“Menu doesn’t need any help,” Jed said.
Here we go again, I thought. Just like the conversation I had with Cargan about the Manor’s menu, so would this conversation about The Dugout’s menu go. “Nothing big,” I said. “Just a few tweaks.”
Jed hadn’t looked at me up until this point, preferring to stare into his pint. “Doesn’t matter, Bel.”
“What doesn’t matter, Jed?” I asked. I was losing the thread of this particular conversation.
He swept his hand around the bar. “This. Food.” He turned and looked at me. “You. Your guilt.”
I could feel the flush starting at my feet and moving up my body. “I’m not guilty,” I said, but even to my ears it rang hollow, a little false.
“Sure you are,” he said, draining his beer and getting to his feet. “We all are.”
“I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about,” I said.
He smiled, but it wasn’t cheerful or pleasant, more of a grimace with some sarcasm laced into it. “Sure you do, Bel.” He walked out of the bar and onto the street, stopping in front of the bar and looking out at the village for a few moments before moving on.
I was unsettled most of the day but tried to put it out of my mind as I ventured into my family home. Walking into the part of the house in which I grew up, I was assaulted with the smell of red cabbage bubbling away on the stove. Cabbage of any kind had had a kind of resurgence a few years back, becoming the new kale, which had replaced arugula as the hot veg, but it was still one of my least favorite foods. I felt as if I had eaten more cabbage in my lifetime than any one person should. Mom always added too much vinegar and not enough salt, and the effect was briny and mouth puckering in intensity. The only thing that saved the meal was the way that Mom roasted meat and I could also smell a fresh ham in the oven, which mitigated my disgust at the prospect of the red cabbage.
Your perfect summer meal. If you were Irish, of course.
Cargan was mashing potatoes with a hand masher, no electric mixer good enough for this task. “Hiya, Bel,” he said. He was in his home jersey, his droopy shorts grass stained. “Great job on the O’Donnell wedding,” he said, as if we had never had the conversation about my fancy food and how it would be a disaster to serve. “Everyone loved it.”
I already knew that, having eavesdropped on the comments from the departing guests.
“And we won today,” he continued. “Eduardo was amazing in goal.”
“Excellent, Car,” I said. “You’ll have to let me know when your next game is so I can go.”
His face lit up. To the best of my knowledge, not one of my brothers had taken the time to see Cargan play soccer, so engrossed in their own lives and squabbles that they couldn’t focus on anyone else.
On the screened-in porch, which faced the back forty, as Dad called it, or the lawn that he tended to with the precision of a surgeon, were Arney and his wife, Grace; Derry and his wife, Maria, or the Eye-talian, as Uncle Eugene called her; and Feeney, with his latest conquest, a girl barely out of her teens and covered in tattoos with the bizarre moniker Sandree. “Her ma named her Sandy, but she didn’t like it, so she sexed it up,” Feeney had told me the first time we had met the lovely Sandree, she of the tattoo that ran up the length of her arm and was tribal in nature. When I had commented that she seemed a little young and perhaps “unfocused,” Feeney had let me know that she had a thriving career as a manager of the local Old Navy and that was she twenty-one, “almost twenty-two.” In eight months. Her birthday was in February, I had come to learn. That made her closer to twenty than twenty-two, but I let it slide. Feeney looked as happy as he could look when he was with her, and she certainly provided hours of entertainment, what with her “original guitar compositions” that she played for us after the first dinner we had together. She had Feeney’s punk sensibilities, the ones he had to tamp down when he sang the standards at the weddings. “Your Tats Are Sick” was my favorite composition of hers followed by “My Pit Bull’s Name is Red.”
Aunt Helen also arrived shortly after I did, Dad handing her a gin and tonic with a squeeze of lime, her signature drink, as she walked in the door. Frank the Tank was by her side, but if history was any indication we wouldn’t get much from him in terms of lively conversation. Helen collapsed heavily onto the wicker settee on the sunporch. She wasn’t as beautiful as my mother, and I suspected that had haunted Helen for her entire life by the way she sometimes behaved around her older sister. It also informed Helen’s treatment of Caleigh—the “pretty one” as she liked to refer to her when I was around and probably when I wasn’t—helping my cousin become someone who spent an inordinate amount of time on grooming. “Is this what it’s like, Oona?”
