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that show, I had produced a handful of reports for National Public Radio. Tommy had heard one of my segments on All Things Considered and called to congratulate me, and since then I’d been the “NPR guy” to him and all the Ficchinos. I didn’t bother to correct this; the lack of a permanent professional affiliation always took too much effort to explain to people not in my field. There were plenty of things I couldn’t remember about Tommy’s life, too, like were he and his brothers still running the refrigeration and air-conditioning business their father had passed on to them? Judging from Tommy’s expensive-looking suit and the fat Rolex on his wrist, he had moved on to something more lucrative.
    Tommy went chasing after one of his daughters, who was making a break for the front door, and I slipped back into the main room. I leaned against a wall and watched my sister in action. Deirdre carried herself with great presence, like an event planner , one of those take-charge corporate types who stands in the middle of the action, wearing a matching skirt and suit jacket (this one was black, with padded shoulders), and with precise orders keeps everyone else moving. She and Andy were both performing just fine as far as I could tell, juggling guests, accepting mass cards from well-wishers, keeping AJ out of trouble. Up at the coffin, Aunt Katie was on her knees, dabbing her eyes. On either side, in sharp black suits, knelt one of her dark-haired sons—Tommy’s older brothers, Mike and Billy—looking like Secret Service agents assigned to protect her. All around me swirled this big family, everyone performing his or her role just so, a portrait glowing with tradition: functional, ritualized, structured to endure the dark storm of death. I saw myself as they must surely see me, standing apart from the crowd with my alien facial hair and my thrift-store suit, displaying no obvious emotions, and I wondered what I was doing here, why I’d set myself up for this kind of scrutiny. Most of the trouble that comes along is trouble we cause ourselves. My father again, his voice ringing out from the past: a lecture delivered one night after I’d been picked up by the cops in the passenger seat of a parked car. At the wheel was a tipsy Eric Sanchez, whom I was trying to persuade to hand over the keys. You could have walked away, Dad had said, and he’d been right. But for all my ambivalence about my family, I had never been one to walk away from a friend.
    And then, unbidden, another memory: a fishing trip we made with some of his co-workers and their sons, a cluster of men and boys on the shore of a lake in upstate New York. My father stood behind me, his arms encircling me and his hands covering mine, guiding me through the proper way to cast. My discomfort at this physical closeness melted as he helped me reel in my first catch. I couldn’t have been more than twelve, but I caught three fish that day, more than anyone else. They were small, none bigger than his outstretched hand, but that didn’t stop us from hauling them home and insisting my mother fry them for dinner. And where the memory ends is here: me recounting for her the story of each catch while he looked on, soaking up my little triumphs, taking none of the credit. The weightlessness that came from having made him proud, and the knowledge, confusing even in the moment, that the key had been to put myself in his hands, to not resist.
    A rumble was building up in my stomach; I suddenly was sure I would vomit. But when I locked myself in the bathroom, what erupted from my mouth was laughter—loud, giddy, cathartic howls of laughter that I couldn’t contain and couldn’t stop. I slid down to the tiled floor, and I flushed the toilet again and again, imagining Deirdre scowling on the other side of the door. I thought of Aunt Katie’s ostentatious fur, of Tommy’s Whaddaya gonna do, of those three puny fish twenty years ago, shrinking in the frying pan until