“My husband . . .”
Then she breaks down.
Danny holds her.
The wake is a horror show.
The casket is closed, because even Marley couldn’t Humpty-Dumpty the body back into a presentable condition.
Danny’s secretly glad, he didn’t want to sit there on and off for days looking at a waxed, made-up face that was supposed to be his best friend. The freaking casket is depressing enough, with the string of rosary beads laid on top of the polished oak.
Depressing, too, the steady stream of visitors who dutifully trickle in, spend a few quiet moments by the coffin, then flow to the seated family to say how sorry they are for their loss. Then they go to the back row of folding chairs to sit for what they consider to be a decent amount of time before they can escape.
Danny wishes he could, too.
Second day into the thing, he’s coming back from the bathroom when he bumps into Liam in the hallway. Can smell the booze on his breath when Liam says, “I know what you’re thinking.”
“Yeah? What am I thinking?”
“You’re thinking it should have been me,” Liam says, like he’s throwing down a glove.
Danny’s in no mood for his bullshit. “It should have been.”
“Well, we agree on something,” Liam says, then shoulders his way past.
At the end of the hall, Jimmy has seen the exchange. “We should have done him when we had the chance.”
“I wish the hell I had,” Danny says.
He goes back into the room to sit down next to Terri.
“What did Liam say to you?” she asks.
“It’s not important.”
“What?”
“That he wished it had been him instead of Pat,” Danny says.
“Don’t we all.”
Time doesn’t pass slowly for Danny; it doesn’t pass at all.
He’s awash in memories.
Pat and him eating sugar sandwiches, Pat and him and Jimmy looking at Superman comics, Batman comics, building model cars. One time they were playing in a construction site and they found a rock they thought had gold in it and they thought they were going to be rich and talked for hours about the stuff they were going to buy—cars, new houses for their parents, a private jet—until they had to admit they knew it wasn’t really gold, but they felt sad anyway, and slunk home brokenhearted. Or when an aunt gave Pat a butterfly net and kit for his birthday and they went hunting butterflies and Pat caught a monarch in the net but then didn’t have the heart to kill it, or, a little older, sneaking upstairs to Jimmy’s father’s room, finding Playboys under the bed. Pat behind an old screen door in the upstairs closet pretending he was a priest, hearing their confessions, making sure they made everything up or it would be sacrilege. First confession, first communion, confirmation, Pat taking it all so serious, talked about maybe becoming a priest until he started dating Sheila in high school and then that was that, Danny asked him what happened to the seminary and Pat just said, “Tits.” Pat and Sheila and Jimmy and Angie and him and Terri going out together, out to Rocky Point, down to the shore, over to Newport, one time they went to jai alai and Angie won three hundred dollars and they tried to get her to blow it all at the Black Pearl but she wouldn’t and put it all in the bank or the time they was playing street hockey on a hot July night on a basketball court and this guy had a stick so curved he couldn’t shoot anywhere but up and he took a shot and hit Liam smack in the mouth and Pat dropped his gloves and beat everybody up and they all fought until the cops came and threw them out and then they went and got someone to buy them beer and they sat outside sipping beer and put ice on their bruised hands and laughed and talked about the fight but Pat he was still pissed about the guy’s curved stick until Danny said he heard Peter Moretti had a curved stick too and Pat finally laughed or that time him and Jimmy and Pat got so drunk in high school and squeezed into a phone booth to make prank calls but then got stuck and couldn’t get the door open so they called Sheila to come get them and they were laughing so hard when she came and shook her head and said she should just leave them there it’s what they deserved but she opened the door and they spilled out like tin cans and lay there in the parking lot still laughing and laughing or the first time Pat took Sheila parking down at the beach and the idiot got his car stuck in the sand and had to call Danny and Jimmy to come help push it out before Sheila’s dad found out, Danny remembers these things and tries not to remember Pat’s flayed body in the dirt.