Just enough to loosen his tongue and let the ideas he usually kept behind his teeth come wandering out.

After dinner he took a heavy tumbler of his good Irish whiskey into the living room and started holding forth about his own father, and legacy, and what a man leaves behind.

I was at the kitchen sink with my back to the room, scrubbing roasting pans, the water hot enough to sting my knuckles, and I could hear every word.

My mother had gone up to bed. Victoria was curled in the velvet armchair with her phone facedown on the armrest and a matching glass of whiskey going warm in her hand, listening.

I remember the shape of that evening with a clarity that still unsettles me — the smell of the whiskey and the cold roast fat in the pans, the low gold light of the one lamp my father liked, the particular quiet of a house two weeks into mourning.

I remember thinking that my father was performing, the way he performed at funerals and holidays, playing the patriarch handing wisdom down to his daughters.