“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who’s the dame?”
He confessed all. Her name was Rebecca but she hated being called Becky and she was a fellow techie nerd who he’d gravitated towards at a cafe one poetry night. They had approximately a jillion things in common including the desire to learn aikido, so they were taking a class two nights a week and going to the movies, book stores, or work-type functions two or three other nights a week.
“Why didn’t you bring her along?”
Zach didn’t even bother to do the sarcastic snort, he just looked at me. “Hi, Mom, happy birthday, here’s the love of my life and your future daughter-in-law.”
“Oh, Zach, do you mean it?”
“What?”
“The love of your life thing.”
He actually blushed. My very own big brother blushed. “Yeah, I do, I think.” He cut off my delighted babbles with, “And not a word, Ash, it’s early days, anything could happen and the last thing I need is the Frank and Bernadette May Third Degree experience sooner than I have to. She’s gonna have to turn out to be completely perfect before I subject myself to that.”
“You just said she is completely perfect.”
“I know, I know. And I’m right, just terrified it won’t work out cause she’s either hiding her past as a con artist or hiding her present revulsion for me until she can find the ‘right time’ to let me down gently.” He grinned. “And if it’s the con artist thing, if she’s repentant I may just be able to live with it.”
“Can I tell Gran?”
“I don’t get to tell her myself?”
“If you must. I suppose that’d be better, I just—oh, never mind.”
“What? What’s up with Gran?”
“Nothing, nothing. I just have to talk to her about something and it maybe kinda tough, so I was hoping to use your news as, like, an icebreaker.”
“Since when do you and Gran need an icebreaker? More like muzzles once you two get going.”
“Never mind. I want to talk to her first, so it’s not on talking to you about it yet, so just forget I mentioned it, okay? Tell me about Rebecca, is she going to move in with you?”
“Ash ....”
“I’m serious, Zach. I’m sorry, it’s just a real personal thing and it needs to be my way.”
“Okay. Just, let me know if you, I don’t know, need anything. I’d do whatever you asked, you know, and I can do it no questions asked if I have to.”
I smiled at him. He was such a protector, a fixer. No wonder I always put things on his shoulders, he’d been wide open to taking care of me since we were little. Rebecca was a lucky woman, and I was glad he’d found her.
Zach dropped me at Gran’s—I would stay the night with her and Zach would stay at Bernadette’s. She and Frank only had the one guest room now they’d converted my former bedroom into a meditation zone. At Gran’s, though, the spare room always had a couple of changes of my clothes.
Also, Gran’s had the expansive fabric closet Pappa had built for her. It was a miracle of color and texture and organization, that closet, and we’d both spent hours there, over the years, letting a project take shape in our minds as we gathered the fabrics that would become quilt blocks and backers and binding. Right away I found the brocade I wanted for Patchy Men. Soon I’d added some organza I might or might not want to appliqué, and began a pile of spearmint-hued calicos for a vague plan to do with images of women refracted through a tea-party setting. When I caught myself going over the pros and cons of taking a package of sewing machine needles, I knew I was avoiding talking to Gran about Pappa. So back to the kitchen I went, feeling grim.
And wimpy.
Instead of talking first, I gave her her quilt. Gran loved it, no surprise—my goal had been to touch her with this manifestation of my love for her. Her response, the way she took in the fine details and overall impact, the way she kept moving her arthritic hands across the surface, showed she knew what I was trying to do, both narratively and artistically, and her appreciation for Chains of Love was multi-leveled.
But mostly, she loved that I had made it for her—that she had been the inspiration for my work. As often as I said her teaching and her support had been the base from which I had launched myself as an artist, she still refused to give herself enough credit for the things about me which made her proud.
“It’s not like I never mentioned how much I love you, you know,” I laughed after her third or fourth round of ‘I can’t believe you did this for me, sweetheart.’
“Oh, sweetheart, I know you do, I’ve always known. Aren’t I the one who can read your mind since birth?”
