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Patrick didn’t manage to convince Finbarr to ask their family about helping with the roof of his house. For some reason, the lad was as uncomfortable with their family as he himself was. Despite his shaky standing among them, Patrick had agreed to be the messenger.
Approaching Da at that week’s céilí seemed his likeliest chance of success; he wasn’t likely to toss profanities at Patrick’s head when all the neighbors were looking on.
He moved to stand beside his da, pausing to build up his courage. Asking his family for a favor was a bold thing to do. Arrogant, even. He justified it by reminding himself that the favor was for Finbarr, not for himself. That they’d do anything for their youngest brother.
After a drawn-out moment of watching the gathering, Da spoke. “Do you remember the céilís in Ireland?”
“Not really. I haven’t many solid memories of our homeland.”
“You were young when we left. Even Tavish’s memories are few and vague, and he’s two years older than you are. It’s done your ma’s heart and mine good to give our children a taste of home.”
“And all the town, at that,” Patrick added.
A smug smile pulled at Da’s weathered face. “We even got our stubborn American neighbors to embrace a heap of our traditions. If you’d asked me five years ago whether they’d ever see value in us or our customs, I’d’ve struggled to decide whether to laugh or cry.”
That was unexpected. “Has the town had troubles?”
“Aye. We had a war on our hands here, and many suffered for it.” Da looked to him. “Did Biddy tell you about Ian taking a beating to the head?”
“She did.”
Da nodded slowly. “And you know about Finbarr’s burned face and eyes.”
“Aye.”
“And Katie Archer’s fingerless hand.”
“Mercy.”
A heavy sadness weighed down Da’s expression. “We’ve found peace among us, but it came at a cost, son.”
“This country found peace within itself as well,” he answered. “But it came at a steep price. Painfully steep.”
Da slapped a hand on his shoulder. “War’s a brutal thing.”
“It is that.” He pushed out the words he’d rather have kept quiet but knew needed to be said. “I wish Grady had come back from battle, Da. I really do. And I tried to protect him. But me against the brutality of war was an uneven battle to begin with.”
“You came back to us,” Da said. “That’s more than we thought we’d have. Grady gave us that.”
Patrick had made enough confessions for one night. He wasn’t ready to make more. He swallowed down any further explanation and switched to the topic he’d meant to discuss from the beginning. “Finbarr and I are nearly done with his house. We’re needing to put on the roof next, but we can’t do that without help.”
Da nodded. “You’ve a bevy of family ready to assist you. Just tell us when.”
“I will.”
“Good.” Da gave him one more shoulder slap before slipping out amongst the townspeople. He smiled as he greeted them, moving among them easily and happily.
They’re at home here. This was how he’d always pictured his family: happy, at peace, together. If only Grady hadn’t— He stopped the thought before it fully formed. What was done was done. He’d do better to pick up the pieces rather than bemoan the shattered state of things.
He wandered through the crowd, his feet carrying him where they always did on Saturday nights: straight to Ma’s shortbread. He’d not yet been able to justify indulging in it. He hadn’t done anything to earn that bit of home. Maybe after Finbarr’s house was done, and he had a paying job, and his own roof over his head, and . . . and he could get through a day without his thoughts turning to the bottle under his bed and the relief it would offer, and get through more than a couple of those days without indulging in that relief. He didn’t know if he’d ever have strength enough to manage that.
Maura’s husband, Ryan, greeted him as he passed with a friendly word and a warm smile. He’d not been part of Patrick’s rough history with the family. That likely helped. Maura herself had been welcoming from the moment he’d arrived in Hope Springs, but there’d always been a hint of hurt in her expression and tone. Aidan had kept more of a distance since Patrick cut his hair and trimmed up his beard. Maybe the lad remembered enough of his father to see the resemblance that haunted Patrick every day.
Patrick slipped around a clump of laughing young people and came face to face with Eliza.
She spoke before he could. “I’ve not seen you in ages, it seems. How are you?”
“Grand altogether.” The response wasn’t entirely truthful, but it was easy. His gaze fell to Lydia, on her ma’s hip as always. “Hey, there, Lydia.”
The little one smiled at him, finger hooked over her lip. She had a way of softening his mood no matter how sharp it was. But she wasn’t the only one of the Porter ladies who warmed his heart. Ever since his talk with Finbarr and the realization that he’d grown partial to Eliza, Patrick couldn’t deny that she was something of a risk, a danger. He wanted to be around her, talk with her, simply embrace the kindness and acceptance she’d offered him from the very beginning.
