Edging back to the bed with the bottle in his hand, he kept his face averted from 
that framed rectangle of night.
    He wondered if he was just unusually drunk or if he might be losing his mind.
    To his surprise, he screwed the cap back on the bottle without taking a drink.
    
    
    3
    
    IN THE MORNING, THE RAIN STOPPED FALLING, BUT THE SKY REMAINED low and threatening.
    Joey didn't have a hangover. He knew how to pace his drinking to minimize the painful 
results. And every day he took a megadose of vitamin-B complex to replace what had been 
destroyed by alcohol; extreme vitamin-B deficiency was the primary cause of hangovers. He 
knew all the tricks. His drinking was methodical and well organized; he approached it as 
though it were his profession.
    He found the makings of breakfast in the kitchen: a piece of stale coffee cake, half 
a glass of orange juice.
    After showering, he put on his only suit, a white shirt, and a dark red tie. He 
hadn't worn the suit in five years, and it hung loosely on him. The collar of the shirt 
was a size too large. He looked like a fifteen-year-old boy dressed in his father's 
clothes.
    Perhaps because the endless intake of booze accelerated his metabolism, Joey burned 
off all that he ate and drank, and invariably he closed each December a pound lighter 
than he'd begun the previous January. In another hundred and sixty years, he would 
finally waste away into thin air.
    At ten o'clock he went to the Devokowski Funeral Home on Main Street. It was closed, 
but he was admitted by Mr. Devokowski because he was expected.
    Louis Devokowski had been Asherville's mortician for thirty-five years. He was not 
sallow and thin and stoop shouldered, as comic books and movies portrayed men of his 
trade, but stocky and ruddy faced, with dark hair untouched by gray-as though working 
with the dead was a prescription for long life and vitality.
    "Joey."
    "Mr. Devokowski."
    "I'm so sorry."
    "Me too."
    "Half the town came to the viewing last night."
    Joey said nothing.
    "Everyone loved your father."
    Joey didn't trust himself to speak.
    Devokowski said, "I'll take you to him."
    The front viewing room was a hushed space with burgundy carpet, burgundy drapes, 
beige walls, and subdued lighting. Arrangements of roses loomed in the shadows, and the 
air was sweet with their scent.
    The casket was a handsome bronze model with polished-copper trim and handles. By 
phone, Joey had instructed Mr. Devokowski to provide the best. That was how P.J. would 
want it-and it would be his money paying for it.
    Joey approached the bier with the hesitancy of a man in a dream who expects to peer 
into the coffin and see himself.
    But it was Dan Shannon who rested in peace, in a dark-blue suit on a bed of 
cream-colored satin. The past twenty years had not been kind to him. He looked beaten by 
time, shrunken by care, and glad to be gone.
    Mr. Devokowski had retreated from the room, leaving Joey alone with his dad.
    "I'm sorry," he whispered to his father. "Sorry I never came back, never saw you or 
Mom again."
    Hesitantly, he touched the old man's pale cheek. It was cold and dry.
    He withdrew his hand, and now his whisper was shaky. "I just took the wrong road. A 
strange highway ... and somehow ... there was never any coming back. I can't say why, 
Dad. I don't understand it myself."
    For a while he couldn't speak.
    The scent of roses seemed to grow heavier.
    Dan Shannon could have passed for a miner, though he had never worked the coal fields 
even as a boy. Broad, heavy features. Big shoulders. Strong, blunt-fingered hands 
cross-hatched with scars. He had been a car mechanic, a good one-although in a time and 
place that had never offered quite enough work.
    "You deserved a loving son," Joey said at last. "Good thing you had two, huh?" He 
closed his eyes. "I'm sorry. Jesus, I'm so sorry."
    His heart ached with remorse, as heavy as an iron anvil in his chest, but 
conversations with the dead couldn't provide absolution. Not even God could give him that 
now.
    When Joey left the viewing room, Mr. Devokowski met him in the front hall of the 
mortuary. "Does P.J. know yet?"
    Joey shook his head. "I haven't been able to track him down."
    "How can you not be able to track him down? He's your brother," Devokowski said. For 
an instant before he regained the compassionate expression of a funeral director, his 
contempt was naked.
    "He travels all over, Mr. Devokowski. You know about that. He's always traveling, on 
the move, researching. It's not my fault ... being out of touch with him."
    Reluctantly, Devokowski nodded. "I saw the piece about him in People a few months 
ago."
    P.J. Shannon was the quintessential writer of life on the road, the most famous 
literary Gypsy since Jack Kerouac.
    "He should come home for a while," Devokowski said, "maybe write another book about 
Asherville. I still think that was his best. When he hears about your dad, poor P.J., 
he's going to be broken up real bad. P.J. really loved your dad."
    So did I, Joey thought, but he didn't say it. Given his actions over the past twenty 
years, he wouldn't be believed. But he had loved Dan Shannon. God, yes. And he'd loved 
his mother, Kathleen-whose funeral he had avoided and to whose deathbed he had never gone.
    "P.J. visited just in August. Stayed about a week. Your dad took him all over, 
showing him off. He was so proud, your dad."
    Devokowski's assistant, an intense young man in a dark suit, entered the far end of 
the hallway. He spoke in a practiced hush: "Sir, it's time to transport the deceased to 
Our Lady."
    Devokowski checked his watch. To Joey, he said, "You're going to the Mass?"
    "Yes, of course."
    The funeral director nodded and turned away, conveying by body language that this 
particular son of Dan Shannon had not earned the right to add "of course" to his answer.
    Outside, the sky looked burnt out, all black char and thick gray ashes, but it was 
heavy with rain.
    Joey hoped that the lull in the storm would last through the Mass and the graveside 
service.
    On the street, as he was approaching his parked car from behind, heading for the