The Parting Glass

Peggy hated the word. It reduced her son to a label, to a condition, a disorder. He was Kieran, her only child, Phil’s son, Megan and Casey’s nephew. He was Irish on her side and Slovak on Phil’s. His father was a talented young architect, and someday his mother was going to be a doctor. He was intelligent, although she knew unlocking that part of him would be difficult. He was a beautiful little boy and would undoubtedly be a handsome man.

He was Kieran.

“He is who he is,” she said. “And when this year is over, we’ll know him better and all his potential.”

He appeared unconvinced. “These are your bags?”

“Yes, but I have to wait for him to calm down. This is the only way I can make sure he does. I can’t interfere.”

“I’ll take them out to my car. I can do it alone. I’ll wait for you outside.” Without another word he hooked the larger suitcases together, leaving her with the carry-on, and walked away.

The trip to Shanmullin was going to take hours. Peggy hoped they would all survive.

Finn O’Malley had resented making the trip to Shannon Airport. He had tried repeatedly to talk Irene out of this daft scheme to bring a stranger from the United States to care for her, but Irene was as stubborn as any Irishwoman. In her youth she’d had red hair, too, lighter than Peggy Donaghue’s, but thick and straight like the young woman’s. He wasn’t given to stereotypes, but the myth of the stubborn redhead had some appeal. In her long lifetime Irene had resolutely refused to marry, refused to move into town as she aged, refused to hire a companion, refused to go to hospital when poor health necessitated it.

And she had refused, although her very life had depended on it, to accept the fact that Finn had given up practicing medicine. She had refused a new physician until Finn had been obliged to treat her or watch her die unaided.

Stubborn.

Now this young cousin of hers seemed to prove that Irene’s contrary nature was going to be carried on in the distant family bloodlines.

“You’re certain you’re related to her?” he asked, as they finally neared the village.

Beside him Peggy opened her eyes and turned her head to look at him. Her eyes were unfocused and heavy-lidded from lack of sleep, but even so, he had been surprised to find such a beautiful woman waiting at the gate. “I’m sorry?”

He hadn’t talked to her on the trip thus far. Thankfully the child had quieted almost from the moment they pulled out of the car park. Banging one’s head against the floor would do that, Finn supposed. The boy had worn himself out, and the mother had fallen asleep nearly as quickly and slept for more than three hours.

“I said, you’re certain Irene is really your cousin? It all seems tenuous to me.”

“Something tells me that anything short of DNA analysis will leave you wondering.” She said it with a faint smile to soften her words. She yawned and stretched, and the seat belt tightened across her breasts at the movement. Unfortunately, he was not oblivious.

“Protecting her seems to be my job, whether I choose it or not,” he said, looking straight at the road ahead.

“Why is that? What’s your relationship to her, other than physician?”

“She was my grandmother’s best friend.”

“And you’re carrying on the tradition. I like that.”

“She gives me no choice.”

“I can see she wouldn’t. Once we began discussing this arrangement, she gave me little choice, either. She’s a tyrant, isn’t she?”

He couldn’t fault the way she said it. With admiration and affection. And besides, it was altogether true.

“Has Irene explained how we’re related?” she said.

“She’s been circumspect.”

“Here’s a history lesson. Back in the nineteenth century there were four Tierney brothers living in the house Irene occupies now. Two of them died. A third, Terence, emigrated to Cleveland, where another brother had gone and died before him. Terence is my ancestor. The fourth, Lorcan, traveled to England and disappeared. Everyone thought he died there.”

Finn wasn’t sure why he had asked. The details were too complicated and intimate, but now that she’d begun, he couldn’t tell her so. “But if he had died there, I suppose you wouldn’t be on your way to Shanmullin now. Irene wouldn’t be alive.”

“That’s right. Lorcan was her ancestor. Lorcan was jailed in Liverpool. I don’t know for what. By the time he made it back to Shanmullin, his family was gone. All of his brothers were dead by then, and his parents had gone to Cleveland years before to live their few remaining years with Terence’s widow, who had remarried a man named Rowan Donaghue. Lorcan was poor and illiterate and didn’t know how to get in touch with them or even if they were still alive. The village priest was dead, as well, and by then a good portion of Shanmullin had emigrated, too.”

“Your name is Donaghue, not Tierney.”

“Lena, Terence Tierney’s wife, had a son by Terence, born after his death. When she married Rowan Donaghue, Rowan adopted little Terry, and they changed his name to Donaghue. They went on to have many more children, but Terry’s my ancestor. So technically, my sisters and I are Donaghues by adoption, not that it matters. We all have the same great-great grandmother.”

“And Irene’s grandfather stayed on in Ireland and worked the land?”

“Irene says that Lorcan was in his forties by the time he came back to Ireland, tired and bitter. He married a local woman, had one son, Liam, and died years after.”

“Liam is Irene’s father.”

“That’s right.”

Finn knew the rest. In the early 1920s Liam and his wife Brenna had abandoned Ireland for the United States, hoping to start a new life. Irene had been only a small child at the time and remembered little about those years. “I suppose all this somehow explains why Irene’s family didn’t find any Tierneys in Cleveland.”

“Exactly. Lena married a Donaghue and changed her son’s name. That was many years before Liam arrived in Cleveland, and apparently he never talked to the few people who might have remembered, including Lena herself, who was an old woman by then. Irene just happened to find out about us on the Internet. The Cleveland Plain Dealer did an article about the history of the saloon my family owns, and Terence Tierney’s name was mentioned because Lena was the founder and he was her first husband.”

“Odd that Irene would still be looking for relatives, don’t you think?”

She combed her hair back with her fingers, a lovely, feminine gesture he hadn’t been privy to in a long time. “Not really. She never married, and she has no children. We all want to feel connected, don’t we? She’s not well. I think the idea of wanting some part of you going on into the years is natural.”

He froze, fingers gripping the steering wheel. At one time he’d understood that need himself.

Peggy looked over her shoulder at her sleeping son. “Kieran’s my bid for immortality, I guess. Do you have children, Finn?”

He could not bring himself to answer casually, and that angered him. The question was simple enough. The answer was impossible.

“You’ll meet my daughter Bridie,” he said at last. “She visits Irene when she can.” He had expected more questions, but she was surprisingly perceptive and didn’t ask them.

Just in case, he changed the subject. “We’re nearing the village. Sneeze and we’ll have passed it before you open your eyes again.”

“It’s all so beautiful.” Peggy’s gaze was riveted outside the window.

“Yes, you Americans always seem to think so.”

“And you don’t?”

“There’s been hardship here, the likes of which you probably can’t imagine. It’s only now coming back to life. Not always with the old families. With new people and holiday cottages, and people working from their homes. You see leprechauns and fairy hills, and I see people who work too hard and earn too little.”

“Yet you stay? There must be a draw.”

They passed through the main street of the village, lined with colorfully painted buildings nestled shoulder to shoulder. Mountains hung like stage props behind them, and the ocean sparkled in the distance. A brook ran through the center of a tiny town square. As villages went, it was picturesque and tidy. He imagined she was enthralled.

They were out in the country again before he answered. “I stay because I stay,” he said.