Charlie McGrath's hands seemed to be made for tools. Despite the fact that he'd quit his job at the town dump to work in his son's bakery more than a year ago, his hands were still callused. Sean wondered idly if he'd been born that way. George had growled at the older man when he'd arrived, but Kevin gave her the Chtch! sound, and the dog slunk back to the shade of the red maple to maintain her surveillance of the situation.

"See, ya got all this crap in the carburetor here," Mr. McGrath told Kevin when the dismembered mower lay in pieces by the shed.

Kevin blinked and nodded. Living with women, Sean suspected he wasn't used to hearing adults use coarse language as easily as if they were ordering lunch.

"Goddamned thing's full of gunk." Mr. McGrath shook his head and eyed Sean.

"Don't look at me, I just got here." Sean laughed.

Mr. McGrath chuckled. "Yeah, well, wherever you're off to next, make sure you get home to maintain your gear occasionally, would ya?"

Sean made a mental note to try to convince Aunt Vivvy to go back to her lawn service.

He and Kevin watched Mr. McGrath clean the crap out of the goddamned carburetor and reassemble the machine. The older man had a gravelly voice and a range of expletives that belied his tenderness. Sean remembered how kind Mr. McGrath had been to him as his father made less and less of an effort to get home. "Door's always open," he would growl at Sean, "even for a young scalawag like you."

In fact, Mr. McGrath often reminded him of his father. They were both blue-collar guys, stocky, and Irish, though the difference in their heights had to be close to a foot. Mr. McGrath didn't speak with a brogue, but he had a strong Boston accent, the brogue's descendant. Both men valued their toughness. It wouldn't do to be caught getting sentimental. And yet Sean knew them both to shed a private tear over the troubles of others.

Martin Doran had lost the privacy of his tears, though. Gritting his teeth in a vain effort to control himself, he would weep in church after his wife died, head bowed, shoulders shaking. Sean remembered how embarrassed he'd felt.

"Well, don't just stand there," Mr. McGrath told Kevin. "Hand me that wrench." Kevin jumped up to retrieve the tool resting in the grass where the older man had tossed it. "There's a good boy." He grabbed the wrench with one hand and tousled Kevin's hair with the other. Kevin appeared slightly confused by these contradictory gestures, but it didn't keep him from hovering over Mr. McGrath's battle-scarred hands as they performed mechanical CPR on the mower.

"And what are you doing with yourself when you're not lollygagging around, letting others do your work for you?" Mr. McGrath demanded of Kevin.

"Uh . . ." Kevin squinted uncertainly at Sean for a moment. "Well, I'm going to Boy Scout camp in a week."

"Boy Scout camp!" Mr. McGrath exclaimed, and it was hard to know if it was with disgust or approval until he went on to say, "I was a Boy Scout!"

"You were? Are you an Eagle?"

"Nah, I only made it to Star, and then I started gettin' interested in girls." He landed a beefy hand on Kevin's shoulder. "Take my advice, don't let some goddamned silly thing get in your path. I'm seventy-four years old, and to this day I regret not making Eagle."

After Mr. McGrath left, Kevin was to mow the lawn. But he went into the shed first and came out wearing a set of old headphones, big clonking things the size of cinnamon buns, with the curling cord dangling down his back.

"Where'd you get those?" asked Sean.

"My dad."

It still startled Sean sometimes to hear Kevin refer to Hugh this way. The happy-go-lucky rascal Sean had known, and the man who had brought Kevin into the world and cared for him, were almost two different people in his mind.

Kevin must have noticed Sean's discomposure. "They're not supposed to be for mowing," he said quickly. "They went to a tape player he had. And when everything got too"-Kevin grimaced and wiggled his hands around-"he'd put them on me and play this really quiet music."

"Oh." Sean nodded, as if the headphones had been the question all along. "Where's the tape player?"

"It broke and Auntie Vivvy threw it away. She said I wore it out. But I grabbed the headphones before she went to the dump-they still keep the sound out even if they're not attached to anything." He reached down and pulled the cord on the mower and the engine let out its introductory roar before settling into an aggravated growl. Kevin flinched at the noise. Then he let go of the brake and started across the lawn.

A wave of sadness washed over Sean as he watched the boy, who was not much bigger than the mower he was attempting to control. It surprised him, the intensity of the sorrow seeming to far outweigh the visual. He generally only felt like this when he lost a patient he'd grown particularly fond of.

Viv's getting that lawn service if I have to pay for it myself, he thought, and went into the house to confront her.

She was in the den, papers scattered across the burled maple desk like the detritus of a parade. She looked up when Sean came in, her eyes ablaze with fury. "I can't do it," she said tightly. "I can't remember what I've done, what's been paid . . . any of it."

His anger toward her, the image of the broken tape recorder and the boy with the beastlike mower, receded from the foreground of his mind. "Any of it?"

She remained silent, which was as good as shouting the answer.

"I'll go through it with you," he offered. "Some of it might look familiar if we go slowly."

Her arm came out and with a sudden jerk she swatted the bills away from her, several of them cascading to the floor. He'd never seen her do anything so childish.

Loss of impulse control, he thought. Sudden outbursts. Instinctively he put a hand on her shoulder, as he'd done so many times with melting-down patients. It said, You are not alone and You are not allowed to go ballistic in one efficient gesture.

He half expected her to shrug away his touch with a sharp, imperious comment. That was the Vivian Preston he knew. Instead she put her hands to her face and wept. The only thing that had ever worried Sean more was seeing his father do the same thing.

Holy shit, he thought. We are screwed.

CHAPTER 22.

He brought her into the kitchen, leaving the papers littered across the den, and made her a cup of tea. He thought about putting a splash of whiskey in it to calm her, but he knew she would taste it and get even angrier. Sean was hard-pressed to know how to manage her-she'd never been one to tolerate managing. But then she'd never needed it before.

