When Maggie landed back in Connecticut after what she referred to as

“the California Experiment,” she lived in her childhood bedroom for sixth months to regroup. Among her accomplishments during The Regrouping was teaching her father how to use an iPod. She created a dozen playlists for his daily walks. The Emmylou Harris song was a favorite of her father’s, and even though the female lead singer was dressed more appropriately for a nineties metal night at the Seagrape than a Southport service, that girl could sing.

Maggie had chosen wisely; the mournful reworking of the classic folk song was an emotional button to Cap Richardson’s moving reminiscence about his and Bill Sweeney’s fifty-year friendship that started at Yale as roommates and became much more than that. Cap was her father’s lawyer, confessor, fixer. Cap was able to boil Bill down to his essential elements: storytelling, laughter, curiosity, and his own brand of humanity tinged with darkness that made him skeptical of the powerful and trusting of the humble. “Not that William Sweeney was the slightest bit humble, but he valued it in others,” Cap said to the laughter of the guests, then added, “The only thing that truly humbled him was fatherhood. He was in awe of his daughters.”

Dear Cap, Tricia thought. We’re the closest things he has to daughters.

Over the years, Cap had watched Bill self-destruct, thanks to booze, women, gambling, and his own mental health demons, and then somehow rebuild his life through writing and solitude. In return, Bill had never made an issue of Cap’s “confirmed bachelor” status, though both of them understood that Anders Hedlund, the charming antiques dealer in town that all the women loved, was more than Cap’s bridge partner. Neither Cap nor Bill ever really talked about it. They never needed to. There was a gay character in Bitter Fruit, Lieutenant Madigan, that Bill had created in honor of Cap. Madigan was the hero of the story. Cap is saying goodbye to his best friend.

Tricia looked down the row at her sisters, sitting as they always did, in age order: Liza, then Maggie, then Tricia. Three redheads in a row, their father had written in My Maeve, his memoir of his wife’s death and his subsequent two-year depression. To the outside world, the book was a brave exploration of depression, a subject few men copped to at the time. It won

the National Book Award and reinvigorated his stagnating writing career about twelve years ago. To Tricia and her sisters, it was a look into their father’s inner monologue about a time period they’d rather forget.

“‘Suppress and deny’ should be the family motto,” Maggie had once commented after her father’s birthday dinner when not a single sister had congratulated him on the new book, instead making conversation about current events, the ending of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the upcoming Academy Awards. None of them had ever read My Maeve in its entirety.

But here they were today, three redheads in a row.

“A good night for a short sail. Sail on, my old friend,” Cap said in his final words, his voice catching. Polished Cap Richardson had taught working-class Bill Sweeney to sail in college, the gift of a lifetime. The first few notes from Sean’s fiddle were all it took for the crowd to understand that William Sweeney was truly gone.

As the song’s refrain faded out, a frail David Hughes, Bill’s longtime editor at Allegory Publishing stood. He hugged Liza, Maggie, and Tricia before making his way to the microphone. He told the story of reading Never Not Nothing for the first time, saying of the experience, “It was the greatest gift of my publishing career, to spend a weekend alone with those words before the rest of the world would discover William Sweeney, knowing it would change their lives, too.” Maggie, in the middle, squeezed both her sisters’ hands.

It was a perfect night and they had made that happen. Liza had out-Liza’d herself, whipping the Willow Lane house into shape with the help of Julia, who insisted on returning to work despite her own shock and grief. If Liza had another week, she probably would have managed to paint the house and re-landscape. A thorough cleaning, a carload of new towels, pillows, and cheap rugs would have to do to freshen the faded interior. Liza brought in the company who did the Christmas decorations at her house to string hundreds of white lights to camouflage the exterior. Details were her strong suit. She’d even managed to get Jack a bath and a fresh bandana for the occasion.

Tricia had contacted the guests, reaching out to all the people her father truly would have wanted there, like the mechanic who kept his old Mercedes running and the long-retired department secretary from The New Yorker. She excluded the people her father would have called “phony,” like Millie Reeves, the head of the Southport Historical Society who denied her

father a special commendation for his seventieth birthday because she didn’t like the language in some of his books. There had been some loose security at the door, one big bouncer from a local bar and two assistants from Liza’s gallery, to distinguish any local wake crashers from fanboy wake crashers. Locals were welcomed without a scene.

Even Maggie, who had a tendency at events to stand on the sidelines and watch rather than work, had poured her energy into making an artistic tribute to her father on the west end of the property where the lawn turned to meadow: an installation of her father’s beloved sails and spinnakers, hung high on C-stands borrowed from a photographer—an old boyfriend who trucked everything in from New York, including a generator and lights.

When David Hughes ended his tribute, Liza, Maggie, and Tricia rose together and made their way to the stage. Liza had wanted Tricia to be “the official spokes-sister,” claiming that Tricia would be “the least emotional”

and thus able to get through the eulogy in one piece. Tricia was both flattered and wounded by the statement. It was Maggie who insisted they all speak, saying, “We’re the Sweeney sisters. We’re good at this. Public speaking awards, sixth grade, Mill Hill, Sweeney Sweep. Talking is our thing.”

Tricia agreed. “We should each read something Dad wrote. Something that mattered to each of us.”

And so that was exactly what they did. Liza, being the oldest, spoke first.

She gave Vivi and Fitz a hug on her way to the stage. She stood at the microphone and breathed deeply several times. Normally a confident speaker, she made several false starts, trying to get her opening words out without crying. She looked at her sisters and settled into a quiet rhythm with a story about their father’s work ethic. She told the mourners how her father would take them all through his process at the dinner table when he was working out an essay or a scene in a book. “We were his first audience for almost everything. As children, we had no idea what he was talking about most of the time, but we knew we loved listening to him tell stories.”

Then she read a passage from a piece in the Yale Review called “Quitting Time,” about his instinct for knowing when a piece of writing was done, when it was “fully finished, polished to a deep luster, but not so shiny that one doubted its authenticity.” She concluded, “My father lived to the age where he attained a deep luster, but never too shiny that you didn’t believe him for one minute. May we all understand our own quitting time so well.”

Maggie stood next, ascending the stage with poise and hugging Liza deeply. Maggie was in a long black dress with a bright orange-and-pink scarf in her hair and silver hoop earrings. She spoke nervously at first, introducing herself with the nickname her father had given her when she was a teenager. “Some of you know me as Mad Maggie. That’s what my father called me for most of my teenaged years. I have no idea why,” she said, wryly.

Then she recalled the many Christmas Eves they would sit around the fire, after the tree was decorated, listening to their father read aloud the classic Truman Capote story, “A Christmas Memory.” “My father described that piece as ‘everything that matters in life in ten pages,’” she said. “I struggled in college, maybe some of you know that. My mother had just died, I was my usual mess. I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t eat. But I could certainly self-medicate in a variety of ways and lie in bed all day. I was capable of that. And this card arrives with Snoopy on the front.” She held up the card her father had sent her, with the drawing of a beagle lying on top of his doghouse. There are laughs from the audience. “Inside is a twenty-dollar bill and the words, ‘For your Fruitcake Fund.’” Maggie paused, collecting herself, then continued, “And as a P.S., my father added,

‘This moment in time is the greatest test of your strength, my Mad Maggie.

Use this pain and make your art sing.’ Use this pain and make your art sing.