Mom was placing a plate of cheese and crackers on the round, glass-topped coffee table, and the boys and Sandree descended on it like a pack of vultures. “Is this what what’s like, Helen?”
“Marrying off your children. Being alone,” she said. I looked over at the old Tank, wondering how he felt about this proclamation of solo-hood. She wasn’t completely alone, obviously, but as my father liked to say, “Caleigh didn’t lick it off the grass”—meaning that any character traits Caleigh had exhibited had come straight from her parents—when it came to high drama. Like mother, like daughter.
“You have me,” Frank said.
Helen treated Frank like a doddering old man when, in reality, he was a robust fifty-eight. “Oh, yes, dear,” she said. “I do.”
“You’re not alone, Helen,” my father said, his booming voice filling the space. He had arrived from his studio in one of his patented studio outfits: paint-splattered clamdiggers and an oversized shirt, Adidas slides on his feet. One toe was completely covered in yellow paint, an inexplicable phenomenon. “You have us!” he said, sweeping his arms out to encompass the boys and their significant others, the kids playing outside on the back forty. His hand caught the ceiling fan with his grand gesture, twirling lazily above us, and a blade broke off, clattering onto the plate of cheese and crackers. Feeney swept it off and continued eating, handing Sandree a Triscuit with a slab of cheddar and a splinter from the blade, which I’m not even sure she picked off before putting the whole thing in her mouth.
“You’ve gained a son,” Mom said, but that did nothing to mollify Aunt Helen, who was in a complete swoon over Caleigh’s marriage. Nothing about the guy who died at the reception, but everything about Helen’s new life as the mother of a married woman. “And a fine man, a wonderful provider and husband, at that.” Mom looked over at me and I couldn’t tell if she was telegraphing that I should keep my mouth shut about Mark or I should get on the stick and find my own Mark.
Sandree brought up the “troubles,” as I had come to think of them. “That poor guy! The one who was murdered? That was awful!” she said to a cacophony of “oh, yes” and “we don’t want to talk about that” and “let’s focus on the positive!” coming from Mom, Dad, and Aunt Helen. “But really. A murder at a wedding? If it wasn’t so horrible, it would be kind of cool,” she said, Feeney poking her in the ribs. She looked at him, aggrieved. “Well, it is. Cool, that is. No one will ever forget it.”
“A man is dead,” Cargan said, having left the confines of the kitchen, his potato masher in his hands. “And I don’t think that’s ‘cool,’ Sandree.”
“Shut it, Cargan,” Feeney said.
“Make me.” Cargan brandished the potato masher, ready to fend off whatever assault Feeney had planned. Yes, Feeney. My forty-year-old brother.
And we’re off, I thought. I was surrounded by grown men with the intellectual and emotional capabilities of a bunch of fifteen-year-olds. Derry stood and took his wife’s hand. “I think we’ll see what the kids are doing.”
Arney and Grace took their leave as well. “Yes, the kids. Make sure they aren’t getting into any trouble.”
I was left with Cargan, Mom, Dad, Helen, Feeney, and Sandree, wondering how a nice Sunday dinner could take such a nasty turn. Oh, right. It was m
y family. We had two emotions, when together: happiness and anger. There was nothing in between. I got up and got everyone a round of drinks. Two drinks in and things would calm down. Three and we would still be okay. Four and the “troubles” would start again. I decided I would be gone by that time, thinking about what a menu for dinner with Brendan Joyce might look like.
“Hey, Aunt Helen,” I said. “While we’re on the topic,” I added, handing everyone drinks from the tray that I had found in the cupboard next to the refrigerator. “Who was Declan Morrison?” I asked. “Who invited him?”
Aunt Helen sniffed derisively. “He was no one. He was a party crasher.”
Mom looked over at her sister, a crease in her brow. Worry. Concern. Something else.
