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requests to see me. Nothing to lose, I thought.
    I arranged to meet him in a quiet corner of the woodwork shop where we wouldn’t draw too much attention.
    “I don’t remember you from home,” he said. “I only heard of you from my ma. She told me that you came to the house a couple of times, looking for me. The teachers mentioned you, what you did for a living. So I guess I ducked you.” He was smiling.
    “So why did you stop ducking?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “A couple of years ago I had a letter from the priest, Father MacIsaac. Said maybe I should contact you if I ever needed anything. Somebody to talk to. He said you went by ‘Breau.’ ”
    “Growing up I used my adopted name,” I said. “MacMillan. I guess there was confusion when I changed it back.”
    “Ah,” he said. “I remember hearing that. We probably know a lot of the same people.”
    “I’m sure we do.” Of course I’d always been aware of him, even before the crime wave. Someone else adopted in the place.Someone’s sister’s cousin’s bastard being brought up somewhere decent. “How do you like the wood shop?”
    “A Unit is too fuckin close. Every minute of every day is a problem. Going to work, going to eat, going back to my house for counts.” He was talking about a reception range, basically a holding facility where inmates were assessed for the most appropriate incarceration.
    I shrugged. “They’re just here for processing, just passing through. What’s your problem?”
    “They try to talk to you, man, but you don’t know who they are. Seen talking to the wrong guy here and you’re dead meat.” There was a loud clang and he cringed.
    I liked the woodworking shop, the way the fragrances of sawdust and glue and machine oil overwhelmed the disinfectant and the staleness of old cigarettes and bodies. But always loud sounds clanging off the tile and steel and concrete surfaces, inescapable. Loud ego voices, reminding us of where we were.
    “So what year did you leave?” he asked.
    “In ’65,” I said. “Went to university.”
    “Wise choice.”
    He looked away, couldn’t hold eye contact for more than a few seconds. He had stood out in the village in a way I never did. I just folded in, Tony MacMillan from up the mountain road, almost like I belonged. He was different. After the store incident, there was a car accident, a sixteen-year-old Strickland driving crazy, two young people dead. People saying: after all the old MacInnises did for him, he never even took their name. What the hell kind of a name is Strickland anyway? Adoption, always a crapshoot, never knowing what you’re getting.
    Sophie the psychologist had warned me. Issues about rejection, alienation, also guilt that had morphed into deep-rooted, textbook anger. Aren’t they all textbook angry, I had said.
    To Dwayne I pretended ignorance. “I don’t remember any Stricklands around home.”
    “There aren’t any. I was raised by the MacInnises. Shore Road. But I guess you’d know that.” He coughed, fished for a cigarette.
    “You can’t smoke here,” I said.
    “Right,” he said, staring at the floor, palming the cigarette.
    Something else remembered: He cleaned up his act after the horrific accident, took a trade at the community college in town, small engines someone at the store had said; the store, the clearing house for news, better than the radio. Plans to open up his own shop on the old place. Growing dope on the old place more like it, someone else had opined.
    Then he went away.
    “Pretty common name, MacInnis,” I said.
    “Our MacInnises were called Big Rory’s,” he said, and I laughed.
    “Big Rory’s—long time since I heard that.”
    “After some old-timer called Big Rory, I guess. You know them?”
    “I went to school with the older ones, Margaret and Jimmy. But I haven’t seen them for years.”
    “Maggie’s married in Boston. Uncle Jimmy lives in Sudbury, shaft contractor there, did very well in the boom times. Drives