I walked over and sat on the edge of the chair, too keyed up to sink back into its cushions.
Uncle Gavin pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “I’m shite at this,” he said.
“At what?” I said.
“Raising a teenager,” he said.
“Not gonna argue.”
I thought he would get mad, but he just raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you can give me some tips,” he said.
“You mean like ‘Don’t send a teenager into a situation where he might get shot’?”
Uncle Gavin snorted. “No one’s going to shoot you.”
“No, he’ll just bash my brains in with a fucking wrench.”
“Language,” he said.
I rolled my eyes but nodded in acquiescence. “How do you know he won’t do that? Or that Mr. No-Neck at Johnny Shaw’s office won’t shoot me in the kneecap?”
“Mr. No-Neck? You mean Gus?”
“Johnny Shaw’s bodyguard is named Gus?”
“Gus Cimino. And no, he definitely won’t shoot you.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it’s true.”
I raised my voice. “How do you know?”
He fixed me with a look, the same right-in-the-eye look he’d given me in the hospital when he told me that if the police couldn’t find the people who had killed my parents, he would. And then, as if someone had pulled the chain on a lightbulb, I understood.
“Oh shit,” I said.
“Language.”
“Motherfucker,” I said.
Uncle Gavin raised a flat hand like he was taking an oath. “Hand to God, I’ll smack yer gob right off yer face.”
“They’re scared of you,” I said. “Or they know not to mess with you. Because you’re …” I ran out of words. No, that’s not it—I just didn’t want to say what came next.
Uncle Gavin dropped his hand and waited.
“You’re a criminal,” I said. “Aren’t you.”
Uncle Gavin sat back in his chair. By this point the sun was a ruddy afterthought behind the skyscrapers to the west, and the streetlight cast shadows from the oak tree in the front yard. Shadow leaves dappled Uncle Gavin’s face so that I lost his eyes in the dark.
“Do you really want to know the answer to that?” he asked.
“The wrong path,” I breathed, almost a murmur.
“What?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
Uncle Gavin made a hurry-up gesture with his hand. “Out with it,” he said.
I hesitated. “It’s … something my parents would say.” I tried to find Uncle Gavin’s face in the shadows. “About you.”
A pause; then Uncle Gavin leaned forward so the light crossed his face. He looked sallow and grizzled with his five o’clock shadow. But the light didn’t touch his eyes. “Your mother said that,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway. He sat back in his chair, back into the shadows. I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t read his expression. Was he angry? Sad? Brooding?
When he spoke, his voice was low and tired but laced with resolve, as if he was determined to say something, no matter how painful. “You know that your mother and I, our parents died when we were young. We were older than you and Susannah, but still. When we came here, to the U.S., we had a duffel bag of clothes and a couple of hundred dollars between us. I wanted to find a job straightaway. Your mother, she wanted nothing more than to go to school and then to university. But we needed money to find a place to live, to eat. So I had to work.”
“But why did you come here anyway?” I asked. “I mean, to the U.S.? I know after your parents … after they died, you all left Ireland. But why come here? Why not go somewhere else in Ireland, or England or something?”
He paused, then, his face still in shadow. “What did your mother tell you?”
I shrugged. “Not much,” I said. “She … didn’t talk about it a lot. She said you all couldn’t stay in Ireland. That’s all.”
My uncle nodded. “That’s about right,” he said.
I couldn’t help it. “But why couldn’t you stay in Ireland?”
“That’s my business,” he said, with as much finality as if he had firmly shut a door in my face. He waited a moment or two to make sure I understood, then continued. “We moved to Atlanta, your mother and I, and I found work wherever I could get it. I saw straight off it would take years to get a green card. And it would take money to send Alanna to school.” He gestured at the street, at the city towers rising beyond the trees, bright against the night sky. “There’s money in a city. Opportunity. So I found it.”
I asked the question that had been lurking in a dark crevice of my brain for a few minutes now. “So, you … what? Sold drugs?”
“Jesus, no.” Uncle Gavin was shaking his head. “Never. Drugs are like a cancer; they rot everything.” He leaned forward, his eyes on me. “In a city, everyone needs something. You need a certain kind of lawyer because your kid got busted with a dime bag and you don’t want his future ruined. Or you can’t get the city to come out and fix a busted sewer pipe. That’s what I do, Ethan. I know things, know people. I help them get what they need.”
“For money,” I said.
He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “For money. Usually. Sometimes I give favors. But yes, I get paid.”
I let out a breath. “What about Johnny Shaw?”
Uncle Gavin grinned. “He’s been my lawyer for years.”
“And Brandon Cargill?”
The grin on my uncle’s face shrank, became something harder. “He’s the kind of person you have to work with. There are Brandon Cargills everywhere. Easiest way to deal with them is quickly.” The grin was gone by then, his face now back to its usual inscrutable look.
A thousand questions filled my head, but they spun by so fast I had a hard time catching one to put it into words. “My
