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“Do I have time to change?”
“Plenty of time.” Her mother pulled the roast from the oven. Bridget’s mouth watered and she realized she’d forgotten to eat lunch. “This needs to sit for ten minutes.”
“Great. Be right back.”
She returned to the living room and looked at Owen, his eyes glued to the TV where Christopher Reeve was flying through the sky, holding the dark haired woman who played Lois Lane. “Need anything before I change?”
The shake of his head was almost imperceptible, but she’d gotten good at identifying his smallest movements. She touched his shoulder on her way to the stairs.
The staircase was identical in every row house in the neighborhood — narrow and steep, built for function back when Irish families were immigrating to America in droves and a house like this one was considered a mansion. Her father had worked three jobs when he’d first come to Boston in the 1970s as a teenager, and he continued working three jobs until he had enough to ask Eileen Milligan to marry him with the deed of the house in his hand.
Bridget could see them — young and full of hope, her father handsome and vital, her mother blushing and innocent — as she trailed her hands along the faded floral wallpaper leading to the second floor.
She continued to her bedroom, at the end of the hall because, to hear her father tell it, he’d known even when she’d been born that it would be next to impossible for Bridget to sneak past her parents’ bedroom when she became a teenager. She’d laughed about until she’d gotten to high school and realized he’d been right.
Her parents were progressive for their generation, but they were still Irish, and they hadn’t given a second thought to the possibility that Owen, his bedroom at the top of the stairs, might sneak out, an injustice Bridget would happily have traded for the one they were dealing with instead.
There would be no sneaking out for Owen. No midnight liaisons with a girl from the neighborhood, no embarrassing returns to the front door by Paddy O'Sullivan, one of the neighborhood police who sometimes did locals a favor by returning their errant kids with a warning.
Bridget shut the door to her room, stripped off her skirt and blouse, and sat heavily on the bed. She knew a lot of people would consider it sad to be living at home at the age of twenty-seven, but Bridget wouldn’t have it any other way. It wasn’t just Owen’s illness, although she could never leave her parents to deal with it alone.
She liked being at home. Liked her mother’s food and the camaraderie with Owen and her parents, liked the way she sometimes woke up after falling asleep on the couch to find that one of her parents had covered her with the old blanket on the back of the sofa.
Nolan had liked it too. She’d been surprised by that, by him. She still remembered the way he’d looked the day he’d first introduced himself at the park. He’d carried himself with the kind of confidence only someone with a lifetime of money and privilege could have, the kind of confidence that said he knew he’d always be okay, knew he walked through life with the kind of safety net most people couldn’t even imagine.
She’d thought he was a jerk — a gorgeous, articulate, confident jerk.
But he hadn’t walked away even when she’d feigned disinterest, and eventually she’d discovered that underneath his good looks and golden-boy swagger was someone with a wicked sense of humor, one that he was more than happy to aim at himself. His self-deprecation had made her laugh, and before she knew it she’d spent two hours sitting across from him at the Southside Diner, drinking bad coffee and picking at a cold grilled cheese sandwich while he talked about the perils and privileges of being a rich kid.
It was only later that she’d realized he was nervous, that his stories and jokes and observations were just a cover. She’d waited for him to finish a story involving his mother, his stepfather, and an unfortunate incident involving the tap water in Mexico before asking a question of her own.
Do you always talk so much to avoid really talking?
He’d looked at her with surprise, stopped cold in the moment before a slow grin broke across his face. She closed her eyes, seeing him in her mind’s eye as he’d looked then, covering his chest with his hands as if he were wounded by her observation.
Do you always make observations about relative strangers that make them rethink every one of their life choices?
They’d both laughed and it had been like the clouds parting after a long rain, the sidewalks scrubbed clean, the air washed of its pollution until all she could smell was the salt of the sea blown in off the bay.
She’d been lost to him then and there, she just hadn’t known it.
It had begun an obsession that lasted nearly three years. Three years of fevered meetings in between her shifts at Southside and night classes at Suffolk University. They’d walked the streets of the city, stayed in the parks when the weather was nice until the cops kicked them out, rode the city bus into neighborhoods neither of them had ever seen just to keep talking.
He’d taken her to visit his grandparents two streets over and they’d shaken their heads at the surprise of it, the fact that they’d never, not once, run into each other in the neighborhood. She could only laugh when he introduced her to his best friend and she realized it was none other than Billy — who now preferred to be called Will — MacFarland, neighborhood clown and troublemaker.
After that the three of them had been together more often than not, drinking cheap beer at The Chipp and engaging in debates at Southside that went long into the night. Nolan had loved her parents and Owen, had seemed perfectly comfortable in the tiny house filled with the smell of her mother’s cooking.
Bridget had only met Nolan’s mother once, a brief and inauspicious meeting that had lasted all of ten minutes. Bridget hadn’t known how it would end, but watching Nolan’s mother eye her with barely concealed disdain, answering her questions, designed to highlight what Moira Adams (nee Burke) already knew — that Bridget Monaghan of Southie was in no way good enough for her son — Bridget had known it was the beginning of the end. She just hadn’t expected it to end nearly a year later with a check for five-hundred thousand dollars and a promise never to see Nolan again.
Bridget’s heart still constricted just thinking about it, and she stood, forcing herself to move, to pull on a pair of jeans and a sweater before walking to the mirror over her dresser to take down her hair.
She could still see Nolan’s mother the day she’d appeared at Southside, could see the look of determination on her face as she offered Bridget a check she had no way of knowing Bridget needed to keep her brother alive.
They’d found out about Owen’s illness two weeks earlier. It was the only secret she’d ever kept from Nolan, kept because she knew he would insist on helping, and because she hadn’t figured out how to navigate the waters of a rich boyfriend and a terminally ill sibling and money that would only become a wedge between them.
She’d been sick after Nolan’s mom left, had gone to the bathroom and thrown up her lunch before returning from her break to continue her shift.
She hadn’t taken the money right away, but in the end, she had taken it. Of course, Nolan’s mother assumed she was a greedy little gold digger who wanted the money for herself, but by then it hardly mattered what Moira Adams thought of her.