“So you didn’t invite him? Caleigh didn’t, either?” I asked. “He told me he was her third cousin, once removed, which means that he must have been related to Uncle Jack.”
“No!” Aunt Helen said.
“So, he just hopped a plane from Ireland, found Shamrock Manor, and came to the wedding?” My saying it out loud was proof of how preposterous the whole thing was.
“Yes, Bel. That’s exactly what happened,” Aunt Helen said, and I could tell that she was gearing up for an argument, even though I found that whole scenario hard to believe. Seems she had found a story and was sticking to it. Mom shot me a look, and in that look was the implication that if I asked another question I’d be eating dinner out by the shed. “There are people who do that, you know. Take advantage of situations. Crash parties. I don’t know why you find that so hard to believe.”
“Because it’s ridiculous?” I said.
Cargan caught my eye and drew a finger across his neck. Why everyone was so blasé about a death at a wedding was beyond me, but that’s where we were. I decided to let it go and steel myself for the assault to my system the red cabbage would bring.
I excused myself and went into the kitchen to get a glass of water, Cargan at my heels.
“Heard you’re consulting on The Dugout’s menu,” he said, giving me a side eye as he checked his potatoes.
“You too?” I said.
“Me too what?”
“I saw Jed there today and he acted as if I had committed some kind of supreme misstep. I’m just trying to help the old guy. Having good food would up his game.”
Cargan tasted his potatoes. “I don’t think he wants to up his game,” he said.
“Well, he should!” I said, not sure why it was important to me. Why it mattered. “Can’t I do something nice for someone?”
Cargan shrugged. “I guess it depends on why you want to,” he said, and left the kitchen.
Dinner was a rather low-key affair, with everyone on their best behavior after a rocky start. Mom’s roast was the same as always: juicy, succulent, with a crispy skin. Her red cabbage? Meh. I pushed it around on my plate and could have sworn I heard Aunt Helen whisper, “Snob,” as she cleared my plate, my dislike for cabbage now a character flaw, apparently.
Caleigh surely didn’t lick it off the grass. No sirree.
I ate a slice of store-bought angel food cake and begged off a little after seven, citing some menu preparation that I wanted to undertake in advance of the McCarthy wedding.
“NOTHING FANCY!” Dad bellowed. “AND NO ROASTED PIGS!” Dad’s entire being—his gestalt, so to speak—was lived in capital letters, exclamation points. I was used to it by now. I wondered how it flew with the guests at the Manor, the people who booked the joint. Maybe the high ceilings and the vast expanse of dance floor made him feel as if he had to say everything at the highest decibel. Maybe he was just loud. Or maybe he was going deaf. Who knew?
I headed outside and started around the house toward the steps leading to my apartment, passing Dad’s studio, one light left on over the big wooden table in the center of the room. From inside I heard the cry of a cat, one who wanted to be outside yet was trapped inside. The door to the studio was locked, but Dad “hid” a key on top of the jamb, thinking no one knew that access to his artistic area was so available, but I reached up and there it was, just like always. I had hidden a lot of stuff in the studio over the years: a six-pack of beer, a pack of cigarettes (really, I was holding them for a friend), that one test that I got a 60 on because I hadn’t studied. For all I knew, it was still in there, along with a pair of jeans that I had spent eighty dollars on and the shoes that my mother had pronounced “slutty” and which I promised I had returned but which I had kept and worn with glee when she wasn’t around.
Inside, I called for the cat, knowing full well that she didn’t know her name but giving it a try nonetheless. “Taylor!” I poked around, looking under boxes and around canvases, but couldn’t find her. “Taylor!” I said a little louder, going into the small room in the back where I had found Dad a few days earlier, standing over a box marked “ART.” No cat in sight. I picked up a canvas that had fallen and put it on top of the box, noticing that where it had once been sealed shut, it was now open a little bit. From inside I heard the mournful cry of Taylor or some other wayward cat. I would soon find out which it was.
I pulled the lid back from the box of supposed art and peered inside, waiting a few seconds for my eyes to adjust in the dark of the windowless room. The cat was in there all right, and indeed it was Taylor, but what she was sitting atop wasn’t “art.”
