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Heading back into the front of the office I saw Lorna packing up, and I thought it might be time for us to have a discussion about what had transpired that day.
"Hey, you want to come upstairs and have a glass of wine?"
She looked at me over her glasses and pushed a stray strand of her blonde hair behind her ear. "Sure. Nowhere else to be."
We headed up the stairs to the spacious apartment above the clinic, and I went to the fridge to retrieve a bottle of sauvignon blanc that had been chilling since I had first arrived at the place. Grabbing a couple of glasses from the cabinet, I opened the bottled and poured generous amounts into each and handed one of them to Lorna.
"Thanks so much for all that you've done to help me. You know I couldn't do it without you," I said with a smile as we clinked glasses and sipped the cold white wine.
"Well, I know that you would have liked it if your sister had been able to help, but since Lucy is busy with work, then I am happy to help you out as much as I can for as long as you need me." She paused and swirled her wine. "But I've got a feeling you want to talk to me about something else, right?"
I nodded. "Bingo."
It had been years since I had voluntary brought up the Killarny family in conversation. Training myself to avoid any talk of them had been pretty easy living far enough away from home that they no longer had any kind of impact on my daily life. But now that I was back in Ashland that was going to change, and I needed to confront at least some of my surface feelings about the family with my best friend.
“You remember that weekend that Alex and I broke up, right?”
She nodded and took a sip of her wine. “How could I forget? You were inconsolable for a month after and then you refused to talk about it at all.”
I sighed deeply and thought back to that time, finally opening up and explaining everything that had gone on between not only me and Alex but our respective families.
It had been not long after my mother had first fallen ill. It was degenerative and in her muscles and while there wasn’t much that could be done, there were several drug studies available for her to take part in if only we would be able to pay for the expense of getting her to the hospital three states away and keeping her there for a week each time during the course of the treatment. It was something that quickly began to add up, and there wasn’t a lot my father could do to make more money at the time. The cattle business is a market like so many things, and there were only certain times of the year when selling really worked, and the rest of the time it was more about maintaining and caring for the herd.
All that we had was the land. And so he had gone to his friend Sean Killarny, Alex’s father, about it to see if he would be willing to loan him some money for my mother’s treatments. It had hit my father’s pride very hard, and it took so much for him to go to Sean and ask for this. My mother’s illness was the only thing that could have driven him that far. He did it for her.
Sean Killarny had more money than God and everyone within a one hundred mile radius, maybe further, knew it. He could have loaned the money and been done with it, knowing my father would pay him back eventually. But Sean had seen the dire truth of the situation—my father was in desperate need of the money and fast, and he would do anything to get it. Sean proposed the terms. He wouldn’t loan the money, but he would buy most of my father’s land with the intention of selling it back to him at cost when my father had the funds to repay him. In the meantime, we could still live on the land and wouldn’t have to worry about leasing it or anything of the sort. My father regretted it every day, but he hadn’t gotten any of this in writing, and so when things went badly later it was all his word against the other man.
My father trusted Sean Killarny and had no reason not to believe that things wouldn’t pan out exactly as he said. But when the time had come, and he was ready to buy back the land, suddenly Sean was unwilling. He said that the value had gone up and since our small piece of land bordered one of the corners of the Killarny Estate it would be a valuable piece of real estate for him to keep, but if my father really wanted it back then Sean was willing to give it up for twice what he had paid for it.
This was outrageous, and my father knew that it was all completely untrue. He threatened to take Sean to court over it, but as Sean was the one in possession of the land title, there wasn’t much to be done. Now he had my father between a rock and a hard place and insisted that if he wanted to stay on the land, he would have to start paying to lease the place. There was no other choice, and that’s what my father had started doing.
All of this had happened while Alex and I were in our senior year of high school. I was planning to go to a state college, while Alex was going to a different university out of state to get a business degree and we knew we were going to part anyway, but we had been together for so long at that point we decided we wanted to make it work. Four years was a long relationship at that point in our lives, and we didn’t want to throw it all away. Alex had been my first love and I his, and the idea of losing that was too much.
But we watched as our fathers quarreled and I saw how my mother was wasting away. The first drug trial had been a failure, so we put her on a second. With my father leasing the land back for use for his cattle we were leaking funds like a sieve, and there was very little to put toward my mother’s care.
Alex and I fought for months. I was so angry at his father that I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him and even though Alex and I went through with it and attended our senior prom together, I refused to acknowledge his father’s presence when we took a photo in front of the grand staircase at Killarny Estate.
It had all blown up that night. A week before graduation, on prom night, with a wild thunderstorm raging outside of our school gymnasium, Alex and I had sneaked off to his truck where we had sex in the cab. Not for the first time, but Alex had been my first, and this was all part of the passionate, fiery relationship we had shared back then. We fought like cats and dogs, but when we got back together, it was like the Fourth of July with fireworks going off all around us.
I was putting my prom dress back on and suddenly the emotion of the night and knowing that I would be leaving for college soon got to me and I started to cry. Alex tried to comfort me, but I had pushed him away, angry that he was leaving, but more upset that he was related to the man who had done such an underhanded thing to my father—and Alex had done nothing to stop it.
That was the night that I said it was over, although we spoke again a week later at our graduation. It had been terse and then explosive, with me screaming at him in the darkness on the football field after our graduation ceremony, caps in hand, gowns still on. I told him I never wanted to see or speak to him again and I had held to my word.
And now here I was, recounting what had happened a decade ago to my best friend for the firs
t time.
“I can’t believe you never told me what Mr. Killarny did to your dad. It’s so fucked up.”
I nodded, somewhat in a daze. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want you to know the truth of what went on between them. I just didn’t know what I should say. You know exactly how powerful Sean Killarny is in this town. Everyone is under his thumb in one way or another, or they are loyal to him.”
Lorna shrugged. “Well, you may have lucked out on your timing, because Sean Killarny has basically skipped town. He isn’t living around here anymore. I think he shows back up from time to time, but I heard he’s got a place down in Costa Rica.”
That didn’t make much sense to me, but I didn’t press. Maybe Emily Killarny had decided that she wanted a time share and they were spending their retirement basking in the sun on the beach. It was more than my parents would ever be able to do. My mother had passed away not long after graduation ten years before, and now I was on the verge of losing my father as well.
“Good riddance. It’ll be bad enough to have to see the rest of the gang of brothers around town.”
She regarded me for a moment before speaking up again. “And you’re sure you’re not still…I don’t know, harboring any kind of romantic feelings toward Alex?”
