“Did you take him to a priest?” Cal asks.

“We did not,” says Senan. “We put him in the back room to sleep it off. Told him we’d say the rosary over him till he woke up.”

“They didn’t do it,” Bobby says, aggrieved. “They forgot I was there at all. I woke up the next morning and thought I was dead.”

That gets another wave of laughter, and Cal is swept along, rocking helplessly with it. “He was still half cut,” Senan says. “Rang me asking was he dead, and what should he do about it.”

“At least,” Bobby says with dignity, raising his voice to be heard, “I never broke my nose trying to jump a wall I hadn’t leaped since I was eighteen—”

“Damn near made it,” Mart says, lifting his pint and winking at the rest.

“—or took a dare and knocked on aul’ Mrs. Scanlan’s window buck naked and got cold water thrown on me.”

A guy on the far edge of the group gets a collective whoop of approval and a couple of back-slaps, and shakes his head, grinning. Cal likes seeing them all this way, the wild boys shining through the solid farmers. For a moment he wonders which one of them was Brendan back in the day, the restless one on the hunt for hustles and escape routes, and how he ended up.

“Have another one there,” Mart says, eyes alight with mischief, reaching for the bottle. “You’ve some catching up to do.”

Cal is surface drunk but not deep-down drunk, and he reckons he ought to keep it that way. Booze has never bothered him the way drugs do—it doesn’t hollow out reality, and people, in the same way—but the air of this room has a high giddy spin, like under the right circumstances things could get out of control with free-fall speed, and this situation has a flavor of initiation rite that could well turn out to be the right circumstances. “Sounds to me like I should take it slow,” he says. “So I don’t wind up buck naked outside Miz Scanlan’s window.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Mart assures him. “Sure, it could happen to a bishop.”

“You boys were weaned on this stuff,” Cal points out. “If I try to keep up with you, I’m gonna end up going blind.”

“Not on mine, you won’t,” Malachy says, his professional pride touched.

“Ah, stop your fussing and foostering, man,” Mart orders Cal. “You’re not some tourist that comes in for a pint of Guinness with the quaint natives and then heads back to his hotel. You’re a local man now; you’ll do as we do. Don’t be telling me you never done anything mad on the gargle before.”

“Mostly just crashed parties,” Cal says. “Made friends with some strangers, sang some songs. Stole the occasional street sign. Nothing fancy like you guys get up to.”

“Well,” Mart says, putting the glass back into Cal’s hand, “we’ve no street signs and no strangers handy, and you’re already at the only party around, so let’s get you singing.”

“Are you going to carry him home?” Barty demands, from behind the bar. “The size of him.”

“Sure, isn’t that my point exactly,” Mart says. “It’ll take more than the one to do the job on a fella his size. More than the two, but we’ll start there and see where we get.”

What makes up Cal’s mind isn’t the fact that quitting now would earn him an ineradicable reputation as a pussy and a tourist, or at least not primarily. What does it is the effortless rhythms of the talk snapping back and forth across the table. Cal has been missing the company of men he’s known a long time. His four best buddies were among the reasons he left Chicago; the depth and detail with which they knew him had come to feel unsafe, something to be kept at as much distance as possible. By that point he couldn’t be sure what there might be, inside him, that they would spot before he did. All the same, somewhere in the back of his head, his hunger for an evening in the bar with them has grown, so gradually that he’s only just noticing its magnitude. He may not know these men, but they know each other, and there’s comfort in being around that.

He resigns himself to the likelihood of waking up in a ditch with his pants missing and a goat tied to his leg. “Here’s mud in your eye,” he says, and throws back the shot, which is considerably larger than the first one. There’s a burst of half-mocking cheers.

This one smooths everything over. The room starts moving again and the banquette turns even mistier, but this feels only natural and right. Cal is glad he did this. He almost laughs at how close he came to chickening out.

In the other corner, the song builds to a crescendo, ends on a whoop, and dissolves in a round of applause. “Isn’t that great timing,” Mart says. “What’s your song, boyo?”

Cal’s song, at parties that went this way, was always “Pancho and Lefty.” He opens his mouth and starts to sing. Cal is no opera singer, but he can carry a tune, and he has a deep rambling voice that holds a room and suits a song about open spaces. The last of the applause trickles off, and people lean back in their seats to listen. The man with the guitar picks up the shape of the song and sends a loose, pensive river of notes drifting alongside it.

When Cal finishes there’s a moment of silence, before the burst of clapping. Hands reach out to slap him on the back, and someone shouts to Barty to get him another pint. Cal grins, pleased and all of a sudden a little bit startled at himself. “Well done,” Mart says in his ear. “That’s a fine pair of lungs you’ve got on you.”

“Thanks,” Cal says, reaching for his beer. He finds himself a bit sheepish, not about the singing itself but at the unfeigned approval around the table and the depth of the pleasure he takes in it. “I enjoyed that.”

“Sure, we all did. ’Tis great to have someone who can spice up the aul’ singsong. We’ve all been listening to each other all our lives; we need the new blood.”

The guy who showed up buck naked at Mrs. Scanlan’s window starts singing, in a clear tenor: “Last night as I lay dreaming of pleasant days gone by . . .” The musicians take up the tune, and a few people hum along in a deep soft underscore. Mart tilts his head back to listen, his eyes half closed.

“When I was a young lad,” he says, after a while, “you’d never have a night out without a bit of a singsong. Do the young people still sing at all, except when they’re trying to get themselves on the telly?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Cal says. He wonders if Alyssa and her friends sing at parties. You need someone with a guitar, mostly, to start things off. Ben is the type of guy who would consider learning an instrument to be frivolous. “Been a while since I was young.”

“Come here to me, Sunny Jim,” Mart says. “You’re sure you want someone to rewire that kitchen, are you?”