But that was selfish. He knew it was. A decade of proof lay behind him. He’d not amass more evidence. Not at her expense.
“I love these weekly céilís,” Eliza said. “Did I pronounce that right? I know it doesn’t sound the same as when an Irish voice says it.”
“You did fine.” She really had.
Eliza looked over at the dancers, spinning about to the music. “We’ll get to do this every Saturday forever and ever. Can you imagine that?”
“Ma says the céilís aren’t held in the winter. ’Tis too cold for being outside for hours.”
She tipped her head. “I hadn’t thought of that. And I suppose the church building isn’t large enough for holding all of the town plus food and still have room for dancing.”
“I’d imagine not.”
Her eyes pulled wide in excitement. She grasped his arm with her free hand. “The inn, Patrick. The céilís could be held in a public room during bad weather. It’ll be bigger than the church building. There’d be space for food and dancing.”
He hadn’t thought of that, but the idea made him smile. “That’d be a fine thing for the town, Eliza.”
“We’d be heroes,” she said with a laugh.
We. He liked the sound of that, but he shouldn’t. The less she connected herself with him, the better off she’d be. She had no idea the demons he wrestled with. Distance was best.
“I’ll build it, Mrs. Porter, but it ain’t my circus.”
She was clearly taken aback. “Mrs. Porter?”
It had sounded awkward, but he was desperate. He needed space. She did too, whether she realized it or not.
“I’ll be working for you just as soon as the project gets underway. Best begin addressing you properly now.”
She did not appear the least impressed by his explanation. “Mrs. Porter?” she said again.
“Doesn’t it sound like a name of an employer?”
“Of course it does.” A hardness entered her eyes, something he’d not ever seen there before. “It’s the name of the woman I worked for in New York. The mistress of the house I cleaned. The woman who made my life an absolute nightmare. The woman who said hurtful and hateful things to me about me and my daughter.” She took a nostril-flaring breath. Every line of her posture had filled with tension. “I’ll accept being called ‘Mrs. Porter’ by children, but no one else. Certainly not you.”
How tempted he was to tell her he’d been mistaken, that they ought to return to the informality between them. “A certain distance ought to be kept between those working and those they’re working for. That other Mrs. Porter was right on that score.”
Her next breath shook a little. Anger was replaced by hurt. “She wasn’t right about anything, Patrick.” The pain and fragility in her eyes tugged at him dangerously. He needed to sever that bond now while he still could. He’d be doing her a service.
“Coziness between an employer and employee never ends well,” he said firmly. “You ought to know that.”
She watched him, silent and still.
“If you’re looking for camaraderie, search out the doctor,”—he had to force out the final two words—“Mrs. Porter.” With movements he knew were a little stiff, he turned and beat a hasty retreat.
I’m doing her a favor, he reminded himself every time his heart shouted at him to go back and apologize. He kept telling himself the same thing all the way to his parents’ loft.
Patrick hadn’t made it through an entire céilí in weeks. Something always pushed him away. It was the time each week when he was most likely to give in to the promise of oblivion. He sat on his bed, breathing and staying strong. Lydia’s doll still sat on the little table nearby, watching him.
“I’m bein’ good,” he told it.
That didn’t make him feel better though. He stood and paced away. How he wished he had his fiddle and a bit of privacy. The instrument he’d sold in Winnipeg had sometimes worked as a distraction from whiskey’s siren song. Of course, he couldn’t have played it here in his parents’ home. He’d not played in front of another person in more than a decade.
Saints, he hated that he’d been harsh with Eliza. He was trying to protect her, trying to protect himself, but he kept getting everything wrong. His own history ought to have taught him how unlikely he was to be a success as a protector.
In the dim, quiet of the house he heard footsteps. That happened off and on over the course of each Saturday night. People came in to fetch things before rushing back out. He just kept quiet so they’d not notice him up there.
This time, however, the footsteps turned into the sound of someone climbing the ladder to the loft. Climbing it slowly, in fact.
Patrick held perfectly still, hardly daring to breathe.
A voice, one straight from the roadsides of England, echoed up to him. “Climbing this thing with an almost two-year-old in my arms is not nearly as easy as you might think. I’d be greatly obliged to you if you’d offer me a bit of help.”
He stepped to the ladder and looked down. Sure enough, Eliza was halfway up, clinging to the ladder with one hand and Lydia with the other.
“What’re you doing here, woman?”
“Trying not to fall to my death,” she answered.
“Saints preserve us.” He lay down on the floor of the loft and held his hands down to her. “Hand me the lass.”
