“I’ll show you, now,” Seán said.

He unstuck the tiny front gate but ignored the path up to the front door, skirting the cottage to go round the back instead. Here, they beat through undergrowth to the place where the ghost of a garden gave way to a prickly wilderness of gorse.

“Look at that.”

“Right,” Ivor said.

His father-in-law spat into the grass.

“How long would you say it’s there?” he said.

Seán reached into his back pocket for a much folded, grubby map of the land they were standing on. Ivor checked it, and then spotted the line of barbed wire threaded through the scrub.

The metal was weathered but not rusted.

“A fair while,” he said.

Melia’s mother was more than a year dead, but she had moved in with her daughter in her final infirmity, so the place had been empty for five years at least. Sometime in her absence, a neighbor had fenced off the bottom ten feet of her land. Maybe twelve.

“Who is he, anyway?”

Seán gave a contemptuous uptick of his head. There was a house on a rise about four fields away.

“He’s on his own up beyond.”

He kept his voice low, though Ivor did not think he could be heard from that distance. He could barely be heard a foot away.

“He has no claim,” Ivor said.

He thought they were going home to Garrenboy, but they drove into Killaloe, where Seán parked by the church and stiff-legged out to the newsagent’s for the paper and a packet of fruit pastilles. These he ate with deliberation in the front seat, leaving the driver’s door open. When there were three sweets left in the roll, Ivor could not take the suspense any longer.

“What are we doing?” he said.

“Sure, what would we be doing?” Seán said. “We’re due to see Matt Thornton.”

From the plaque on the wall, Ivor gleaned that this was the name of a local solicitor, though “Matt Thornton” was now Matt’s daughter, her father being recently retired. She was very young, and she spoke with an odd, puppetlike authority that was, Ivor thought, entirely charm-free. The legal term they were looking for was “adverse possession,” she said, and this could not be argued for another seven years. She advised them simply to put a new fence along the legal boundary, which was fixed and on the deeds.

Seán nodded judiciously.

“He has no claim,” he said.

“Not yet,” she warned.

And Seán stood to go, as though this were what he had come to ascertain. He reached across the desk to shake the girl’s hand.

“I suppose she’ll bill me for that,” he said, when they sat back into the car.

As if he were about to put a fence through gorse, he said, in full view of a man obsessed with shooting crows.

“You could sell as is,” Ivor said. “Let the new owner deal with it.” Though the truth was that no one wanted the place except the man who was causing the trouble. Besides, even the rumor of a boundary dispute could spoil any chance of a sale. The Loughnanes had been outplayed.

Outside the house at Garrenboy, Seán killed the engine and, in the silence, the smells in the car seemed to rise around them; the malt of calf nuts, diesel from an empty jerrican, his father-in-law’s boots and sweat and work clothes.

“He came to the wake,” Seán said, staring at the windscreen. “He leaned over the coffin and he touched her dead hand.”

Then he got out of the car.

Inside, Melia had a tea brack set out, with butter in curls on a glass dish, and she stood stirring blackberries reducing in sugar on the stove. Orla was sitting in the easy chair reading a book and Ivor got a fright when she looked up at him, her smile was so bruised about with berry juice. There was a colander half full of them on the draining board and, as he looked at the tiny flies floating above it, he saw how drowsy and full the air was, on this warm September day. Beside the colander were three enormous mushroom caps.

“The size of a dustbin lid,” he said.

Orla hefted one into his hands and he knocked on top of it, for the hollow sound. Then she showed him the underside, running her finger along the dark, velvety frill.

They mopped up the blackberry sauce with the last of the cake, and Orla was so proud of her day’s haul, the pleasure of eating it made her seem more solid.

“She’s like her mother,” Seán said.

“How do you mean?” Orla said, brightly.

Her grandfather gave her an appraising look.

“You’re not adopted, anyway.”

Ivor had an impulse to protect the child from Seán’s attention. But what harm? he thought, as the phone went off in the hall. They watched Melia get up and make her way out to it. A long silence after she picked up the receiver. More silence.

“Hay . . . loh?”

Ivor recognized Emer’s voice from the tinny sounds in the speaker and he found it strange that he was sitting in her childhood home while she was far away. He missed her. He missed the way she might say, “Oh, for God’s sake, Daddy. Would you leave the child alone.”

