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"Me too," I said. I knew what Graham wished. Like me, he wished we'd gone against Spencer and remained friends with Hunter. "I wish I'd never listened to Spencer. I wish some mobster would shoot him."
"Don't say that, Celia," Graham admonished, but of course I was drunk and sad and wouldn’t listen to reason. "You don't want him murdered by the mob."
"I do," I said. "He's a bastard. He was happy that Sean was killed. He said he wished the whole family would be shot. He's a monster." I bit my cheek to keep from sobbing out loud.
"Are you okay?" he asked. "You sound bad."
"I'm drunk, okay?" I said and then knocked myself on the head. I didn’t need a lecture on drinking from Graham. "Amy and I went out for a few drinks to drown my sorrows."
"You should watch how much you drink, Celia. Remember what happened to Dad."
Of course, he would remind me that alcoholism was what killed our father. An alcoholic got into a car despite being drunk and drove down the wrong side of the freeway, killing my father and disabling my mother.
"Don't remind me."
"I feel like I have to."
"Even you get drunk now and then," I said defensively. "I deserve to now and then, too, and this is as good a reason as any."
"Just take it easy. Pretty soon, you'll get control over your inheritance and can tell Spencer to fuck off. We'll invest it and make even more off it and you'll be set up for when you graduate. Spencer will never have any power over us again."
I nodded. When I turned twenty-four, Spencer would no longer be the executor of my father's will. I'd be free from him. No more manipulation. I could write him out of my life. If only my mother hadn't married him and given him power of attorney when she had gotten so sick…
"I have to go to sleep," I said finally and we said our goodbyes.
I lay in the darkened room and thought about everything. All my regrets, starting with my father's death, Spencer's domination, my treatment of Hunter, and now, Sean's death and how hurt and filled with grief Hunter must be.
Despite all the alcohol, sleep was a long time coming.
Chapter 3: Hunter
One Year Earlier
The funeral was held on the following Thursday, and was well-attended by the local Irish Catholic community. During Mass, I noted a few faces in the pews I hadn't seen before—beady-eyed pale men with high Slavic cheekbones.
Russians.
Thugs from the Romanov family. I hated them.
I'd have to deal with them sooner or later. John was advising me on what protection money we had to pay and how money was laundered through illegal betting on the fights. It was small potatoes, compared to the Romanov family, whose tentacles spread all through the eastern US, in the docks, in fights, in drugs and prostitution.
It was enough to get a RICO charge against my uncle, but I suspected that was done as some kind of favor to Spencer, the new DA, rather than because my uncle was such a big prize.
This whole mess was what I had wanted to escape when I’d joined the Marines. Now here I was, being advised on how to get along in this corrupt world I'd always hated.
The night before, we'd held a real Irish wake for Sean at my uncle's club, although we didn’t prop Sean's body in his coffin in the corner, which my father said had been common back in Ireland. Instead, we created a small shrine with a big picture of Sean, taken when he was still boxing. It was a photo of him standing in the ring after winning a bout, the referee holding his hand high, his face beatific. How he had loved boxing and MMA.
We toasted Sean, talked about the past, and shared our memories of him as a boy, then as a fighter, and finally as a man.
I had always looked up to Sean. He was my big brother who had shown me the ropes both in and out of the boxing ring. He had such a good disposition, and despite his traumatic brain injury he had been cheerful, always laughing and putting his arm around my shoulder.
Now, I was the big brother. I was the oldest Saint of my generation. John was younger than me, Conor younger still. My female cousins weren't involved in the business in any way, so I knew it was all down to me. In the coming weeks, my father would be looking to me to help him adjust to not having either Donny or Sean to help with the business. In the first few distraught hours after the shooting and Sean's death, I’d thought I might escape being drawn back into the business, but I'd been wrong. Finally, I acknowledged that my father needed me. I had to sacrifice what I wanted for him and for Conor.
I had to man up.
After the Mass, we took Sean's coffin to the local Catholic cemetery for burial. The priest led a small service at the graveside, and our closest family and friends stood around under the shade of an old oak tree, and we said our goodbyes to Sean.
There wasn't a dry eye in the place when my cousin John's youngest daughter Colleen played an Irish song on her fiddle, Down by the Sally Gardens. Based on a poem written by William Butler Yeats, it was Sean's favorite piece, and one he used to request when the family got together and listened to Irish music.
