Sublime

belligerent,

My mother returned to County Clare afterward, as if America were just a dream she’d fallen into as a girl, who had awoken years later as an old woman in an empty house. She lived now in the stone cottage where she’d been born, writing me occasional letters of matters so foreign that they seemed written by, or to, a stranger: stories of stillborn sh

Sometimes, on the computer, I would hit refresh, refresh, refresh, hoping. In October, I received an e-mail that read, “Hi Josh. I’m OK. Don’t worry. Do your homework. Love, Dad.” I printed it up and hung it on my door with a piece of Scotch tape.

This is how I found the courage not to pick up the same old pieces.

Adam waits, month by month, for the choked black walnut to die and take his baby brother with it, smothered in his own clown-covered coverlet. But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

His relationship with his father had been like the unfurling of some flower of beautiful potential, which, when wholly opened, turned out to be blighted inside. Until he had been seven he had loved the tall, big-bellied man uncritically and strongly in spite of the spankings, the black-and-blues, the occasional black eye.