"I know, Kev," Danny said. He opened his arms. "That's what I'm here to talk about. I got a lot to make up for. I'm back and I'm staying this time."

"I've heard that before," I said. "It's gonna be a long walk home."

Danny stood his ground, arms still spread. "Then let's get started. You lead." I didn't move; my brother didn't, either. He swallowed hard. "Say the word and I'm outta here. Believe me, I wouldn't blame you."

"Three years is a long goddamn time," I said.

"Would it do any good," Danny asked, "to make it longer?"

I took a deep breath. He had a point. I could keep talking, I figured, or I could do the right thing.

I walked down the stairs and into his arms. Fuck pride. And history. This was my brother back from the dead. He had always been my breaking point. Even as kids, he asked and I gave. That's just how it was. Maybe he had changed over the past three years. I hadn't.

He squeezed me hard, lifted me a few inches off the ground. "You are the fucking man. Thank you. I mean it, Kev. I'm off the shit and back for good."

I stepped back after he released me. "I can see that you're clean. As for the rest of it, let's start with that beer and go from there."

"Good enough for me," Danny said, waving his hand in the air. "I won't even ask you to drive."

Headlights popped on down the street. The car, a black late-model Charger with deeply tinted windows, stopped in front of us. It gleamed and purred, immaculate, under the streetlight.

Silently, the driver's-side window rolled down. I stepped to the car.

"You remember Al Bruno," Danny said. "From back in the day."

I did, though he'd lost quite a bit of his hair. What remained was cut short, revealing a prominent widow's peak. In the blue lights of the dashboard, in his black clothes, Al looked vaguely vampiric. He stuck out his hand across his chest, not turning to look at me.

"How you been, Kev?" he asked, nearly crushing my hand when he shook it. Al had been hitting the weights, either at the gym or at the jailhouse.

"Can't complain. I'm still teaching, over at the college."

"Noble," Al said, sliding a medallion back and forth along the gold chain around his neck.

"What're you doing these days?" I asked. Parole? Probation? Hardly anything noble, I figured.

Definitely not community service.

Al turned to look at me. "Little of this, little of that. I got a few things workin'."

Those few things working probably wore pricey watches and hung around supermarket parking lots. Danny's choice of companions wasn't doing much for my faith in him.

Danny slapped me on the back. "New, different things," he said. "Right, Al?"

"You gotta change with the times," Al said.

"Okay then, this is cool and all," Danny said, "but wouldn't it be more fun over a beer?"

"Danny," I said, "talk to me a minute." I took a few steps away from the car. Danny stayed put.

"Over here."

"I know what you're gonna say," Danny said, "and I don't blame you. But it's all good. Al and I went through rehab together. The old days are behind us, Kev."

Al said nothing, just took a toothpick from behind his ear and put it in his mouth, his same old junior gangster act.

Danny opened the back door for me. "Hop in. One beer. Let me pay you back that much."

I got in the car and Danny climbed in the passenger seat. Al rolled up his window and pulled the car into the street, spinning his tires on the pavement, kicking up a screech and a cloud of smoke as if he needed to announce his departure to the block.

Squeezing between the front seats, I asked Danny where he'd been the past three years. He held up his hand, telling me it was not the time for questions. I thought maybe he didn't want Al hearing what he told me. Maybe he couldn't hear me over Kid Rock. But he smiled as he watched the island fly by out the window and I thought maybe he was just enjoying the reunion.

He and I in a car again, heading out after dark, this time with a chance to make things right. I had to admit, I liked the feeling, too.

AL EASED THE CHARGER up to the curb outside the Red Lion, the emerald neon of the bar's Budweiser shamrock washing over the car's gleaming black hood, gutter gravel crunching under the fat tires. He kept the engine running. Danny turned in his seat.

"I mean, this was the original plan, right?"

"Works for me," I said.

We hadn't even discussed where we were going; Danny had no doubt planned the whole thing.

Danny and I climbed out, careful not to catch the door on the high curb. Al stayed in the front seat, his cell phone open in his right hand, the neon striping his lap. He was reading a text message, brows knit, bottom lip puffed out.

