Patrick doesn’t know who he’s kidding. Public humiliation isn’t the worst thing. Going to jail is the worst thing.
His mother’s name will be dragged through the mud. He hasn’t considered this until now. Oh God. Margaret Quinn’s son: cheat, liar, crooked good-for-nothing scoundrel. Playboy models, insider trading, placing bets on a drug for sick children.
Another shot of vodka.
His phone lights up with a text message, and then immediately a second and third text message. It’s Jen, he thinks. She got to Logan but couldn’t bring herself to board the plane. They’ve been together fourteen years and have never spent a Christmas apart. If she comes back, he might survive.
But the text messages aren’t from Jen. There’s one from his father, one from his sister, and one from his brother Kevin.
Dad: Mitzi left.
Ava: At Bar with Kev. Mitzi left Daddy. We need you to come home.
Kevin: Dude, come home.
Patrick reads the three messages again, but his head is swimming with the vodka and the Vicodin. Mitzi left? For where? He gets confused, thinking of Jen at Logan, sipping a glass of good chardonnay at Legal Test Kitchen while the kids play on their iDevices at the gate. Patrick closes his eyes and pictures the Bar, where his brother Kevin works. Kevin is the happiest person in the family, and Ava, a music teacher at the elementary school, is second. They never felt any pressure to earn or achieve or propagate the Quinn family name-because they always had Patrick to do it for them. They don’t even particularly like Patrick, he doesn’t think. He’s only ninety minutes away, but they never come to Boston to visit; they think Patrick is a carbon copy of the relentless bastard their father used to be before he quit his big, important job in New York and bought the inn on Nantucket and became a nice guy. Probably, when Ava goes to the Bar to have a beer with Kevin, all they do is talk about what a tool Patrick is. They need him now because there’s a crisis-Mitzi left-and neither of them is a problem solver. Patrick is the problem solver, always.
But what they don’t know is that Patrick can’t help today.
His phone accidentally drops to the floor with a clatter, but Patrick can’t summon the energy to retrieve it. Even though he knows they don’t like him as much as they like each other or Bart, there is still something appealing to Patrick about walking into the Bar to have a beer with his siblings. But he’s in no condition, and they don’t want him anyway, not really. If Bart were on Nantucket, Patrick would go, but Bart is in Afghanistan, nobly serving their country. Bart grew up idolizing Patrick-beyond Big Papi, beyond Santa Claus, beyond God. What would Bart think of him now? He would realize that Patrick is a little man behind a big facade, like the Wizard of Oz. Patrick does another shot of vodka and takes another Vike. Oblivion-how much poison must he ingest to achieve it?
He watches the tree sparkle. Three thousand ornaments. Despite everything, he thinks, it is still so pretty.
AVA
She drinks another beer at the Bar with Kevin, who has to work until closing. He will be no help except in numbing Ava’s senses, impairing her judgment, and getting her drunk-but this has always been the case with Kevin. He calls himself the Underachieving Quinn, the slacker, the loser, the Big Zero, names Ava scoffs at, although she realizes that Kevin’s sense of worth has suffered from his life choices, many of which have been dictated by his dead-end relationship with Norah Vale, whom Ava always thinks of as Norah Vale the Cautionary Tale.
Kevin and Norah started dating in tenth grade, and they famously became engaged in eleventh grade. Kevin bought Norah a silver claddagh ring, and together, they announced they were going to get married as soon as they turned eighteen.
Kelley, Mitzi, and Margaret had all tried to talk Kevin out of it. Kevin had already been accepted to the University of Michigan; Norah wasn’t going to college. She didn’t have the grades, or the money, or the interest. None of the parents came right out and said it, but Ava now understands that they didn’t think Norah Vale was a quality choice for a life partner. Norah had five older brothers, but only the eldest of the brothers and Norah shared a father; the four boys in between had been sired by two different men. Norah’s eldest brother, Danko Vale, was a tattoo artist. He had tattooed a fearsomely realistic python around Norah’s neck and shoulders. The head of the snake had been done in trompe l’oeil style, so that it looked like the python was striking from just below Norah’s clavicle.
This tattoo had given Ava nightmares. She had never been able to hug Norah Vale, not even on her wedding day.
Norah had gone to Ann Arbor with Kevin, but she was miserable there. And so Kevin dropped out after his freshman year, much to the family’s consternation. He then enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America in Poughkeepsie. He and Norah lasted three years, although Norah spent much of the third year at home, on Nantucket, working at the Bar. And then, with only a six-month externship to complete, Kevin dropped out of the CIA. He came back to Nantucket and got a job at the Bar, which was like climbing back into his smelly, unmade childhood bed. He had no degree and nothing to show for his years since high school graduation-except his devotion to Norah Vale.
Now, Norah Vale lives in Miami, where Ava is pretty sure she works as a stripper, and Kevin is the manager of the Bar and is hoping to buy it someday from the elderly man who owns it.
Ava loves Kevin. She loves all her brothers and takes a distinct pride in being the hub of their wheel.
“Have you heard from Bart?” Ava asks Kevin.
“Have not.”
“No,” Ava says. “Me either. What do you think it’s like over there?”
“I have no idea,” Kevin says.
“Me either,” Ava says. “I don’t even know if it’s hot or cold. I was thinking desert, hot, but Afghanistan is mountainous, too, so maybe it’s cold.”
“He’s in the Marines,” Kevin says. “I’m sure he’s prepared for both extremes.”
“Do you worry about him?” Ava asks.
Kevin smiles at her. “He’ll be fine.”
He’ll be fine. Well, he has to be fine, because anything else is unthinkable.
“Have you gotten a response from Patrick?” Ava asks.
“No,” Kev says. “You?”
“Of course not,” Ava says. Her fifth ice-cold Corona with double limes sits in front of her; she should probably start thinking about getting home for dinner. However, Ava is savoring a secret triumph: Nathaniel has called twice from the road, and she let both calls go to voice mail. She is determined to be present and enjoy being at the Bar with Kevin, especially since it looks like they both might be getting a bona fide family crisis for Christmas. Mitzi has left their father, Patrick isn’t coming home, and Bart… Ava can’t even think about Bart anymore. Or rather, what she thinks is that if Bart will just text and say he’s all right, she’ll be able to handle the rest of it.
She says, “What do you think happened with Patrick? Do you think he and Jen split?”
What are the chances, she wonders, of two marriages in the same family falling apart on the same day?
“Fight, maybe,” Kevin says. “Holiday stress, or her mother is sick, or he was short a couple diamonds in the tennis bracelet. But they didn’t ‘break up.’ They’re made for each other.”
Ava agrees: Patrick and Jen are one of those couples who are oddly synced in their Type-A-ness. Jennifer is so tightly wound, it makes Ava’s head hurt just to look at her, yet Patrick worships her in all her glorious anality.