Emmy, an aging role model with a trim figure and a Pond’s Cold Cream skin care regimen, had come into the gallery. She had found a thank-you note that Maeve had written to her that included a short, beautiful poem about gardens and renewal. Emmy had wanted to share it with Liza. (“Your mother had so much talent, but your father took up so much of her energy,”

Emmy observed.) They’d spent an hour talking and catching up. There’s no way Emmy would have forgotten what Maggie and Tricia were up to in that short time. She was as sharp and engaged at seventy as she’d been at forty, which was why Maeve had bonded with her. “Then I went to Spic & Span to get a sandwich and that was a whole ordeal. Condolences, condolences.

You know how this town is. The guys at Spic & Span are going to rename the tuna sandwich the Sweeney Special in Dad’s honor. How great is that?

Here, I brought you a few sandwiches. Have you eaten?” Maggie knew to cover her tracks. And she had seen that Emmy woman in the parking lot, so that tracked.

Tricia burst into laughter, nearly choking on her iced tea. “Dad would have loved that.” Even Liza agreed. That was a touching gesture.

Maggie breathed a little easier as she watched her sisters’ smiles. She was sure she’d dodged a bullet. “Anyway, here are the boxes.”

Chapter 10

Tricia stood on the platform at the tiny Southport train station, waiting for the 9:38 to New Haven, like her father had done many Tuesdays and Thursdays for thirty years, heading to his teaching job at Yale. Her father, whose life could be so ad hoc, appreciated the ritual of commuting by rail: the waiting, the ticket taking, the names of the same small towns called out over the inaudible intercom. He rarely drove the half hour to New Haven, preferring to give himself over to the timetable of the MTA. Tricia had taken the train back and forth from New Haven during her college days, but it had been a few years since she’d stood on the platform, studying the commuters, most of whom were on the opposite platform, headed into New York. The bankers, the lawyers, the ad men were long gone, hopping on trains well before seven in the morning for their daily drudgery. The group now was mainly women, theatergoers or museum mavens headed into the city for lunch and a little culture. Only one other person stood on the New Haven side with Tricia, a high schooler with a backpack, maybe skipping school for the day or getting a late start. Tricia felt the weight of missing her father in that moment. Don’t cry, no one will understand.

She recognized John D’Amato right away. He looked exactly like the portrait her father had painted with words in an essay about the veteran conductor. He father wrote about him for Esquire last year, an homage to train conductors everywhere. The essay was an insightful piece about the kind of person who works a job that is both repetitive and essential. Clearly, her father had spent years exchanging “How ya doing today, Professor?”

with John D’Amato, and the essay was warm, knowing. It was longlisted for a PEN/Faulkner Award, but lost out to a piece about binge-eating that

her father described as “slightly better than the diary entry essays my first-years turn in.” (Amongst his many personal failings, William Sweeney hadn’t come to terms with the body awareness movement.) Tricia waited for the conductor to make it to her seat, then she spoke: “Hi, Mr. D’Amato, I’m Tricia Sweeney, Bill’s Sweeney’s daughter. I know he was a fan of yours.”

John D’Amato was taken by surprise, then he composed himself. “What a loss. What a loss. Your father was a gentleman, a good man. I was lucky to know him and happy to serve him on this train.”

Tricia didn’t know whether to stand or sit, so she remained seated, but pulled an envelope out of her bag. “I’m glad you’re working today. I wanted you to have this,” she said, handing the wiry, gray-haired conductor the white envelope with the Yale insignia. “It’s the first draft of my father’s essay about you. I found it in his office. You can see where he redlined it, his editing marks in his own hand. I thought you might . . .” Tricia choked up. She couldn’t finish the sentence.

John took the envelope reverently. “This is an incredible gift.” The conductor himself was overcome. “This is something.”