Her hand trembled slightly as she brought the teacup toward her mouth. "Stop examining me," she murmured, and took a sip.

He turned his gaze down to his own mug. "I really wish you'd see a doctor."

"If wishes were horses, beggars would ride."

He let out a laugh despite himself. She had a comeback for everything, and yet she couldn't do her damned bills. "Okay, I'm going to make suggestions and you're going to shoot them down, but I can't not make them."

"Ever the responsible medical professional."

He let out an exasperated sigh. "Have you always been this difficult?"

It was obviously a rhetorical question, but it stopped her for a moment, and she seemed to consider it. Finally she said, "No, I don't believe so. I don't like this . . . confusion. Some people seem to live their whole lives in a state of befuddlement. But it makes me irritable." She glanced at him briefly. "More so than usual."

Of course it did, especially since she'd had so little to hang on to in life other than her intelligence and grit. Sean dug a little deeper for patience. "It could be caused by an imbalance of some kind, in which case it's reversible."

"That's what Simon hoped."

"Dr. Krantz? Did he run any blood work?"

"He did. He died two weeks later. Lovely man."

"Did he find anything?"

"Not a thing. It's likely Alzheimer's or some similarly ruinous cousin thereof. Certainly not Huntington's. There's no known case of onset at my age. But whatever it is, there's no cure."

"Auntie, there are new drugs now that can slow the process."

"Sometimes they can, sometimes they can't."

"For the love of God, won't you at least try?"

She put her teacup down and steadied her gaze at him for the first time that afternoon. There was a gentleness to it that bordered on sympathetic. Sean had no idea of what to expect.

"Did you have a plan?" she asked simply. "If the symptoms came?"

"A plan . . . you mean . . ." he stammered.

"Suicide. Were you planning to kill yourself? Or does your faith preclude that option?"

Catholic doctrine was pretty clear. Suicides are said to share no reunion with their loved ones in the afterlife, no communion with Jesus or the saints. They drift alone for eternity. But Sean could never buy the idea that a loving God would actually cut loose the most desperate of his children. He suddenly felt so weary. "Tierra del Fuego," he said. "I was going to do it there."

"Ah," she nodded approvingly. "Parts unknown. Very fitting."

"You?" he asked.

"When I was at risk for Huntington's, I always thought I would have a nibble at some garden chemicals under the red maple."

"Also fitting."

"Yes, but then all of you children came here to live, and I couldn't very well let you find me foaming at the mouth in the backyard. I never did devise a satisfactory alternative. But as the years passed, it became less and less likely I'd need one."

Until now. Neither of them said it, but Sean knew she was thinking it, too. They sat quietly as the drone of the lawn mower rounded to the front of the house. It seemed terribly unfair-how much was one family supposed to handle? And yet he'd seen families decimated by disease and violence, mothers watching their children die from something as preventable as dysentery, children orphaned with no relatives left to care for them. He reminded himself that at least his family had a roof over their heads and food to eat, warm beds and clean water.

And one hell of a godawful gene pool . . .

Aunt Vivvy did something completely unexpected then. She reached out and covered Sean's hand with her own, the grip of her gnarled fingers surprisingly strong. And he felt sure he knew the reason she was taking his hand for the first time in their entire history together.

"Please don't ask me to kill you," he said.

She sighed. "You're certain?"

"Yeah, I'd really rather not."

"You may change your mind when things get worse."

"I know. Still."

"Let's consider it an open invitation, then. You'll do as you see fit, with my blessing."

Her blessing. Another first. Had she ever given such glowing approval of any of his past efforts? Apparently in her book, of all his good deeds, murder would be the high point.

She released his hand to bring the teacup to her lips again, but the feel of her tight grasp lingered. Would he change his mind eventually, when she became so lost, so hard to handle, that her death would seem like a gift to them both? He'd seen dementia before, but not very often. In the places he'd stayed, most people didn't get the chance to outlive the functionality of their brains. How bad would it get? And how could he possibly find someone willing to care for an increasingly demented old lady and her slightly odd, orphaned great nephew?

"Sean," she said, interrupting his ruminations. "Is it possible that your father was in the yard today fixing the lawn mower?"

"No, Auntie," he said, startled that her delusion so closely shadowed his thoughts earlier in the day. "It was Mr. McGrath, Cormac's father."

"Brigid McGrath's husband?"

"Yeah, from the Garden Club."

"Hmm," she said. "I might have sworn it was Martin."

Sean waited for Deirdre to get home. He desperately hoped that they could come up with some sort of plan. More than anything he just needed to talk to someone.

When she didn't show up after her shift at the diner, he called her cell phone. She was in her car, headed to Worcester. He could hear the rumble of rush hour traffic on the Mass Pike.

"I'm going straight to practice," she said, sounding slightly annoyed at his intrusion. "What's the issue?"

"Jesus, pretty much freaking everything, Dee."

"Okay, well, I've got a show going up in two short weeks, and it's a part I got ten days ago, Sean, so I can't really deal with pretty much freaking everything at the moment. In fact, I can't deal with anything other than this performance, aka the basis for my entire future."

"So I'm just supposed to handle all this shit myself."

"Welcome to my world," she said. She honked her horn and muttered, "Asshole!" before hanging up. Sean assumed she was referring to another driver, but he wondered if she'd meant for him to have a small share in the epithet, too.

CHAPTER 23.

"Hey, any chance you feel like grabbing a bite?"

"Oh, uh . . ."

"It's all right if you're busy. I just thought I'd give it a shot."

"No, I'd like to." But Rebecca was clearly hesitant. "I just need to . . . there's some stuff I have to do first. How's seven?"

"Great! I'll swing by and grab you then."