They managed the exchange, and Patrick twisted enough to set the girl on the floor, keeping an arm around her so she’d not wander away.
“I-und,” she said with a grin.
“Patrick.”
As always, she didn’t even attempt to correct herself. Truth be told, he didn’t mind too much. He stood and scooped Lydia up just as Eliza reached the top. The little girl leaned into him, her tiny fingers scratching at his whiskers.
Patrick set his gaze on her ma. “You’re missing the party, Mrs.—”
“So help me, Patrick O’Connor, if you call me that one more time, I’ll abscond with every piece of long underwear you have up here and sew all the legs shut.”
He thought it best to call a truce for the moment, on the topic of how he addressed her, at least. “If I call you Eliza again, will you go back to the céilí and leave me be?”
“No. Call me Eliza and I’ll leave your underthings alone. I’ll go back to the céilí when I’m good and ready.”
He bounced Lydia a little, eying Eliza narrowly. “Are you certain you don’t have some Irish in you somewhere? That was fiery enough for me to wonder.”
She arched a brow. “Do you think only Irish women can be fearsome?”
“What’ll it take for you to return to the party?”
She popped fists on her hips. “The truth.”
In his experience, the truth was something best avoided.
“I’d offer you a seat, but I don’t have one.”
She shrugged. “I can make do.” As regal as a princess, she moved to the bed and sat on the edge, quite as if it were a very fine sofa in a very fine house. “Now, what—” Her gaze froze on the little doll on his bedside table. “What’s this?”
Embarrassment rushed over him in a wave of heat. “Mr. Johnson needed a repair seen to and made an exchange. The doll was part of it.”
She looked at him, gaze hopeful but hesitant.
“I’d not had a chance to give it to her yet.” Patrick reached over and snatched the toy up. This was proving more uncomfortable than he’d anticipated.
He offered the doll to Lydia. Her handkerchief doll occupied her one hand, and the other was busy fussing with Patrick’s beard.
“We can tuck this in your pinafore pocket,” he said, slipping her handkerchief there. Her lip began to quiver. Panic crept over him. He couldn’t bear the thought of making her cry. Patrick held the doll out to her. “What do you think of this sweet dolly, huh? Just right for you, I’d say. And she’s a pretty thing.”
Lydia was hesitant but curious. She poked at the doll a few times. She touched its hair and its dress. He’d not considered the possibility that she wouldn’t like it. The silly thing ought to have been so easy for him to dismiss, but the idea of the little girl he’d come to care about rejecting his humble offering tore at his heart.
She looked up at him. What he saw wasn’t rejection but confusion. Mercy, did the girl not even know what a doll was? What level of poverty had this tiny family endured if she couldn’t even identify a toy?
“I’m confusing her,” he said. “I’m sorry about that.”
Eliza waved that off.
He sat on the edge of the bed and set Lydia on his knee, facing him. He held the doll up in front of her and wiggled it around a bit to seem more alive, more interesting. He moved it to her and let the doll “kiss” Lydia’s cheek, before returning to its wiggle dance. On the second repetition, Lydia smiled. That lifted some of the weight on Patrick’s mind. Even if the girl didn’t know how to play with the doll, she was at least enjoying it.
He began a sing-song repetition of “I love Lydia. I love Lydia,” in his best version of a dolly voice while continuing the doll’s little dance. After a moment, she reached for the doll and took it in her own hands. She wiggled it around a bit like he had and mimicked his sing-song words, though in little-girl gibberish.
“There you go, sweetie.” He folded his hands behind her back, keeping her balanced and safe on his lap. She could sort out what to do with the doll while she sat there. He’d wager she’d have the knack of it in no time.
“Thank you, Patrick,” Eliza whispered beside him.
“The lass needed a doll.”
She laid her head against his shoulder. “You have a good heart, but you work so hard to hide it. I can’t for the life of me understand why.”
“Is that the reason you came up here after me? To sort me out?”
“Honestly, I came up here to tell you to quit being such a sour apple. But climbing that ladder hurt so much that I found myself ready to fully forgive you if only I could rest my hand a bit.”
He’d been so busy worrying about himself that he’d not even noticed her bandaged hand. “I heard you burned it.”
She nodded. “It’s feeling better, but it’s still very tender.”
And he was the reason she’d pained it climbing the ladder. “I’m sorry.”
“Do you always apologize for things that aren’t your fault?”
“That’s a more complicated matter than I think you realize,” he said.
“I’m not a dunderhead. I can comprehend complicated things.”