“Or the one who I’ve wanted to, anyway,” I said with a kiss.
“And that being true,” she pulled me towards the breakfast room and we sat at her small vinyl table—the yellow with gold and brown specks had greeted me most dinners of my youth. I traced the dots that always looked like the outline of a duck to me. “Who is he and what has he done to give you that secret little smile?” Gran asked. “If you can tell me without being crude.”
“Gran!”
“I’m just asking, You’re not the only one who reads romance novels here.”
I laughed. “He’s just another guy at the retreat, his name is Caleb and he actually was at Berkeley with Zach.”
“As in, he still lives in California?”
“Get right to the heart of the matter, why don’t you? Yeah, he does. But, I don’t know, so far we haven’t talked about it but I have this, I guess, premonition it’ll be okay.”
“Well, good girl, I’m glad for you. And I hope it works out to be everything you dream.” Gran always talked about my life in terms of dreams. My name—she named me—was adapted from the Gaelic for dream or vision, and she put a lot of store into the symbolism.
I got us some shortbread from the batch Gran had prepped for my arrival. Zach had obviously broken into it while I was lost in the fabrics, so I asked if he’d had a chance to chat with her.
“Yes, I got the news of his love life, too. I feel blessed both of you have found such happiness—you remind me of myself and Pappa sixty years ago almost, except we were in love with each other.”
I bit into the shortbread and looked at the duck again.
“What is it, Ashlyn?”
“Just, well, not nothing. Something. Something I need to talk to you about.”
“Goodness, girl-child, what is it? So serious all of the sudden.”
“I know, I’m sorry. I need to have a serious kind of talk with you, but maybe we should wait until later, after dinner. It’s not urgent.”
“Well you’ve got me curious. Can we not talk now?”
I glanced at the kitchen clock—it was closing in on four, and the reservations were for seven. We’d have to leave by six-thirty at the latest to avoid Bernadette’s sarcasm should we arrive after her, and I wanted to shower the patina of car trip off of me.
But mostly, I was avoiding it.
I hedged a bit more but Gran was having none of it, so I started in with the background of Lizzy’s parents. Gran, being from the land of everyone knows everyone else, remembered Agnes’s mother and aunt clearly from some school connection of her cousin’s. She didn’t know Dub but wasn’t surprised he knew of Pappa.
“And is this serious thing of yours about Dalkey seventy-odd years ago?”
I nodded. “Sounds silly, I know.”
“Maybe not.”
I glanced up at her. She was looking a tad wary. “Gran? Are you, um, aware of a secret from then?”
She sighed. “Just tell me what this Dub Murphy had to say, sweetheart. Just tell me.”
She couldn’t know already. Or, I’d been convinced until that moment she couldn’t. Gran wasn’t known for her poker face, but I was getting nothing from her. So I talked.
“Okay, he told me Pappa didn’t exactly come over here the way he said.”
Gran didn’t comment.
“He came the same route, I mean, through Liverpo
ol, but not the same way with his family and all.”
Gran put her hand over mine. Faltered over the words a little. “I—I suppose he knows the sister?”
Meeting her gaze, I said, “He knew the doctor, your father-in-law, that is, and he knew the doctor’s, um, grandson. Matthew O’Connor.” Her eyes went dull and moist like wet slate, but still not a word. Damn this was rough; a thousand pinpricks and not a thimble in sight. I reached for the most straightforward words I could find to finish the story. “Well he, what Dub says anyway, is a boy, eighteen really, so a man, named Niall O’Connor who was the son of Dr. Matthew O’Connor went with his bride to England, and she came back saying he’d died on their wedding trip. And then she had a son, and the doctor and his family took them in and, well, that’s about it. I guess.”
I trailed off, and Gran was staring into the middle distance, and I paused before fumbling on. “The mom died already. So there’s no, um, proof at all. It mayn’t be true. You know the Irish and their blarney, and how many O’Connors might he be confusing Pappa with anyway.”