“And this is for you as well.” She reached into her bag for the commuter mug her father had taken back and forth to New Haven for years. He had a collection of coffee mugs from colleges all over the country, the end result of years of guest lectures and honorary degrees. He was rarely without a mug of coffee during his working hours and his mug selection became a sort of bellwether for how he was feeling, what the day might bring. The University of Iowa mug if he was literary; the Kenyon mug if he was precious, overthinking. The commuter mug was from Yale, though. He’d carried it back and forth from New Haven for years. Tricia started to explain to John why she was giving him an old coffee cup, but he knew.

“Your father had hot coffee and the New York Times every Tuesday and Thursday when school was in session. We’d talk about the news, the lousy politicians, the lousy Knicks. Sometimes he’d give me the name of a book I should read. And I read most of them,” John D’Amato said with pride and then he made a gentle bow. “Thank you, darling.”

Tricia stood and hugged the man who was a constant in her father’s life.

He had needed people like John D’Amato to keep him honest, in touch. To make sure he got where he was going. “Thank you, Mr. D’Amato.”

“We’ll miss him, won’t we?”

“Yes.” Tricia was beginning to understand how much.

“Hello?”

Tricia looked up from her position on the floor. She was cross-legged in her father’s office, where she’d been for the last two hours, sorting through drawers and boxes in search of the memoir. It was slow going, as a few colleagues kept interrupting her, those working over the summer or finishing up department responsibilities before heading off to Maine or the Cape or any writing workshop gig at Sewanee or upstate New York. They popped in uninvited to share recollections of her father and his legendary critiques that left his students in tears. Or to retell a classic story of his illfated introduction of visiting writers in the Beineke lecture series or about the late nights at Mory’s. Several mentioned the early morning monthly department meetings that he rarely bothered to attend. Tricia nodded and smiled. Though in a frenzy to find the manuscript, she wanted to hear these stories and remember that here on campus, her flawed father was his best self.

One professor, Abukar Abdule, a brilliant young writer who’d been born in Somalia and plucked from a refugee camp in Kenya to attend Cambridge before publishing his first literary novel at twenty-five and securing a spot at Yale a few years later, stopped by to say, “Your father and I had nothing in common, but I loved him dearly.”

That about summed up her father’s relationships with most of the faculty in the Creative Writing Department at Yale. He was a throwback, to the time when being a vaunted American writer meant being male, white, and heterosexual, with a drinking problem, a healthy ego, and a dark childhood.

That model of the testosterone-driven man of letters was dying off, fading away like the curriculum it spawned with reading lists of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Styron, Roth, Vonnegut, Cheever, Irving. The academic world was opening up to a diversity of voices and life experiences. William Sweeney, the tail end of the manliest (so they thought) generation, managed to hold on longer than most. (“What does cis mean?”

he asked Tricia one day during her time at Yale when they had regular lunches together. “Students keep referring to me as cis.”) Maybe he endured because deep down inside, he knew he was a dying breed, lucky to get in on some coattails of other writers who had created the genre, letting him sneak onto the gravy train at the exact right time in

literary history. Behind closed doors, when he could turn off his persona and simply be, he had enough humility about his work to make him endearing to the younger generation.

“Hello?”

Tricia looked up from her position on the floor at the handsome face in the doorway—dark hair, dark eyes, white teeth—recognizing it from the wake. The sincere librarian who told the story about having the lengthy discussions about the literary merits of The Sopranos, her father arguing pro-Tony and the librarian, anti-Tony. She was taken aback seeing him again so soon. He was tall and lean, in a deep blue button-down shirt with a messenger bag over one shoulder. She liked his glasses. She scrambled to stand. It was an ungainly transition from floor to feet. “Hi?”

“I’m Raj Chaudhry. We had plans to meet. You’re Patricia. I was at the wake but we never had the chance to speak.”

“Yes, Raj. Thank you for coming. My apologies. I lost track of time. And probably most of my mind the last few days.” Tricia needed a moment to collect herself. She reached out to shake his hand. His skin was warm.