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they were hardly even there, and I laughed some more, until my stomach tightened and the muscles in my face ached. The frantic laughter only mixed emotions can bring.
     
     
    Back at the house, I filled a plate with food and moved toward the back porch, an enclosed room off the kitchen where I could blow cigarette smoke out the window. The room wasn’t insulated, but putting up with the winter chill was preferable to hanging out in the living room, dodging Aunt Katie. Tommy saw me heading out and quickstepped behind me. “Hurry, before Amy decides there’s something I should be doing right now,” he joked. “Let’s make a break for it.”
    Tommy and I were the same age, and as kids we liked to slip away from his bullying brothers and go off on our own, coming up with gentler alternatives to the older boys’ games: bike riding instead of ball playing, gin rummy instead of “I Dare You!” Over the years, on those rare occasions when we were both at a family gathering, we usually found ourselves, without quite planning it, one on one. That day, I had a bottle of vodka and a bottle of tonic at my feet, and Tommy was soon matching me drink for drink and cigarette for cigarette. We made small talk—real estate on Long Island, where he lived, versus in San Francisco—and caught up on each other’s lives—the refrigeration business had indeed been sold, and Tommy was working for a venture capital firm in Manhattan. We even talked a little about the wake. “Don’t pay no mind to my mom,” he said, lowering his voice. “She’s just broken up about it, is all.”
    “She’s pretty hard to ignore,” I said. “If looks could kill—”
    “If it was you in that coffin, Deirdre would be lookin’ for someone to take it out on, too. You know?”
    “Yeah, I know.” It was true, my sister was loyal. Wasn’t that why she had done the hard work of caring for our difficult, declining father, and why she was so frosty with me now—because I’d stayed away? We weren’t always like this. We were allies through high school, hanging out with some of the same kids, bitching about the same teachers, helping each other with homework (she had a head for math, I was better at English). Then Mom died, and Dad sued the hospital, and Dad found me with Eric, and I went off to college, freaked out and heartbroken—and I couldn’t tell you what Deirdre was doing during any of this. In most families, a mother’s death draws the survivors closer, but when we looked at each other, we saw our wounded selves reflected back, and we kept our distance. Years later I finally told Deirdre about Eric. About me. She was more accepting than anyone in the family had been, but I was already living a separate life in New York, while she was dating Andy in New Jersey, pitching her tent in the camp I had fled. I no longer saw her as my ally but as my father’s; her proximity to him seemed a judgment against me. You and your sister push each other’s buttons, Woody would say, listening in on my end of a phone call with Dee that had gone suddenly brittle. I knew I shared the blame; I knew she wasn’t blameless. What I didn’t know was what was left between us.
    My conversation with Tommy was interrupted by Amy, poking her head through the back door to complain about his absence. “I’ll be in when I’m in,” Tommy told her.
    A few minutes later their eleven-year-old, Brian, showed up at Tommy’s elbow. “Mom wants to know if you’re still smoking.”
    Tommy looked at the cigarette in his hand. “Whaddaya gonna tell her?”
    “I don’t know.” Brian looked to me for help. I just shrugged.
    Tommy roped his arm across Brian’s shoulders. “Let me ask you something. Who took you to see the Islanders last weekend?”
    “You.”
    “Right. And who picks you up after basketball?”
    “You.”
    “And who took you and your friends to see The Matrix?”
    “Yeah, okay, Dad—you.”
    “So next time your mom tells you to go do her dirty