Retreat to Love Read online

  “And this is Ashlyn May and Caleb Kendall, Mum,” Lizzy said, steering her parents towards us. Wiping our hands dry, we smiled. “Aren’t they just the picture of lovely American co-artists? Ashlyn’s grandpa is from Dalkey, remember I said to you, Dad? She wants to ask you about the old days.”

  “Would either of you care for tea or coffee?” I asked.

  “After our drive down, anything is appreciated. Coffee if you have it. Tea for Agnes.”

  “Coming right up,” Caleb smiled, putting on the kettle.

  “Sit down, please, we’ll bring it right in.”

  “Thank you, dear,” Agnes smiled.

  Caleb raised an eyebrow at me as I pulled out clean mugs. “Very upper-middle-class, no?”

  “They’re cute,” I whispered back.

  “Cute, sure, but come on—are they how you imagined the hotbed of Lizzy’s origins?”

  “Sssh.” I arranged the cookies and glanced through the pass-through, where everyone was all settled in at the table. Caleb and I were alone for the first time that day. For a second we just breathed next to each other’s stillness.

  “You want tea, too?” he asked, pulling out my favorite ceramic mug.

  “Peppermint.”

  He set the coffee plunger and teapot on the tray, then joined me leaning against the counter as we waited for the water to boil.

  “Ash?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I ask you to tell me something honestly?”

  I looked up at him and put my hand on his arm, thinking both of Ann and of the almost-tearful shock of my fingers on his tan skin. “One thing I’ll tell you about me today, Caleb Kendall, is you can count on me to always be honest.”

  “You’re something else, Ashlyn May. Look, I need to know if your pal Lauren is, well .... God this sounds vain and stupid.” He drew a breath. “Does Wren want to, you know, be with me?”

  The kettle boiled.

  “Do you want her to?”

  “Don’t. Just tell me.”

  I filled the cafetière. “She does. She’s liked you since the bus ride from Austin. She’s the one who pointed out to me the remarkable brightness of your face when you’re feeling spirited.”

  “The what?”

  “Never mind.” I shifted all the mug handles so they faced the same direction. “Why do you ask?”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s a little bit of a long story. Maybe we can talk later?”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be with Lizzy ....”

  “But back by dinner, she has to be here for dinner?”

  “She does.”

  “So after?”

  I took up the tray. “You’ve got a date, partner.”

  He and the plate of cookies followed me into the dining room.

  Dub and Agnes were quite the couple. He had been a banker for most of his career, before that a delivery driver for a woolen mills. She had been a secretary at the woolen mills who’d gotten obsessed with travel and history after her marriage. She’d taken Dub and Lizzy and her brother Stephen to as many famous battle sites as they could pack into two-week holidays in Ireland, Britain, and France. When they left Wimberley, they were headed for a day at the Alamo, flying home from San Antonio via New York.

  Dub talked about the good old days of Dalkey for a while; the big hotel where everyone worked at some point or another, the frequent trips out the island for picnics, and getaways to the surrounding hills. Pappa’s tales had populated the same scenery, but Dub’s Dalkey was so much more modern. Pappa never went back to Ireland; whenever his fond recollections of the place prompted curious questions, he said, “It’s where my children and my wife are that’s my home, not some distant green memory of a place.” Pappa insisted he had no desire to leave even after his kids were grown—he wanted to keep a warm place with a snug bed available to his children wherever they were. And he did. He spearheaded the campaign to bring Bernadette and Frank back down to Texas, though Gran was of the same mind about it.

  All he ever wanted was his children around him. They grew up knowing it, and when he died they still knew it. Uncle Dermot at the funeral said, and was the simplest truth of the day, “Being our dad was the most important thing Niall O’Connor ever wanted to do with his life.”

  It was interesting to hear what modern-day Dalkey was like, though, and to imagine Pappa’s life if he’d never left.

  The Murphys wanted to see Lizzy’s cabin before we headed to town for a through investigation of all the quaint shops Wimberley had on offer. As Caleb stacked the mugs back on the tray and said his farewells, he brushed his fingers against my nape. It was small, but Lizzy gave me quite the arch look. She cornered me in town while her parents took pictures of the split-rail fence lining a park by the water. “And what was the touching back there all about?”

  I grimaced. “Don’t know yet. Can I tell you later?”

  After peeking in at the milliners and the curiosity shop, where Dub debated between some knobby walking sticks before settling on an easier-to-pack garden chime, we settled down with sandwiches outside a cafe on the river. Thus far the talk had mostly been of Lizzy’s brother Stephen and his family, along with various aunts (“she collapsed on the bus to Rathgar and was sent to hospital with a kidney infection. They read her last rights before she got better. Desperate business”), cousins (“judicial separation from Aoife, they just told us”), and neighbors (“can you believe it, drug addicts stole the vases from her brother’s grave”).

  And then they started in on Lizzy. I was enchanted as Agnes recounted her first school dance experience, and grinned openly when Dub told, not the soufflé story, but the special anniversary tea she’d made them at age eight, which was soon followed by her first cooking lesson. Lizzy kicked me under the table—kinda hard—before I recollected myself, and my mission.

  Watching a jay flash out over the water, I asked Dub, “Would you have known or remembered any of my Pappa’s family? He was Niall O’Connor, and he emigrated in 1937, when he was eighteen.”

