"She'll come," Maureen said. "She came to the trial every day. She'll come to this."
Sheila Galvin had come to the trial every day. Neal could see her still, if he let himself, which most days he did not: a small woman with a long braid going gray, in a purple cardigan that she wore every single day of the eleven days of testimony, so that by the end he had understood it must have been a cardigan that meant something, a gift from her son maybe, a thing he had touched. She had sat in the second row behind the prosecutor's table with a younger woman on one side of her, Elijah's sister, and on the other side an empty seat that nobody ever sat in, and she had never once looked at Neal or Maureen, not in the hallways, not in the elevator, not even on the day of the verdict, when the clerk read out guilty of murder in the second degree and Maureen made a sound Neal had never heard come out of a human being before or since, and Sheila Galvin had bowed her head and covered her face with both hands and stayed like that, perfectly still, while the court officers took Sean out through the side door.
It had been a party. That was the stupidest part of it, Neal had always thought, and then had come to think that there was no stupidest part, that it was all one stupidity, all the way down. A June Saturday night, a house on Ash Street on the west side where somebody's parents were in Foxwoods for the weekend. Sean was nineteen and home from his first year at Bridgewater State, where he had been doing badly in a way that nobody in the house had wanted to look at directly. He was a big, soft-spoken boy who had played offensive line at Brockton High and had a girl's laugh, high and surprised, that he was embarrassed by, and who had been, since a knee injury the spring of his senior year, taking pills. Percocet first, from the surgery. Then whatever else. Neal had found a bottle in the truck in March with somebody else's name on it and had taken it away and said, This stops now, and had believed that it would, because he had said so.
At the party there had been a lot of beer and some of the pills. There had been a girl Sean liked and a boy she liked better, and the boy was Elijah Galvin, twenty years old, a sophomore at UMass Dartmouth, home for the summer, working at the Home Depot on Westgate Drive, and by every account of every witness, including the ones who were Sean's friends, a good kid, a funny kid, a kid who was trying to calm things down. There had been words on the front lawn. There had been a shove. Somebody had laughed. Sean, who was bigger than Elijah by fifty pounds and who had never, not once in his life, needed a weapon to win anything physical, had a folding knife in his pocket that he had bought at a flea market in Raynham because he thought it looked like something, and he had taken it out.
He had said something first. Six witnesses had heard it, and they had all heard the same thing, and the prosecutor had made sure the jury heard it six times.
Do you know who my father is?
And Elijah Galvin, on the lawn, under the streetlight, with his hands up and open at the height of his shoulders, had said, according to six witnesses, I don't care who your father is, man, just go home.
And Sean had stepped forward once.
Neal had been asleep. Maureen had answered the phone. It was Hughie Coughlin, his old partner, a detective by then, who had been called out because the name had come over the radio and somebody had known it, and Hughie said, Neal, you need to come to the Good Sam, and then, Neal, you need to come now, and then, before Neal could ask, Neal, it isn't Sean who's hurt.
He thought about that night every day. He did not think about it the way people imagined, as a scene, with the lights and the sirens and Maureen's bare feet on the cold linoleum of the hospital corridor. He thought about it as a sentence. A single sentence, six words, that his son had said under a streetlight with a knife in his hand. He thought about where Sean had learned it.