Everyone in the post office was watching. I could feel it the way you feel heat from an oven. The teenager had both earbuds out. Mack had turned around at the counter with his certified envelopes held against his chest. Dot had taken her reading glasses all the way off and was holding them by one stem.
"Eamon," I said. "Who is this?"
My brother looked at me then. Really at me. And I saw something in his face that I had seen only twice before, once on the night our mother died, at the hospice on Peach Street, when he came out of her room and told me it was over, and once much longer ago, so long ago that it is less a memory than a color, a gray-green hospital color, a seventeen-year-old boy in a Cathedral Prep sweatshirt with blood on the cuff kneeling in front of my wheelchair and telling me Daddy wasn't coming.
"You don't know," he said. It wasn't a question. It was something closer to grief. "Of course you don't. You were seven. I made sure you didn't have to know."
"Know what?"
He set his briefcase down on the wet floor. I remember that, because Eamon never sets his briefcase on the floor. He has opinions about floors. He set it down and straightened up and said, in the walking voice, the courtroom voice, every word placed down carefully like a stone in a stream:
"That's Virgil Haberle."
The name went into me like cold water.
I need to explain about that name. I had never heard anyone in my family say it out loud. Not my mother, not my brother, not my aunt Orla, not the priest at St. Peter's who came to the house every Sunday for a year. I had read it. When I was twelve I had found a folder in the bottom drawer of my mother's desk, under the tax returns, and in the folder were newspaper clippings from the Erie Times-News, and I had read them sitting on the floor of her bedroom with the door locked. DRUNK DRIVER CHARGED IN FATAL PEACH STREET CRASH. LAWRENCE PARK MAN PLEADS GUILTY IN DEATH OF LOCAL TEACHER. HABERLE SENTENCED TO 4 TO 10 YEARS. There had been a photograph in one of them, a grainy courtroom photograph of a big broad-shouldered man in an orange jumpsuit, with a heavy jaw and a full head of dark hair and a white scar splitting his left eyebrow in two.
I had put the folder back exactly as I found it. I had never told anyone I had read it. And for eighteen years the name Haberle had lived in me not as a person but as a sort of weather, a low pressure system somewhere over the horizon of my life, a word that meant nothing and explained everything: why my mother sometimes stood at the kitchen window for twenty minutes without moving; why Eamon never went away to college; why I have a white scar on my chin shaped like a fishhook and a left arm that aches before rain; why on Sundays in October, when the Steelers are on the radio in somebody else's car, I sometimes have to pull over.
I turned around and looked at the old man.