He took the receiver.

“Yeah. Hi. How are things?”

Melia did not step back from him in the ordinary way. She turned briefly to the side and seemed to droop over a cloth she held in her hand. And this distracted him so much that he could not understand what Emer was saying. His father was what? he said.

His father was in the Galway Regional Hospital and they were calling the relatives in.

Melia, as though released by this news, launched herself toward the front room, and Emer started all over again. They could not give details, though she had a phone number, if he wanted to ring first. But, really, they said he should just arrive and someone would speak to him. He should go tonight. Her voice was very kind.

When he got to the front room, Melia was at his open suitcase, and the sight of his mother-in-law fumbling through his shirts and underwear was too much for him.

“Leave it, Melia. Just drop it. I’ll do that.”

He put the case up on the bed and pulled Orla’s few bits out of it. And he was slamming the car boot closed before he thought to speak to his daughter—partly because he did not know what to say.

My father is dying.

It seemed an odd thing to tell your child.

“I’ll be back,” he said. “I have to go, love. But I’ll be back tomorrow, or I don’t know. Be good, all right?” Her face in the rearview mirror was a thumbprint in the shadow of the doorway, as he bumped along the boreen to the main road.

“It’s the color of a mouse’s tummy”—that was what she’d said about the mushroom’s underside. As soon as she said it, Ivor had seen it, too: a transparency of pink at the base of the brown gills.

The next few days were lonely ones. Ivor squared his shoulders, kept himself neat; he took the priest’s blessing and the ward maid’s cup of tea. He phoned his brother in Riyadh from the phone in his father’s hall, and he slept in his childhood bedroom for one night and then the next. On the third evening, he left out a note to cancel the milk. The next day, he took his lunch at the hotel where his father liked to go, and he found himself making the same fuss with collar and cuffs that his father made before picking up his silverware. It was as though the dying man had entered him briefly: they were, for a moment, one and the same.

When he got back to the hospital, two women were working fast around the bed, and one of them glanced up and paused. “Ah, you missed him,” she said, as though his father’s death were a departing bus. They left Ivor to sit with the body, now free of tubes and wires. The priest spoke to him in the room, the undertaker in the corridor. His father would repose in the funeral home. There was a hotel by the cemetery, which could take any number for lunch. The gurney arrived, and he was free to go. The staff nurse put her arm around him all the way to the exit. Everyone was great. Everyone knew more than he did. Back in the house, he opened the study door and saw last week’s newspaper on his father’s desk, folded to the crossword, which Ivor had an impulse to finish—“Could a bad legume make ten ill?”—and then did not.

The next day, he thought to go and pick up Orla, but Emer said not to complicate things, and, besides, what would he do with her?

“I suppose,” Ivor said, thinking the better question was what he would do with himself. There was a meeting at the undertaker’s and on the way back he bought a few bits for lunch in the local shop. He went from room to room, feeling slightly indecent—or perhaps the word was “previous.” It was too soon: death had made the place more private, not less. In the utility room, he came across his mother’s flower vases, long unused. In the small conservatory, he picked up and folded again a blanket she had crocheted. He tried the string that pulled down the ladder to the attic and put his head through the hatch. Then he sat on a lower rung and stayed there for a long time.

In the evening, Ivor walked out along Salthill with an old school friend who was always good value. The fine weather was holding, and when he came back he mowed the grass against the coming winter. He wondered about the phone bill, including that last call to Riyadh. He did not sleep, then fell into an unconsciousness so total you could walk around in it.

Emer arrived at the train station the next day with his good suit and the two older girls. Then his brother came in from Saudi, wrecked under his tan, and crawled upstairs to sleep. Suddenly it was tremendously busy. Everyone showed up for the reposal—neighbors and all sorts.

“Now, there’s a blast from the past,” he kept saying; his whole childhood was in the condolence queue.

Ivor was doing up his tie on the morning of the funeral when his father-in-law walked into the living room. The hall door was open; it was like dressing in public, the amount of traffic coming through.

“I am very sorry for your trouble,” Seán said, offering his roughened hand. “I met him only that one time, but he was a gentleman.” He brought his other hand to Ivor’s shoulder. “And a good man, if he made you.”