I never sensed the shots. I should have felt them in my gut, having been born of the same blood, the same inheritance, the same home. It should have been like that feeling one twin gets when the other is in trouble, a hand burned on the stove matched with the other’s intuitive pain. But the six pints of Guinness I’d slaughtered in celebration of my birthday kept everything muffled. Instead I felt only the fog of drunkenness, that genetic trait of its own, and spent the end of the night passed out in a chair, cocooned in a deep, black silence.Twenty years earlier, my mother somehow sensed her father’s shot and left her shift at Olga’s diner early, certain, never once doubting herself that it had happened. When she came home, my father and I were sitting at the kitchen table, the food before us long grown cold, the news of my grandfather’s suicide having quieted any chatter, my younger brother having fortunately spent that night at a friend’s house. My mother took one look at us and threw her apron down, the smell of it thick with fryer grease, and cried, her shoulders shaking as she gasped for breath.
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