Chapter 9: The Wake

I sat up in the dark.

Nessa sighed and rolled over, her rabbit squashed under her cheek.

"I'm sorry," I whispered.

"You don't have to be."

"I know I don't have to."

He was quiet for a long time.

"In the other life I wasn't here," he said. "I was at the Anchor. Somebody called me at last call and I didn't pick up till morning."

"Where are you now?"

"On the floor next to his bed. They want me to get up so they can take him."

I closed my eyes.

I thought of the old man's shaking signature. The nod.

"Get up, Cormac," I said. "Let them take him. Then go home and sleep."

"Okay."

"Do you want me to tell her?"

"Would you?"

"Yes."

"Thank you," he said, and hung up.

I didn't sleep again.

In the morning I told Nessa that Grandpa had died in the night.

She ate her cereal and thought about it.

"Like Daddy?"

"Not like Daddy. Grandpa was old and his heart was tired."

"Daddy wasn't old."

"No."

She stirred her cereal around.

"Can I say bye?"

The wake was on Wednesday, at a funeral home on Dorchester Street with green awnings.

The line went out the door and down the block in the July heat.

Every bookie, cop, priest and bartender in South Boston came to see the old man off.

I wore black and held Nessa's hand.

People recognized me.

I watched it happen face by face. The double take. The elbow in a neighbor's ribs.

The altar girl. The rat's daughter. With the Devane kid.

Nobody said anything to my face.

The old man lay in a bronze casket in a room full of lilies, in his good blue suit, with rosary beads in his hands.

Nessa looked at him for a long time.

"He looks like he's pretending," she said.