Everyone but Eva, the beautiful Irish girl Billy meets while fixing up a cottage on Long Island with his cousin Dennis shortly after their return from the European battlegrounds of World War II. Although Eva accepts his ring and money for return passage to America once her family obligations in Ireland are discharged, Eva ends up marrying another man. The newlyweds remain in the Emerald Isle and use Billy's money for downpayment on a gas station. Rather than break the truth to his cousin back in New York, Dennis tells Billy that Eva died of pneumonia. Billy's grief shapes his life just as much as his warmth, humor, thoughtfulness, handsome appearance and hopeless alcoholism.

@reviews.body:A perfect first chapter introduces the members of Billy's immediate family, gathered at a small Bronx bar after his funeral. McDermott, who reads at Barbara's on March 19, establishes her characters with penetrating psychological precision, while integrating rich and varied themes: grief and its crushing effect on a young life once full of promise; the resistance of those who'd romanticize alcoholism rather than recognize it as a disease; the nature of courage, love, the Catholic faith and the Irish American character. Then, like yanking a tablecloth out from under a fully set table without disturbing one dish, she changes everything by having Dennis reveal to his daughter the lie upon which his family's perception of Billy's life is based.