"Al, you coming in?" I asked, walking around the front of the car to his window.

He snapped shut the phone, thinking hard about whatever he'd read. "Nah. I got a girl I gotta go see. I'll catch up."

"Thanks for the ride," I said.

Al put the car into drive, nearly running over my feet as he pulled away. Danny stood outside the pub.

"Used to be," I said, walking over to him, "you couldn't shut that kid up."

"That girl's got him on a short leash," Danny said. "Anyway, Al never could hold more than one idea in his head at a time. A girl takes up all the room he has. How about that beer?"

He grabbed the brass door handle and pulled. Blurry conversations muddled under Shane McGowan's singing drifted past us and over the street. "I've been looking forward to this for a long time."

I threw a soft elbow into Danny's midsection as I passed him. He pretended it hurt.

Inside, the voices and the music got louder. Flushed, heavy-lidded faces rotated in our direction, their mouths still talking in the other direction. Danny pointed out a booth in a back corner, then went to the bar for drinks. I slipped through several sets of hard shoulders and dropped into the booth, sliding into the corner. Waiting for Danny, I picked at the old cigarette burns in the green plastic of the bench and watched the door, hoping our folks would walk in. It was a foolish thought, founded on nothing. I'd been here with Dad a couple times, but Danny had never been with us. Dad and I had talked about him here, though. Maybe that was it.

What was the rush? If Danny really was on the mend, we'd have our reunion eventually. If Danny had kicked junk for good, there was no longer a time bomb ticking underneath our family.

Then I thought of our mother. The bomb ticked on, just with someone else holding it now. And there was no defusing Alzheimer's; it didn't matter what wire you clipped. There was no kicking it, either.

Danny set a draft Guinness in front of me and sat on the other side of the booth. All he'd gotten for himself was a tall club soda with lime. I decided to hold back on the news about Mom, at least for the night. I didn't want Danny and me starting over with the taste of bad news in our mouths.

"Totally clean and sober?" I asked.

"I haven't done heroin in over a year," he said. "Nothing else, either, no weed, no pills, no coke, no nothing."

I turned the pint glass round and round on the table. I should've asked for a Coke. "I'm waiting for it to settle."

"Go ahead," Danny said. "No worries."

"You sure? I don't want to fuck anything up."

"Nobody can fuck me up but me," Danny said. He sucked down half his soda water. "I have a few drinks now and then, but nothing more than that." He tilted back the glass, sliding some ice into his mouth. "I'm not supposed to, technically, but considering where I've been, I figure I'm doing pretty well."

I drank my beer, licking the foam off my top lip. "Where have you been?"

"No place that matters, but lots of places, I guess," Danny said. "Nowhere I wanna go back to."

"How'd you get back here then?" I asked. "From wherever you were."

"I got a ride," Danny said.

"C'mon, Danny, not to my house, not here here. You know what I mean."

"I got a ride." He stabbed at the ice in his glass with his straw. "Ambulance."

I sat and waited, my stomach going sour, my beer getting warmer by the minute.

"I died in Manhattan," Danny said. "That was the beginning of the end, so to speak."

I leaned back against the bench. My hands fell into my lap, nearly pulling the Guinness into it with them. "You died? In Manhattan?"

This is it, I thought. This is when the worms burst out of Danny's eyes and the alarm goes off and I wake up sprawled across the mattress at home, exhausted, depressed, and defeated before the day even started.

"So you're dead," I said. "And none of this is really happening."

"What?" Danny reached for my Guinness, sniffing it, sipping it, then handing it back to me.

"You find an old stash of mine or something? No, I'm not dead."

Danny rocked his head from shoulder to shoulder, assembling the story.

"In Manhattan," Danny said. "About a year after I last saw you, I died under the East River Bridge. OD. Got brought back in the ER."

"What the fuck were you doing under the bridge?"

"Living, I think," Danny said. "I'd been there awhile; I don't know how long. A week? Maybe more." He ate more ice. "It's a big junkie hangout over there. It's where I ended up. Junkies are like carnival freaks. Or cops. Or crooks. We prefer our own kind. Anyway, one night my appetite got too big for my heart. So my heart stopped. Or maybe I got a bad shot. Either way, the result was the same."