Gran patted my hand lightly so I shut up but she wasn’t talking. This wasn’t good—Gran had never run out of things to say to me before. I mean, of course we had our companionable silences, but usually when we were occupied—quilting or cooking or whatnot. Otherwise we were always talking; talking politics, talking history, gossiping about family and neighbors.
When I met her eyes again she was crying, which was enough to open the floodgates I’d been forcing closed for most of a week. So much for my theory the worst part delivering bad news was the anticipation.
“I’m sorry, Gran, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry if it’s true and I’m sorry I mentioned it.”
“No, no, sweetheart.” And to my shame, our hug became her offering solace to me. Of all the times to discover how like my mother I truly was.
No. I refused to be like Bernadette, sobbing across Pappa’s side of the bed after his funeral, Gran forced to comfort the daughter who had spent a lifetime telling her she wasn’t as valued as all the men in her life. First Pappa, then her brothers, or then Frank, and Zach. Or Zach, then Frank. No matter the order, it always went men first with Bernadette. Gran and I were tied for last.
But she was first for me, and I’d done my best to be first for her since Pappa passed.
I disengaged and reached to the center of the table to pluck napkins from a basket I’d woven back in middle school. After we’d wiped our eyes, Gran told me what she knew.
“It nearly cost us the wedding.” A minuscule smile graced her face. “A fortnight before the ceremony, and we were at a picnic, just the two of us. Talking about sex.”
“Gran!”
“We were engaged. Are you and your Caleb engaged?”
Oops. “Well, you were still a teenager.”
“An engaged teenager. And don’t think I don’t know about you and Daryl.”
Double oops. “Fine. You and Pappa were having teenage sex.”
Her smile brightened enough to truly rearrange the lines on her face. “Not until after we were legally bound, dream girl, and don’t you forget it. We were only kissing on our picnic.”
“Shocking behavior. I’m telling my uncles.”
“They’re to defend me against their own father now are they?”
“Well your brothers have all passed, I can’t tell them.”
Gran blessed herself. So did I. Although I’ve never been a church-goer—Frank and Bernadette opposed organized religion like the good new-new-age hippies they were—I’d picked up the habit of making the sign of the cross over my own chest when Gran’s lost family members were mentioned. “Rest their souls,” she said. “And my Niall’s, too. He was a good man, Ashlyn.”
“The best.”
“I hope you find one as good yourself some day. I hope maybe you already have.”
The stinging behind my eyes wasn’t all due to missing Pappa. Just thinking about Caleb and the future sent bright pinwheels of hope and fear spinning within me. “Maybe,” I said, but quietly. It wasn’t time for those thoughts.
“And I got up the nerve to ask Niall about sex.”
I laughed. Gran’s timing couldn’t be beat. “What’d he say?”
“Poor Niall. He looked like he wanted to sink beneath, well, if not the earth, at least our picnic blanket. Do you remember how his ears went all pink?”
I shook my head. Tons of memories of Pappa, but not one to do with his ears.
“Well, they did, when he was embarrassed. And his ears went pink, and I thought it was to do with us both being virgins. No more of your faces, young lady. As it happens, I was the unsullied one, so you can just wait until you get to heaven and scold your Pappa then about it.”
I laughed. “Pretty sure he knew about Daryl, too.”
“He’s the one who caught you half-stripped behind the henhouse.”
Now there was a memory of Pappa I’d never lose. Come to think of it, his ears that afternoon had been rather bright.
“So no scolding in heaven. What he told me did break my heart that day. It truly did. But I was a teenager, and furious, and nervous about the rest of my life, and though I’ve never thought about it before—I’ve never talked about that day before now—I believe I was jealous. Not of her. Alice. Well, not because she’d lain with Niall. What made me burn was how I was inexperienced, a child, and she a woman. I was facing moving from my home where my ma directed us all to this unknown where I had to manage everything. It was daunting, and on top of all that, I had to learn about intimacy. And here was Niall already knowing everything, and keeping it from me.”
“What happened?”
“I accepted him, of course. How could I not?”
