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“It seems sharp enough to me.”
Riley cackled. “Oh, the brain’s stayed with me well enough. Just takes the body a mite longer to get up and running these days.” The boy wanted to know what had been and where he’d come from, Riley decided. And why shouldn’t he? “I’ll tell you, the babe, the boy who grew to be your father, was a handsome one. Many’s the time I saw him toddling along the roads holding his ma’s hand.”
“And his father’s?”
“Well, perhaps not so often, but now and again. Dennis was after making a living and putting by for his journey to America. I hope they had a good life there.”
“They did. My grandfather wanted to build, and that’s what he did.”
“Then that was enough for him. I remember your father, the younger Dennis, coming back here when he was old enough to have grown a few whiskers.” Riley paused to pour himself more tea from his thermos. “He seemed to’ve grown fine, had a pleasing way about him, and set some of the local lasses fluttering.” He winked.“As you’ve done yourself. Still, he didn’t choose, at that time, to leave anything behind him here but the memory. You’ve chosen different.”
Riley gestured toward the construction with his cup. “Building something here’s what you’re about, isn’t it?”
“It seems to be, at the moment.”
“Well, Johnnie, he wanted nothing more than a cottage and his girl, but the war took him. His mother died not five years after, heartbroken. It’s a hard thing, don’t you think, for a man to live always in the shadow of a dead brother?”
Trevor glanced up again, met the faded and shrewd eyes. Clever old man, he thought, and supposed if you lived past the century mark, you had to be clever. “I imagine it is, even if you go three thousand miles to escape it.”
“That’s the truth. Better by far to stand and build your own.” He nodded, this time with a kind of approval. “Well, as I said, you’ve the look of him, long-dead John Magee, in the bones of your face and around the eyes. Once they landed on Maude Fitzgerald, she was his heart. Do you believe in romance and ever after, young Magee?”
Trevor glanced away, up toward Darcy’s window, then back again. “For some.”
“You have to believe in it to get it.” Riley winked and passed his cup to Trevor. “What’s built isn’t always of wood and stone, and still it lasts.” Reaching out, he once again laid one of his gnarled hands on the head of the child nearest his chair. “Ever after.”
“Some of us do better with wood and stone,” Trevor commented, then absently drank the tea. He lost his breath, his vision blurred. “Jesus,” he managed as the heavy lacing of whiskey scored his throat.
Riley laughed so hard he fell to wheezing, and his wrinkled face went pink with humor. “There now, lad, what’s a cup of tea without a shot of the Irish in it, I’d like to know? Never say they’ve diluted your blood so over there in Amerikay you can’t handle your own.”
“I don’t usually handle it at eleven in the morning.”
“What’s the clock got to do with a bloody thing?”
The man, Trevor thought, seemed old as Moses and had been steadily sipping the spiked tea for an hour. Compelled to save face, Trevor downed the rest of the cup and was rewarded by a wide, rubbery grin.
“You’re all right, young Magee. You’re all right. Since you are, I’ll tell you this. That lovely lass inside Gallagher’s won’t settle for less in a man than hot blood, a strong backbone, and a clever brain. I’m considering you have all three.”
Trevor handed Riley back his cup. “I’m just here to build a theater.”
“If that’s the truth, then I’ll say this as well: It goes that youth is wasted on the young, but I’m of a mind that the young waste youth.” He poured another cup of tea. “And I’ll just have to marry her meself.” Amusement danced in his eyes as he sipped. “Step lively, boyo, for I’ve a world of experience with the female of the species.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Trevor got to his feet. “What did John Magee do before he went to war?”
“For a living, you’re meaning.” If Riley thought it was odd that Trevor wouldn’t know he didn’t say so. “He was for the sea. His heart belonged to it, and to Maude, and to nothing else.”
Trevor nodded. “Thanks for the tea,” he said and went back to join his crew.
He skipped lunch. There were too many calls to make, faxes expected, to take time for an hour in the pub and his afternoon dose of Darcy. He hoped she looked for him, wondered a little. If he understood her as he thought he did, she would expect him to come in, to have to come And it would annoy her when he didn’t.
Good, Trevor mused as he let himself into the cottage. He wanted to keep her a little off-balance. That careless confidence of hers was a formidable weapon. Her arrogance played right along with it. And damned if he didn’t find them both attractive.
Amused at himself, he went directly up to his office and spent thirty minutes immersed in business. It was one of his skills, this ability to tune out every other thought and zero in on the deal of the moment. With Riley’s memories fresh in his own mind, and Darcy dancing at the edges of it, he needed that skill now more than ever.