AK-47s, one stacked atop another, were in the box, the little cat peering up at me from the place she had nestled in beside them.
CHAPTER Twenty-three
It took me a long time to go to sleep that night and even longer for me to get up the guts to go to the Manor the next morning and face my parents, one of whom was a liar (Mom) and the other of whom was most likely an arms dealer (Dad). The thought of those two things made my stint at The Monkey’s Paw, my almost assassination of the former president, and my fending off a knife-wielding actor seem like child’s play.
Dad was a patriot for both his native Ireland and for the good old U.S. of A. But was he such a patriot that he thought that hoarding guns—and maybe sending them back over to his homeland—was a patriotic thing to do? I worried on this and the repercussions of someone finding Dad’s stash most of the night. Eugene was supposedly the ne’er-do-well in the extended family, but I wondered if I had made that up in my mind, that the rumors that swirled in my childhood had grown in magnitude over the years, that my brothers had stoked the gossip fires. Dad was the good guy. But between the guns and the murder I couldn’t figure out what was going on exactly, and that troubled me.
Not Dad. Never Dad. He was a kind and decent soul, not a renegade. I was sure of that.
I had tossed and turned most of the night but finally dragged myself over to the kitchen at the Manor the next morning to try out some of the ideas I had come up with for appetizers. They weren’t anything special, just some tried-and-true treats that might make it past the Irish clientele Mom and Dad seemed to cultivate and appeal to. Bruschetta on toasted garlic bread; a goat cheese tart; a chicken satay skewer. Nothing that was going to set the culinary world on fire but a step up from the frozen canapés and pigs in a blanket that were standard fare at the Manor.
I cooked for a while, avoiding anyone in my family. Dad was in the foyer doing some additional repair work on the broken banister and Mom’s voice could be heard coming from the office, her tone low, like she was whispering. I stepped toward the door of the office that led into the kitchen; it was ajar. Mom was doing her best to be heard by the person on the other end but no one else, her back turned to the kitchen door, the sound of Dad’s hammering almost drowning out her side of the conversation.
“Helen, we have talked about this repeatedly. No one knows. No one will ever know. But for Christ’s sake, if you continue acting like this, people will become suspicious.”
I had never heard my mother take the Lord’s name in vain and I wasn’t sure what had me more upset—that she was harboring some secret that Helen seemed to know about or that it had her so
upset that she had actually said “Christ” in anger. She was quiet for an extended period while she listened to Aunt Helen, whose voice was traveling through the phone and into the space of the office, her words loud but unintelligible. “Helen, calm down. I have work to do and can’t spend my days worrying about something like this.” She waited as Helen perseverated some more. “I’ve got to go. Good-bye,” she said, swinging around and firmly placing the phone on the receiver.
Surprised by the speed at which the call ended and seeing the realization dawn on my mother’s face when she saw something—my checkered pants, my white coat, my wide eyes—in the space where the door was open, I fell into the office, falling into the chair in front of the desk. “Mom, hi,” I said.
“Belfast,” she said, the wheels turning in her head, figuring out how much I had heard, if she should ask. “Do you need something?”
I realized I was holding a skewer of chicken satay. “Want to try this?” I asked, proffering the hors d’oeuvre. “It’s going to be new on the menu for the McCarthy wedding this Saturday.”
She studied the skewer and finally, after much examination, tasted it. “Well, it’s lovely, dear. Just the right amount of spice.”
My parents hate spice. Spice, to them, is salt and salt alone. This was high praise indeed. “Do you want to try a few of the others?” I asked.
“No, I trust you. I’m sure they are delicious.” She patted her flat midsection, the one I hadn’t inherited. “That was Aunt Helen,” she said after a few moments of awkward silence.
“I gathered.”
“She’s upset.”
“About what?”
Mom sighed. “It’s complicated, honey. I’d rather not go into it.”
“Is she okay?” I asked.
“Yes, she’s fine,” Mom said, and looked down at the ledger in front of her. “Dad and I were talking and we’d like to start advertising that we have a world-renowned chef at the Manor now. Is that okay with you?”
Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) Page 14
