Supporting cast · The Loyal Man
Forty-eight. Dennis’s older brother. The one who always knew a guy. The one who pushed Dennis off the high dive and caught him at the bottom and said I had you, and has been collecting the debt ever since.
Kevin runs Reilly Property Group: laundromats on the low-rent corners of Harmon, the 5th Avenue location, the one on Crane Street, the one on Oak Street downtown with the apartment above it, plus rental properties and a commercial lot he is developing into storage units. He has a theory about laundromats, people always have dirty clothes, and people without their own machines are people without much else, so a business that serves them never has a bad year. He bought his four-bedroom Pinewood colonial cash in 2014 after selling his fourth laundromat; the driveway holds a Lexus SUV, an Audi, and a stenciled work van. He does not separate work from home, or a favor from an obligation, or much of anything; the boundaries other people maintain, he moves through as if they do not exist.
Kevin’s set piece, told thirty times, at Thanksgivings and baptisms and his brother’s kitchen table, is the one about walking into First Federal in 2006 with a business plan written on a drugstore legal pad and talking a loan officer into financing his second laundromat: Nobody’s ever handed me a business plan on a legal pad. And I go, nobody’s ever going to hand you a better one. What the story leaves out is that the Cordell laundromat nearly went under in 2008 and Lorraine’s parents lent them $60,000 to keep the doors open. Kevin doesn’t lie about the loan. He just doesn’t include it. The story is about the legal pad.
It is Kevin who calls during dinner and asks Dennis to change a date in the county database, eleven seconds of keyboard, clerical, a favor. He cosigned Dennis and Pam’s mortgage in 2004 without being asked; he was in the hospital hallway the day Dennis’s son was born, and cried, and said the baby had the Reilly nose. The love is real. So is the ledger. When the edit is found and Dennis is ruined, Kevin already has a word ready, the careful word the Seer foretold, the one that sounds like a kindness and places the failure inside Dennis’s head and not his own, chosen the same week he asked for the favor. By the end the brothers do not speak; Kevin’s colonial goes up for sale, and what happened to him, charges, investigations, Dennis chooses not to find out. The file is closed.