“I haven’t any doubt on that score,” he said. “I only meant to explain why it’s hard for me to . . . explain.”
She tucked one of Lydia’s stray wisps of hair out of the girl’s face. “Do your best and take your time. The céilí will go on for hours.”
This wasn’t something he could even consider discussing with his family. But Eliza wasn’t connected to that complication. Perhaps he could manage the words with her. He needed to tell someone, he needed someone to know what he carried around every day.
“When my family came to Hope Springs, my brother Grady and I stayed in New York. I loved the city, loved the pulse of it, the enormity of it. I’d planned to stay for a time, figure out what I wanted out of life. I just needed time to manage that. And, knowing Grady was there, neither of us would’ve been entirely without family. We talked between us about—”
He stopped. He’d never told anyone about this, not even Maura.
Eliza slipped her arm around his without jostling Lydia. “Go on,” she said. “I’m listening.”
“You have to promise not to share this with m’family. I can’t do that to them.”
“I’ll not whisper it about, but if I think you ought to tell them, I’ll probably hound you a bit to do it.”
He breathed slowly. “Just promise you’ll be gentle about it.”
She looked up at him, worry in her eyes. “I’ll not push you. I promise.”
“Grady and I said that, in a year, or maybe two, we’d see if we couldn’t convince Maura to move west. Maybe even talk her parents and sister into making the journey as well. He— He was willing to stay if she absolutely wouldn’t go, but he hadn’t intended to stop trying. And I’d promised myself that, so long as he stayed in New York, so would I. He’d be heartbroken without at least one member of his family to keep that connection.”
“But you would have rather come here?”
“I would’ve. But they all think I didn’t care about them or about being together. It comes up now and then, even though I told them. I swear I did—before they all left, I said that it wouldn’t be forever, that we’d be together again. But they didn’t—” Frustration and sadness silenced him for a minute. “No one heard me. Sometimes I think they still don’t.”
“You’re here now, though, but you’re not happy, and they’re not happy. What went wrong?”
“They still begrudge me staying behind. It was selfish, they think. Maybe it was, a little, but not listening to me wasn’t very giving of them, either.”
“Why can’t you tell them this?” Eliza asked. “If they knew—”
“I can’t.” Saints, this was hard to talk about. “When I was living with Maura and Aidan after the war, she’d go on and on about how Grady had stayed in New York on account of her, how he loved her so much to be willing to do that and he never minded and never begrudged her that, how he never even gave it a second thought.”
“Oh, dear,” Eliza whispered.
“It’s proof in her mind that he loved her. Telling her he’d meant to convince her to move west, that he’d given it second, third, fourth thoughts . . . I don’t want to be the reason she wonders if her husband loved her, because he did. I don’t know many people who loved anyone as deeply as Grady loved Maura. All she has left of him are memories, and if I tell her all the truths I’m carrying around, she might lose even that.”
“Truths? Is there more than his not wanting to stay in New York forever?” Eliza had seen the cracks in what he was leaving out.
“A lot of what they believe about Grady isn’t true, but it’s part of who he is to them, part of who he is to Aidan. I can’t take that away. I can’t.”
“But what they do believe reflects badly on you?” She was whip smart; no one could deny that.
“It’s better that they think a little poorly of me. I’ll give them that gift, whether they see it as such or not.”
“For what it’s worth, Patrick O’Connor, I think you should tell them. You should tell them what you’ve told me, and you should likely tell them whatever else you’re still holding back. I suspect even Grady would agree with me.”
“And the bits even he didn’t know?” Patrick had a lot of secrets.
“Are they so terrible?”
He gave Lydia a little squeeze, then handed her over to her ma. “They are the reason you’d do best to let me call you Mrs. Porter and think of you as my employer instead of—”
“Instead of what?”
He’d told her enough hidden things for one evening. “Instead of my friend.” It was as much as he would admit to.
She didn’t argue. He helped her and Lydia get down the ladder and watched until they’d left the house before returning to his loft. There was no doll to scold him into behaving, nothing but the guilt of all he’d relived and all he’d refused to admit to.
Sitting there alone and painfully sober, he couldn’t face the enormity of his regrets and failures. The sobriety he could do something about.
He bent low and pulled his nearly empty bottle from under his bed. His supply would be down to three bottles by the time he fell asleep. Another failure. Another regret to add to the heap.
The warm burn of oblivion did what it was meant to.
He didn’t hear the rest of the party, didn’t hear his parents come into the house afterward, didn’t have to think about the weight of past years on his heart. He simply escaped the only way he knew how.