“But I mean, what happened with him and Alice?”
Gran huffed a short laugh. “Sex. Behind the henhouse, most likely.”
“Not behind the henhouse,” I said.
She squeezed my hand softly. “Well. Wherever it was. Alice was a neighbor, friendly with Niall’s sister Kitty. They took walks together, all three, and sometimes just Niall and Alice. Kitty was sure they’d wed. And because neither of them had much else of a plan, they discussed it. And they were curious teens. So they went behind the henhouse and no one’s grandfather came along to stop them, and they ended up pregnant. He offered marriage. But he said it was Alice’s idea to go to England instead, and Kitty helped them arrange it all. The always helpful Kitty.”
Gran could be pretty sarcastic about a sister-in-law she’d never met.
“Once they were in Liverpool, Alice decided to see it through on her own. She said she never wanted to see him again, and I gather there were some words and some tears, but in the end he gave her what money he had and promised to stay in Liverpool while she went back to Dalkey. He only corresponded with her via Kitty, ensured Alice made it home all right. Once he’d earned some money he wrote to offer his hand again, and promised if she didn’t accept he would head to America on the next ship.”
All the pinwheel pieces in my heart had crashed apart. “What did she say?”
“Nothing. The reply came from that bitch Kitty, may she rest in peace.” We crossed ourselves. “More than seventy years, and I’ve never forgotten Niall’s face when he told me about it. He said it was the shortest letter he’d ever received. ‘May the wind be at your back always, Niall.’ Only that. She never answered the letters he sent from Texas, probably never passed his messages on to their parents.”
“How horrible. Poor Pappa.”
“Poor Niall. And hearing all that, how could I deny him the chance to form a family with me?”
“You couldn’t.”
“Well, no, I could not. And in my heart I didn’t want to. So,” she tilted her head, sighing, “we married.”
Poor Gran. Her teen bride self grappling with such a change in who she thought her fiancé truly was. Poor Pappa, carrying the guilt of the abortion and the loss of his family, burdens he knew he had to put down to move forward
with Gran. They didn’t know about the years of war and the miscarriages and the drought ahead of them; it would have seemed a glittering future only accessible via a rickety bridge of hope and faith.
And just as they were about to start across, a plank fell into the abyss.
It sent my tears overflowing, contemplating what would have happened if they hadn’t trusted they could make the crossing together.
Chapter 15
But cross the bridge together they did, only as it turned out, it a more rickety crossing than Gran had realized. And there I was sitting in her kitchen telling her the foundations of her life were unsteadier than she’d ever dreamed.
My gut curled further in on itself. “Oh, Gran. I don’t—I mean, you don’t think he ever knew? About the baby and the whole thing with his supposed death?”
She shook her head with the smallest of smiles. “I don’t, sweetheart. No, not my Niall, he couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have stayed in England, or in Texas, knowing there was a child of his in Ireland. No. He never knew.” Gran swallowed back a gasp. “He never knew.”
I could feel my eyes jumping rapidly as they scanned her face. “I always thought he’d had a row with his family, or they’d died or something. He never mentioned much about them other than his childhood days, and I didn’t think to ask.”
“No, Niall was still devoted to them, as much as he could be. It broke him, I always thought, in so many little ways, being away. You don’t remember when he found out his mam had died? You were, oh, nine or ten?” Pappa used to take a day every few weeks to go to the downtown library and read the papers from home. From Ireland, that is. “It was mid-winter, but he spent the next two months ripping down and rebuilding your precious henhouse. Hardly spoke a word to any of us.” She sat back, exhaling fully this time.
Her movement seemed to break the closed system we’d made, beside each other at the table. I looked around. It was almost six. I hesitated. “I could tell them you’re ill, that we can’t make it.”
“Pah! Your mother would have Frank here within minutes. I do love the girl but here she is turning sixty and behaving still like a pre-teen.” We laughed, as usual for Gran and me, leaning our heads towards each other.
Retreat to Love Page 17
