think how nice it would be to be younger again.

They had liked being the little boys. There was an ease in obedience, never thinking past their father’s instruction. For a long time after their mother’s death Doyle was able to protect them, and all there was in the world to worry about was what would happen that night on Darwin’s
Beagle
. It made the brothers think for a moment that Kenya was the lucky one. At eleven, not only could her life be ordered, she still had all those books to look forward to. She could be foolish enough to go to bed at night believing that one day she might grow up to be president.

At the bottom of the steps Doyle and Kenya turned in the same direction, walking down Union Park Street away from Tremont.

It was not yet ten o’clock in the morning but most of the sidewalks had been cleared and the snow was neatly banked on either side. “What I always wanted to know was what happened to the people who lived in that house?” Kenya said, and pointed to a house that was exactly like Doyle’s but four doors away. “I don’t think it ever was for sale but one day there were different people living there.”

Doyle nodded. “The Baughmans. He was a lawyer. The house sold quickly. It might not have even gone on the market, I can’t remember. I know they went to New York.”

“They had twin girls.”

“That’s right, Scarlett and Lucy.”

“I always thought that would be a lot of fun, having a twin.”

“Did you know them?”

“The girls?” Kenya shook her head. “Oh, no.” The wind whipped across the narrow park and Doyle snapped a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 184

up the collar of his coat so it stood straight. It was so much colder now than it had been the night before. The leafless trees looked brit-tle standing naked in this little park. The bowls of the two black fountains were filled with snow.

They followed the street past Shawmut, past St. John the Bap-tist Hellenic Orthodox Church with its enormous mosaics of a sad-eyed Christ on the front of the building. They passed the Cathedral of the Holy Cross where Bernadette’s uncle had baptized the boys, where they made their first communions and first confessions with their grade school class, and where John Sullivan came back to say the mass for Bernadette when she died. It was not her uncle’s parish but it was theirs and the bishop made special allowances for Doyle’s family. Doyle saw the cathedral as a joyless structure, the granite Gothic Revival so massive and foreboding that it was impossible to imagine that anything as light as faith had ever existed within its walls. He wondered if it was all those years of going to mass at the cathedral that had ground religion out of him. Perhaps if he had attended a more modest church, maybe even the Hellenic Orthodox closer to the house, he might have done a better job of holding on to God, or perhaps religion had only ever been a campaign device for him, as Sullivan so often suggested. When he knew that he was finished in politics, he let himself be finished with his faith as well.

As a law partner he was no longer required to be the good Catholic son of Boston.

“Are you and your mother Catholic?” Doyle asked.

Kenya nodded. “Sure. We’re all Catholic.”

Cathedral Grammar School sat between the church and the housing project, a tall chain link fence wrapping up its basketball court tight. It would have been full of children normally but this morning everything was empty with the snow. Doyle had a real affection for this building. He thought of the countless plays he had r u n

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attended to watch his boys dressed up as shepherds or sheep, the parent-teacher conferences spent sitting beside the teacher’s desk in undersized chairs to hear how well Tip was doing and how might-ily Teddy struggled. He thought of the hallways lined with lockers, the construction paper butterflies stuck to classroom doors, the pri-mordial spaghetti suppers that were the cornerstone of a Catholic education. Sullivan had gone to Cathedral Grammar as well. Teddy and Tip had followed him there. Later, Teddy went around the corner to Cathedral High and Tip took the bus to Boston Latin. It was one of the reasons Bernadette had wanted to buy their house in the first place. She had looked at the schools before they ever had children to enroll. She loved the idea of walking her imaginary children over in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon. Doyle had asked her if she loved the idea of the school being next door to a public housing project. “I’ll thank God if it saves them from only seeing other Irish kids all the time,” she said.

Of course in the end it was Doyle who wound up walking the boys to school in the morning and rushing home when he could to pick them up in the afternoons. He blessed Bernadette for having the good sense to keep them all so close together. “Do you go to school here?” Doyle said, and pointed up at the building. She was a smart little girl after all, and he knew there were a certain number of scholarships. He had served on the scholarship committee.

Kenya shook her head. “It’s private.”

Past the school they walked into the first courtyard of the housing project, but now he let her lead him. “We’re towards the back,” she said. “It looks pretty in the snow, sort of like everything’s just been painted.”

He knew what it looked like without the snow. He had been the mayor after all and on the City Council before that. He was familiar with the housing projects, their budgets and statistics. He was espe-a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 186

cially familiar with Cathedral, sitting as it did in his own backyard. It was better than a lot of places. The sprawl of mustardy-yellow brick buildings turned into something of a maze and no good ever came of mazes, but there was a playground that kids actually used. Because it sat hip to hip against a better neighborhood, it was patrolled with greater regularity. The police pushed down hard on the nefarious elements and in doing so managed to hassle most of the decent citizens as well, so the crime rates stayed down and for the most part no one was happy. Boston Medical Center was only blocks away. There was a women’s shelter, a food pantry, plenty of resources and yet every one of them was stretched thin enough to snap. If Doyle could have been the mayor again he liked to think there were some things he would do differently.

Once they were through the second archway they passed three Hispanic girls standing against a wall smoking cigarettes in the cold.

They had on puffy nylon jackets but none of them wore hats. “Hey,” Kenya said lightly because they had turned their eyes to her, to Doyle walking behind her.

“Fucking freezing,” one of the girls replied, as if she had been asked about the weather.

Kenya quickened their pace slightly and led him through an exterior door that was propped open with a brick. A fi ne wedge of snow had dusted into the hallway and was marked with footprints. She unlocked the door to her ground floor apartment, using the larger key for the top lock and the smaller one for the knob.