“Must’ve been a pretty good one,” Russell said. “Like to see the other guy.”

“He fell down,” Frankie said. “My father used to come home like that. He was a strange bastard. Payday was no trouble at all. He’d get his check and work all day and come home and give the dough to my mother and they’d go out that night, go shopping. And they’d come home and watch TV and he’d maybe have two beers. At the most, two beers. Lots of times you’d come down in the morning and there’d be the glass on the table next to his chair, full of flat old beer. I remember, I tasted it, the first time I tasted it, I thought: how the hell can anybody drink anything that tastes like this. And he’d go to work. But then some times, nothing on the shape-up. Lots of times. And most of them times, he’d come home and read or something. Never talked much. But some times, there wasn’t anything, see, you wouldn’t know that, he didn’t come home, not all the times but some times. And he always, he knew, he knew when he was gonna do it. Because when he didn’t come home, when he was late, my mother’d start to get worried and walk around a lot, and when he wasn’t there, she’s saying Hail Marys and everything, when he wasn’t there by seven-thirty she’d go to the cupboard. That’s where they kept the money they didn’t use onna shopping. In a peanut-butter jar. And if he wasn’t there, the jar was always empty. Always. And he’d be gone for at least three days, and when he came home, that’s always the way he looked. He always fell down.

“I remember,” Frankie said, “the last time he’s up at the farm. I had to take him up there, and he was, well, it was mostly my mother. She told me: ‘You’re twenty now. You take care of him. I’d do it but I’ve had enough.