“Leave him out.”
“Sorry, Michael. I didn’t mean anything.”
“He didn’t mean anything,” Joe seconded.
From the police reports, Michael had formed an image of his father’s death: In an alley in East Boston, his heart pierced by a bullet, Joe Senior had shimmered down to the ground, hands pinned to his sides. That was the image Michael saw now, and it made him venomous.
“Brendan, you might have let that chair cool off before you sat down in it.”
“Michael!” Margaret’s tone was more astonished than angry.
Conroy was unruffled. “I see.” He simply had not understood and now everything was clear. “Maybe I should go.”
“So go,” Michael said.
Joe pounded the table with the butt of his fist.
Conroy dabbed the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come. Margaret, ladies, thank you for all this. Excuse me.”
“Brendan,” Margaret instructed, “you sit down. This is my house, you’re my guest. It’s enough of this.” Mother Daley could be magnificently huffy. Her late husband had called her Princess Margaret. The three boys, more accurately, called her Queen Margaret.
“No, Margaret. Maybe Michael’s right, it’s too soon.”
“Michael is not right.”
“Some other time. I don’t want to spoil this beautiful meal.”
“Brendan! You sit down. Michael is going to apologize.”
Ricky said, “What’s he got to apologize? He didn’t do anything.”
“Mind your own business, you.”
Brendan Conroy smiled gallantly. All the arguing was pointless. There was no swaying him from a grand gesture. “Some other time,” he repeated. He excused himself, got his coat, and left.
The seven Daleys listened as Conroy started his car and drove off.
A moment of silence.
“Michael,” Ricky said, “let me have those noodles.”
For as long as the Daley boys could remember, there had been a basket attached to the phone pole in front of the house. They had gone through a few of them. Winters killed the steel hoops and especially the flimsy backboards from Lechmere’s, and every few years Joe Senior would swap in a new set, adjusting it slightly up or down the pole to avoid the holes left by the big lag screws he used. The current model, which had lasted the longest, had a faded, undersized fan-shaped aluminum backboard. It was hung a few inches too high and seemed to rise even higher as you got closer to the curb, where the pavement dipped. The boys thought of this hoop and the pavement in front of it as their private court. Even now, with the Daley boys all long gone from the house, there were neighbors who did not park in front of the basket, out of old habit, as if it were a fire hydrant. Occasionally a new neighbor or visitor or other interloper, ignorant of the local etiquette, would leave his car under the hoop, and the boys took it as a sign of the decline of their city. Back in the day, no one would dream of parking there because, as a general rule, you did not fuck with the Daleys, particularly Joe, and in any case there was always a game going on there.
These games were a deadly serious business. A Code Napoleon of unspoken rules governed play. One must never take the feet out from under a player near the basket lest he land on his back on the curbstone, as Jimmy Reilly once did. The Daleys’ ball was never to be used in a game at which no Daley was present, even if the ball was sitting right there in the yard. All parked cars were inbounds. But the sidewalk was out-of-bounds, to discourage smaller players from running behind the basket and using the pole to rub off a defender, a strategy deemed so chickenshit that Joe forbid it outright. These were technicalities, though. The real secret knowledge of these games-their whole purpose-was the hierarchy of the boys involved. There were a dozen local boys who regularly played, mostly Irish, all linked through school or St. Margaret’s parish, and every one of them knew precisely where he ranked from number one to number twelve. There was no allowance for age or size. Nor did it matter who you were. Michael Daley never rose above the middle of the pack, even on his home court; Leo Madden, though his father was in and out of Deer Island and his mother weighed three bills, was a rebounding machine and therefore he was completely respected here. Prestige to the winners, shame to the losers. All of it real and perfectly quantifiable and precious as money in the lives of boys, and men.
So, when the three brothers drifted out to play after dinner under the streetlight, the women gathered at the windows to watch. They arranged themselves at the living-room windows, which looked across the porch and over a shallow yard to the street. Margaret and Kat stood together at one window, Amy at the other. The younger women wore similar expressions, sharp, bemused, scornful. Queen Margaret had the same sharp smirk, but there was bleary concern in her eyes. She could not completely share in the womanly skepticism of boys’ games, knowing that, however it turned out, one of her boys would lose. She felt Kat’s arm curled around her lower back; that helped a little.
“Margaret,” Kat said, “you should have had one more. Two against one, it’s not fair.”
“Fair to who?”
“True.” Kat considered the problem. “You know, Ricky should let them win, just once.”
Margaret emitted a skeptical sniff. Cigarette smoke piped out of her nostrils.
“Amy, why don’t you talk to him? Ricky’s got to let Joe win sometime.” Kat gave Amy a sidelong look. “Come on, Aim, you could find a way to convince him, couldn’t you?”
Amy raised two fingers, scissored her cigarette between them, and removed the cigarette with a flourish. “Ladies, let me assure you, I could lie down in my altogether on a bed of roses and it wouldn’t make one bit of difference. Ricky’d cut off his right arm before he’d let Joe win.”
“Well,” Kat sighed, “if Joe beats him then, it’ll be fair and square.”
“He’s got to win sometime, right? I mean, if they play enough times?”
Amy: “I just hope Joe doesn’t kill him, after that fiasco.”
Margaret: “If he’s going to kill anyone, it’ll be poor Michael. I don’t know what’s got into him. Michael’s crazy lately.”
“Don’t worry, Mum, Joe won’t kill him. Maybe just, you know, shake him around a little.”
“Well, that’s a comfort, dear.”
Outside, Michael was hopping up and down to stay warm.
“I don’t know what Michael’s got against poor Brendan, I really don’t.”
Amy: “I do.”
Kat: “Margaret, maybe you should enter a convent.”
“I’m not entering any convents.”
“Still got some wild oats to sow?”
Margaret turned to face the two younger women. “Now why should that be so funny?”
Kat made a face at Amy: eyebrows raised, impressed smile, Wow!
Amy: “Nothing’s funny. So, Mum, is Brendan…?”
Kat covered her ears. “Oh, stop! Ick.”
“Brendan is-”
“Stop, stop, stop!”
“I didn’t know you girls were so squeamish.”
Amy said, “I’m not squeamish.”
Kat watched Joe as he stood waiting for a rebound, arms up. “Amy, you want to make this interesting?”
“Sure.”
“Six points okay?”
“Sure, whatever.”
“Margaret, how about you? Michael’s feeling feisty tonight. Care to put a little cash down on the middle son?”
“You want me to bet against my own sons?”
“Only one of them.”
Margaret shook her head.