Once current projects were handled, faxes zipped off, E-mail answered and sent, he gave his thoughts to a future project he was formulating.
Time, he thought, to lay the groundwork. Picking up the phone, he called Gallagher’s. He was pleased that Aidan answered. Trevor made it a point to go straight to the head of a company. Or in this case, a family.
“It’s Trev.”
“Well, now, I thought I’d see you sitting at one of my tables by this time of day.”
Aidan raised his voice over the lunchtime clatter, and Trevor imagined him pulling pints one-handed while he talked. In the background he heard Darcy’s laugh.
“I had some business to do. I’d like to have a meeting with you and your family, when it’s convenient for you.”
“A meeting? About the theater?”
“Partly. Do you have an hour to spare, maybe between shifts?”
“Oh, I imagine we can accommoda
te you. Today?”
“Sooner the better.”
“Fine. Come on by the house then. We tend to hold our family meetings ’round the kitchen table.”
“I appreciate it. Would you ask Brenna to come by?”
“I will, yes.” Taking her off the job, Aidan thought, but made no comment. “I’ll see you a bit later, then.”
Around the kitchen table. Trevor recalled several of his own family meetings in the same venue. Before his first day of school, when he was going off to baseball camp, about to take his driver’s test, and so on. All of his rites of passage, and his sister’s, had been discussed there. Serious punishments, serious praise had warranted the kitchen table.
Odd, he remembered now, when he had broken his engagement, he’d told his parents as they sat in the kitchen. That’s where he’d told them of his plans for the Ardmore theater, and his intention of coming to Ireland.
And, he realized as he calculated the time in New York, that was where his parents most likely were at this moment. He picked up the phone again and called home.
“Good morning, Magee residence.”
“Hello, Rhonda, it’s Trev.”
“Mister Trevor.” The Magee housekeeper had never called him anything else, even when she’d threatened to swat him. “How are you enjoying Ireland?”
“Very much. Did you get my postcard?”
“I did. You know how much I love to get them. I was telling Cook just yesterday that Mister Trevor never forgets how I like postcards for my album. Is it as green as that, really?”
“Greener. You should come over, Rhonda.”
“Oh, now you know I’m not getting on an airplane unless somebody holds a gun to my head. Your folks are having breakfast. They’re going to be thrilled to hear from you. Just hold on a minute. You take care of yourself, Mister Trevor, and come back soon.”
“I will. Thanks.”
He waited, enjoying the picture of the rail-thin black woman in her ruthlessly starched apron hurrying over the rich white marble floor, past the art, the antiques, the flowers, to the back of the elegant brownstone. She wouldn’t use the intercom to announce his call. Such family dealings could only be delivered in person.
The kitchen would smell of coffee, fresh bread, and the violets his mother was most fond of. His father would have the paper open to the financial section. His mother would be reading the editorials and getting worked up about the state of the world and narrow minds.
There would be none of that uneasy quiet, that underthe-polish tension that had lived in his grandparents’ home. Somehow his father had escaped that, just as his own father had escaped Ardmore. But the younger Dennis had indeed stood and built his own.
“Trev! Baby, how are you?”
“I’m good. Nearly as good as you sound. I thought I’d catch you and Dad at breakfast.”
“Creatures of habit. But this is an even lovelier way to start the day. Tell me what you see.”
It was an old request, an old habit. Automatically he rose to go to the window. “The cottage has a front garden. An amazing one for such a small place. Whoever designed it knew just what they wanted. It’s like a . . . a witch’s garden. One of the good witches who helps maidens break evil spells. The flowers tumble together, color, shape, and scent. Beyond it are hedges of wild fuchsia, deep red on green and taller than I am. The road they line is narrow as a ditch and full of ruts. Your teeth rattle if you go over thirty. Then the hills slope down, impossibly green, toward the village. There are rooftops and white cottages and tidy streets. The church steeple, and well off is a round tower I have to visit. It’s all edged by the sea. It’s sunny today, so the light flashes off the blue. It’s really very beautiful.”
“Yes, it is. You sound happy.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You haven’t been, not really, for too long. Now I’ll let you talk to your father, who’s rolling his eyes at me, as I imagine you have business to discuss.”
“Mom.” There was so much, so much that his morning conversation with an old man and his horde of progeny had set to swirling inside him. He said what he felt the most. “I miss you.”
“Oh. Oh, now look what you’ve done.” She sniffled. “You can just talk to your
