City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)(12)

“Ned can bring me.”

“I’ll drive you,” Danny repeats.

Marty’s in his midsixties but he acts more like he’s in his eighties. What the cigs and booze and bitterness will do to you, Danny figures.

To Marty, anyway.

Danny remembers him lashing out, screaming, You’re just like your mother! You got that bitch’s blood! In that quiet clarity before passing out, Marty muttered, I didn’t even know I had you. I went to Vegas, had a fling with a broad I met at a bar—a year later she shows up with a kid. You. Tells me, “Here, here’s your son. I’m not cut out to be a mother.” Only truth ever came out of her lying mouth.

Truth also that Marty loved her. Kept her picture under his bed. Danny found it there one time, looking for Playboy magazines—tall, statuesque showgirl with red hair, green eyes, long legs, big tits. It was only later, during one of Marty’s drunken diatribes—this time show-and-tell—Danny realized it was his mother.

It was hard to believe, though, that his old man had ever nailed a woman like that. You looked at Marty Ryan, you didn’t see a ladies’ man. Old Pasco set Danny straight on that score, though. They were out digging clams and Pasco said, “Your father, back in his day, was one good-looking kid. Marty came to the party, hide your women.”

Danny knows his father still has the picture.





Five


When they get to Pasco’s, there’s already a houseful.

People everywhere, the women moving around the kitchen like a well-practiced drill team, Mary Ferri presiding over the whole thing. Danny gets Marty into a chair and then goes back and finds Terri helping out in the kitchen.

“Where’d you go this afternoon anyway?” she asks. “I woke up, you weren’t there.”

“Business.”

Terri says, “Over beers?”

“A couple pitchers is all.”

She looks at her brother. “How much did Liam have?”

“He’s okay.”

“He looks a little too okay,” Terri says. “Keep an eye on him, all right?”

Danny says he will, but he resents it a little. Everyone always has to keep an eye on Liam. Pat’s been doing it his whole life. Even on the ice it was well known that if you took a run at Liam, Pat was going to drop the gloves.

This goes all the way back even before Liam was born, Danny figures. One drunken night Pat told him the story of how Catherine’s pregnancy with Liam was supposed to be difficult, maybe even life-threatening for her, and John, devout Catholic that he is, wanted her to abort the baby. But Catherine wouldn’t do it and the baby, Liam, was born a couple of months premature, less than three pounds, wasn’t expected to live and was declared dead twice.

So pampering Liam, looking out for Liam, bailing Liam out from the consequences of whatever shitty thing he did is a Murphy family habit.

Danny looks over where Liam is charming Mary Ferri, and sees that he has that flush high on his cheeks, and that amused-at-everything, too-cool-for-school smile on his face.

“Jimmy and Angie here?” Danny asks.

“Outside,” Terri answers.

“You want a drink?”

“I’d take a beer.”

Danny goes to a big steel bucket on the floor, full of ice, and pulls out two cold beers. Then he sees Cassandra. Tall, wavy red hair, those startling dark brown eyes. She smiles at Danny and he feels awkward, the two beers in his hand.

“Hi, Danny.”

“Cassie, hi,” Danny says. “I didn’t know you were home from . . .”

“Treatment?” she says. “You can say it, Danny.”

It was like her, what, second or even third time in rehab or the psych ward? Cassie is the unlikely black sheep of the Murphy family, and John barely bothers to hide his shame of her. She was the angel once, daddy’s little girl—Terri once admitted to Danny that she was jealous of her big sister—a fine singer of the old folk music, a dancer who won awards at céilís, but then she started drinking, and then it was grass, and then it was all kinds of dope. She was on the street for a while after the Murphys went the “tough love” route and kicked her out of the house, and then Danny heard she’d agreed to go back to this place in Connecticut.

Danbury, someplace like that.

She looks good now, though.

Clear eyes, her skin glowing.

“One of those beers for me, Danny?” she asks.

“Jesus, Cassie, don’t even joke.”

He and Cassie were always close—maybe it was because each of them was something of an outsider in their family and so they were natural allies.

“No, I can joke,” she says, “I just can’t drink.”

“Probably a good idea, huh?”

“At least that’s what they say at the meetings,” Cassie says.

“Yeah, you go to the meetings?”

“Ninety in ninety.”

Anyone who lives in an Irish neighborhood knows what that means—ninety AA meetings in ninety days.

“Good for you, Cassie,” Danny says.

“Yeah, good for me,” she says. She always liked Danny. There was something soft in him, something hurt. Small wonder, him being Marty’s kid. “You’d better get back to Terri before her beer gets warm.”