He Took Me to Catch the Rat, But the Rat Was Him novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Parting Glass

I wore my mother's green wool coat to the Mummers Parade, because it was the only green thing I owned.

I stood on the curb on Broad Street in the cold, with two of Cathal's men behind me.

On one side of me was a bakery owner's cousin, and on the other a woman who sold lottery tickets.

The street was packed twelve deep, and the whole city had come out to watch grown men in sequins walk in a straight line.

"Here they come," said the lottery woman.

"The Richmond Street boys."

Forty men in purple satin suits came down Broad Street with feathered plumes taller than a door.

They carried banjos, saxophones and glockenspiels, and they played "Oh Dem Golden Slippers" while the whole band did a high-kneed strut.

At the head of them walked Cathal Dwyer with a banjo.

His purple satin suit was covered in silver sequins, and his plume scraped the traffic light.

I laughed out loud.

I had not laughed since Christmas Eve, and it came up out of me so hard that I had to hold the barricade.

"He hates the costume," the lottery woman said.

"Does it every year for his father."

Cathal saw me.

He did not stop playing, and he did not break the strut.

He only looked across thirty feet of cold street at me in my green coat.

He grinned, wide and helpless, the first real smile I had ever seen on him.

Then the plume dipped under a banner and he was gone.

The Richmond Street club was a long brick hall with a bar down one side and a stage at the end.

By two in the afternoon it was full of men in half-removed satin and women in good wool.

At the head table sat six old men in dark suits, and Phelim Dwyer sat in the middle of them with his gold pin.

"Our guest," Phelim said, and the hall went quiet.

"Miss Mulcahy has a gift, gentlemen."

"The Table would like to hear it."

I walked up through the tables.

Cathal stood at the back by the bar in a gray suit, with a stray purple feather stuck in his hair.

I did not look at him.

I stood in front of the head table with my hands at my sides.

"The Parting Glass," I said.

I sang it without music, slow, in the voice I kept for funerals.

The hall was so quiet I could hear the ice in the bar.

I looked at Phelim while I sang the last verse, straight into his smile.

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