"How'd you get outta there?"

"Some guy with a stolen cell called nine-one-one. Then he threw the cell in the river and split."

He grinned, shaking his head. "But not before they took my stash, my works, my wallet, and my shoes. That's how the EMTs found me, anyway. Stone dead and stripped clean. I suppose I coulda lost my wallet and shoes long before then."

Danny stretched his arms across the back of the bench and puffed out his chest, watching a pair of giggling, whispering girls walk by. He was breathing hard, as if telling the story took the wind out of him. In the dim light of the bar, I couldn't read his eyes.

"Bumps in the bathroom," he said. "I remember it well."

I did, too. The two of us jammed into a filthy stall in another bar. Another life.

My hands went sweaty. "Jesus fucking Christ, Danny."

"Not where I was," he said. "I didn't see Him, no host of angels, no blinding light, nothing. The EMTs brought me back but they lost me again as they loaded me off. I got brought back for good in the emergency room." He fished the lime from his glass and popped it in his mouth, chewing it without so much as a wince. "I remember noticing I was sitting in piss and pigeon shit while I stuck the needle in, then bam, these thick glasses and this big nose right in my face. I don't know who was more surprised when my eyes popped open, me or the doc. I puked all over both of us.

"That's about all I remember, his goofy fucking face. That and this weird snap in my spine, like a running dog hitting the end of his leash." He shrugged. "Then I wondered where my stash was and when I could shoot up again."

"Did you?"

"I never got the chance. I spent some time in ICU and then got moved to the detox ward. I can't remember how long I was anywhere. It beat detoxing at the folks' house, but it still wasn't no picnic. Better drugs and worse food."

"But you went back. To the heroin."

"Yeah, I went back. Not to the bridge, thank God, but to the drugs, yeah. I felt so fucking good when I got out of the hospital. What better to do than get high? So I did a few snorts with an ambulance driver three blocks from the emergency room. God bless America, huh? I didn't pick up a needle again for six months. Dying was a fresh start. I was back at the beginning and could do it right this time."

"You gotta be kidding me," I said. "You died twice in one night and all you thought was that you'd figured out heroin?"

"I came back from the dead twice, is how I looked at it. Bit of an ego trip. Look, I'm a junkie, that's how we think. I'm not sayin' it makes any sense."

He tapped his empty glass on the tabletop. He wouldn't look at me.

"I'm sorry I jumped your shit," I said. "It's just that the logic is hard to follow. In fact, the whole story is a lot to take."

"No shit," Danny said. "Listen, if I was bullshitting you, wouldn't I come up with something a little more glamorous? Sit through one NA meeting and you'll hear ten stories a lot more far-out than mine."

I thought about it. Who was I to call bullshit on Danny's story? The conversation had certainly moved beyond the realm of my expertise. And what did it matter whether or not he'd told the whole truth? That Danny lived and breathed in front of me, physically healthier than I had ever seen him, was more important than how he'd gotten there.

"Okay," I said. "So you went to rehab."

"I did."

He still wouldn't look at me; he just stared down through his empty glass, through the table, focusing on something only he could see.

"So rehab worked," I said. "Finally."

"Seems like it," Danny said. "Who knows what was different this time? I got busted copping from an undercover in Sunset Park. I gave up a guy selling guns and got rehab instead of jail."

"Good for you," I said.

"Maybe. Anyway, I never bought that Higher Power shit they put on you in those places, especially not after dying, and those meetings are one long misery trip, but I met some people I liked in there. Guys that reminded me of you. They made quitting seem worth it." He reached for my half-empty glass. "Let me get us a fresh round." Halfway to the bar, he turned around and came back. "Thanks for listening, for being here. And if anybody has a right to jump my shit, it's you."

He didn't wait for me to respond; he just headed back to the bar. It was just as well. I don't know what I would've said. I was grateful for the break in the conversation. Danny returned holding a Guinness in each hand.

"This cool with you?" he asked, sitting.