In 1997, William Sweeney was named the Grand Marshal of the St.

Patrick’s Day Parade in New York City. He was thrilled at the prospect of walking up Fifth Avenue, with a grand orange, white, and green sash, one of a hundred thousand marchers in the parade but in his mind, the most important one. He relished the chance to celebrate his heritage and be cheered by the spectators who lined the streets for thirty-plus blocks. He insisted that Maeve and the girls march beside him, the four fiery redheads in their green wool coats as a testament to their Irishness. Maeve was reluctant; she didn’t want the girls on display to the inebriated crowd, but she acquiesced to her husband’s wishes as she often did and March 17, 1997, went down as one of the worst days in Sweeney family history.

The story of How Dad Abandoned Us at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and We Got Lost and Then Had to Take the Train Home and We All Cried and Mom Yelled became a family favorite. In the sisters’ version, the parting of ways was accidental. The end of the parade was chaos and Bill Sweeney went one way, toward the bars on Second Avenue, and Maeve and the girls went the other way, toward the car that the parade organizers had promised would be waiting a few blocks away to take them back to Connecticut. The crowd closed in, separating the family and, in the primitive days before mass cell phone ownership, the mother and the father had no way to communicate with each other. The fact that there was no waiting town car became a laugh line in the storytelling with the girls describing the four of them cold, hungry, and exhausted standing on the corner of 80th and Fifth hoping for a miracle. Maeve had tried to use the phone in a coffee shop to call somebody, anybody, but without luck. The schlep back down to Grand

Central was when Tricia, then seven, started to melt down and Maeve started to yell, an uncharacteristic reaction by their even-keeled mother. By the time the Sweeney girls jammed themselves on the standing-room-only train headed back to Southport, Maggie and Liza were crying from the stress of the day.

Maggie, who had insisted on wearing her new Ugg boots, complained that her feet hurt and her mother fired back, “I told you those were a terrible choice. What do you expect with no arch support?”

Liza, who previously could tune out almost any conflict, had recently started her period and was a hormonal mess. “Please stop crying,” she kept saying between tears.

In the dinner table version, the Sweeney sisters practically crawled the mile home from the train station, no taxi in sight. Little Tricia, who slept on the floor of the train, caught a second wind and ran home ahead of her sisters, a precursor of athletic achievement to come. When the Sweeneys arrived at Willow Lane, cold and dark, Maeve slammed a box of cereal and a quart of milk on the kitchen table, saying, “Eat this!” and took to her bed.

The denouement of the tale was that Bill Sweeney arrived home twenty-four hours later, no explanation, and Maeve made him sleep in the boathouse for a week.

Over the years, the girls told the story to Cap and Aunt Frannie and random dinner guests and new boyfriends and college roommates. When Maeve was alive, she would stay silent in the retelling and roll her eyes when Maggie got to the part about their father staying in the boathouse.

They always put a glossy veneer over a grim story until one day, Liza, then a wife and mother of four-year-old twins, said to her sisters while they were doing the dishes after a family dinner, “You know, it was pretty shitty of Dad not to make sure we got to that town car. I mean, he knew where we were supposed to meet the car and he never showed up. I know the car didn’t show up, either, but he could have gotten us a cab to Grand Central at least if he wanted to stay and drink. Whit would never abandon me and the twins like that. Tricia was so little.”

The sisters must have known that to be true the many times they’d entertained with the parade story. After Liza’s comments, they stopped joking about the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. But it wasn’t until Tricia read the final chapter of her father’s memoir, the chapter titled What I Got Wrong, that she truly understood what Liza really meant. The St. Patrick’s Day

Parade story was one extended metaphor about what William Sweeney got wrong. In his own summation, he got fatherhood totally wrong.

“Did he hate us?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, it sounds like he hated us,” Tricia said to Cap in his office Monday morning. She had finished the memoir the previous night, promptly thrown up, fallen asleep curled up in the fetal position next to Raj around three a.m., gone for a run at dawn, and was now trying to make sense of what she’d read . Cap had been right. When he said there was difficult material at the end of the book, Tricia had assumed it was about her father, not about her and her sisters. Even Maeve got one last devastating swipe from the grave. Reading it, she felt like she’d gotten hit by a truck. “He definitely uses us in the book.”

“I understand it’s hard for you not to take this material personally, but remember, your father was a writer. He sought meaning in the banal. He’s heaping a lot of importance onto this one day and using it as an extended metaphor for his shortcomings. It’s a literary device.”

“Yes, I went to Yale, too. I understand literary devices,” Tricia said, unusually snippy with Cap. “I’m sorry. That was childish. But the attacks get very personal. I’m too focused, too ambitious. I won’t color outside the lines and I run to run away from my problems. Damn straight, because the house was so depressing after Mom died, I ran as fast as I could away from the place and I’m still running. I’m not going to apologize for using a coping mechanism to gain control over my life.”

“I know . . .”

“And Liza, who literally married a guy she wasn’t all that crazy about to please her parents, is going to love being called a slut in high school and repressed as an adult. Thanks, Dad.”

“It’s not that stark, but, yes, your father was uncomfortable with Liza’s burgeoning sexuality and he admits that. A double standard for sure, but relatable for many fathers. Although he was not too complimentary about her marriage choice.”

“Maggie can never read this. He flat-out calls her untalented.”

“He blames himself for not cultivating her talent in a broader fashion, going too easy on her discipline-wise, so that she never fully developed her

craft. He believed she was gifted, but he also believed she did not work to her highest potential.”

“At least he didn’t mention her overdose in college. That would have been unforgivable.”

“I was relieved about that, too.”

“I like that he identifies all our issues but then fans himself with a mea culpa to let himself off the hook.”

“He writes, let me see here . . .” Cap searched for the passage. “‘I wasn’t generous enough to be a good father. I couldn’t put anything ahead of the work. I take all the blame.’”

“Really, Cap? The work? That was the problem? How about the drink?

The women? His giant ego? He found a convenient and time-honored excuse.”

“I warned you it was harsh.”

“I think about everything I’ve been through, like my mother’s death, my father’s depression, my miscarriage two years ago . . .”

“Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you. It’s not something I’ve told a lot of people about—you’re the third and Raj is the second. I’m saying that the tough stuff we’ve all been through was not caused by our father nor were we rescued by our father. He takes this bizarre credit for our downfalls but gives us no accolades for our resilience.”

“I can see your point about a lack of self-awareness,” Cap said, loyal to his old friend but torn by what he had read, too.

“And dangling the fact that he has another daughter out there, but doesn’t name her or explain the circumstances of her birth, I mean, come on, you have to be disappointed in that, Cap.”

Cap shook his head. “As a lawyer, I’m relieved he didn’t name Serena.

She may not want that. It could have been the basis of a lawsuit.”

“Here’s the thing, unless you’re me, Liza, Maggie, or the mystery sister, this is going to look like a brave statement on male inadequacy. That’s what Raj said, and I think he’s right. William Sweeney opening up and admitting his failure as a father and the consequences to his daughters of his inability to connect with them on a meaningful level because he was too focused on great literature. A cautionary tale sort of, because no one will ever believe that William Sweeney, the man who wrote My Maeve and created Elspeth,

didn’t worship women. No wonder he wanted to be dead when this came out.”