Free Want Not by Jonathan Miles Page A

September 11th. “Brian Tooney,” the headline read. “A Winner in Life, and Love.”
     
Brian Tooney hated to lose. Whatever the game, be it Monopoly or one-on-one basketball or his latest passion, golf, he usually only lost once. “And that was always the first time he played,” said his older brother, Robert. “After that, he’d hunker down somewhere to study and practice until he had everything down cold. Then he’d come back and stomp you.”
That competitive streak made Mr. Tooney, who was 34, a natural fit for Wall Street. He worked as a bond broker for MarketBolt, in the World Trade Center. “He loved the adrenaline, the charge of it,” said his wife, Sara. On their second date, the couple bumped into a not-quite-yet-old flame of Mrs. Tooney at a midtown bar. Mr. Tooney, she later learned, tipped a waiter to “accidentally” spill a drink on the competing suitor, forcing him to beat a quick retreat from the bar.
But Mr. Tooney had a soft side, too. His 11-year-old daughter, Alexis, brought it out in him most. “If she scraped her knee, and cried,” his wife said, “he cried too.” Almost every night, before bedtime, Mr. Tooney and his daughter danced together, usually to a Bruce Springsteen song. “‘Thunder Road,’” Mrs. Tooney said, “was their favorite.”
The family had just moved, in June, to rural Sussex County, N.J., because Mrs. Tooney dreamed of raising horses. “The commute was a killer,” his brother Robert said. “But if Sara wanted to raise penguins, he would’ve commuted from the South Pole. That’s the kind of guy he was.”
     
    For a long time Sara stared at the newspaper, her eyes darting from the text to the photograph and back, as if struggling to reconcile them. She heard the faint creak of her front teeth grinding. Finally, she said, “Fuck you, Brian.”
    And then it came back, as she’d feared (when setting that box aside) but not quite expected (when opening it). All of it: the initial splinter of that morning (Liz calling, saying, “turn on the TV”); the way Sara collapsed to the floor, rubbery and boneless, in perfect terrible tandem with the second tower’s collapse; Alexis in pigtails screaming “someone tell me!” while Sara and Brian’s mother clung to one another in the living room, Sara sobbing and Brian’s mother hacking up broiled bits of her lungs, both of them incapable of speech; Brian’s father’s silent, sleepless vigil in front of CNN, a single omnipresent tear trickling down his old prizefighter’s cheek; the four hundred MISSING posters they printed at Staples, and the clerk who glanced cautiously about for her manager before telling Sara there was no charge, go; the bobbing sea of yellow candles in Union Square; the smoke from the island’s charred tip that went on and on, forever. All of which felt endurable and even lenient compared to what, for Sara, came afterwards.
    Brian’s brother Robert suggested the memorial. He offered to rent out A. J. Byrne’s, the bar on 52nd Street where Brian had taken Sara on their second date and where Brian and Robert had had a standing date, for
Monday Night Football,
during the NFL season. Invite everyone, Bass Ale (Brian’s regular) on the house, maybe a slide show if they could all bear it. “That’s what Bri would’ve wanted,” Robert said, and Sara had agreed. All Robert needed, he said, was an invitation list; he’d do the rest.
    Brian’s Outlook address book struck Sara as the natural source. The recipient lists on his constant stream of email forwards—New York Giants scuttlebutt, mostly, but also chain letters (typical Irish, he was superstitious to the point of paranoia)—must have included one hundred or more addresses. It was password-protected but that was easy: Alexis. As Sara scrolled through his inbox, averting her eyes from the text of the emails to avoid conjuring Brian’s voice, she kept seeing one name—Jane L. Becker—over and over and over again. On September