  “Well now. There were the O’Connors that ran the boats and the O’Connors further up towards town that were old Dr. O’Connor and his lot. But I don’t recall either family having a boy gone to America. ‘37, you said?”

  I nodded. “‘37. And his father was a doctor.”

  “Dr. O’Connor never had a boy off to America. Three girls in his family, young Kitty was a great friend of my sister Elizabeth.” His eyes narrowed, then he shook his head.

  “What?” asked Lizzy.

  “Must be a mistake. Never mind,” replied her dad.

  “Never mind what?”

  “Nothing, pet, I’m sure it’s naught to do with your friend’s granddad.”

  Agnes was looking at him sharply. He wouldn’t meet her eye, though. I was embarrassed, but I said, “Go on, Mr. Murphy, you can tell me. I won’t mind. Whatever it is.”

  “Well,” he sighed. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Young Kitty just had a nephew, named Matthew after the doctor, born around then, I think it was in ‘37. The mum was a widow, I always heard, just married to the doctor’s son but he was kicked by a horse on their honeymoon in England, and killed.”

  Agnes gasped. “You’re talking about Alice O’Connor and her boy?”

  Dub nodded.

  “She’s Alice Magill as was. My da’s cousin. Why didn’t I think of her?”

  I looked from him to her. “But this must have been Pappa’s brother, surely?”

  Dub cocked his head with half a shrug, but wouldn’t elaborate. Agnes, however, said, “People always said, poor Dr. O’Connor, his only boy lost so young.”

  “And was his name Niall?”

  Before Agnes could answer the table shook gently and she veed her eyebrows at Dub. Looking back at me, she patted my hand and said, “I couldn’t say for sure, dear.”

  I sat back, not quite able to focus. It was too much, not credible. My thoughts were a tangle, looped like a bobbin thread when the machine tension i
s all wrong.

  It had to be a mistake.

  Lizzy glanced between us all, then watched my reaction as she asked them, “So what ever happened with this Matthew O’Connor?”

  “I couldn’t say,” replied Dub.

  “Mum, he’s your cousin. I know you could say.” Agnes pressed her lips together, but Lizzy kept at her. “Go on, Mum. I’m just going to keep asking.”

  She nodded, as did Dub. “Well. He’s living in Dublin now. He took early retirement a few years back from RTE. He’s got grandchildren now. I remember his oldest girl married a Dutch man.”

  “How many kids?”

  “Two girls. They’d be in their forties now.”

  “And his mom? Alice?”

  “Dead some few decades now, God love her. Cancer.”

  I closed my eyes and rubbed at my temples. My own—my American—Uncle Matthew was in his forties, living in California touring with a semi-successful jazz band and acting bit parts when he could get them. Zach and I had gone to a dozen bad movies over the years to catch twenty seconds of Matthew delivering take-out or being shot by crossfire.

  “You okay, Ash?” Lizzy’s worried look was such an echo of her mother’s more gentle one I had to smile.

  “Uh.” I sighed. “Okay, yeah. A little, how do I describe it? Taken aback?”

  “You wanna go back? Be alone?”

  “No. I mean, I guess so, yeah, I’m not likely to be good company now. You three would do better without me. I can grab the bus, it stops just down the road.” Or somewhere. Margie had hung the laminated bus schedule in the laundry room. I would figure it out.

  Dub stood. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll drop you back. Agnes would like a walk in those woods you have anyway, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course. We’ll all go. Come on, dear.” That was directed at Lizzy, who was still sitting.

  As we buckled our seat belts, she asked, “Mum. Is this the cousin Alice who Crazy Uncle Corneilus dropped all those hints about?”

  “Goodness, child, your Uncle Corneilus has been—you haven’t seen him these twelve years. How do you remember that?”

  “It is, then?”

  “What hints?” I asked.

  Agnes signaled her turn. Once she’d taken her lane on the main road, she said carefully, “No one was invited to the wedding, except Alice’s sister, they said. We never heard about it in advance, just one day she was returning from England a widow, and the baby born not seven months later. In those days, girls went suddenly to England for reasons we didn’t discuss.”

  Lizzy looked at me and mimed a pregnant belly. “But no one ever claimed they weren’t married, right?” she asked the front seat.

  “Not in so many words. It was a tragedy, his dying. The O’Connors were just happy to have young Matthew to love. That boy was the image of the doctor.”

  Pappa had come to Galveston from Liverpool. And many of the places of Dalkey he’d described were mirrors of Dub’s stories; people, too. Still, there surely could have been another Dr. Matthew O’Connor with a son last seen in the late ‘30s. Or would Pappa have assumed the dead man’s identity? No, that was a worse tangle than deserting his pregnant girlfriend. I sank back into my seat, eyes closed. In what possible twist of fate’s knife could my Pappa be a man who’d left a pregnant girl behind and run away to Texas, letting his own parents think he was dead?

  No one spoke until we’d pulled into FireWind, though I could see Dub and Lizzy both silencing themselves. As Agnes pulled up in front of the Main House, Lizzy started to give her directions to my cabin. I stopped her, said I’d like the walk. Summoned up thanks to her parents for lunch.

  “Well, it was lovely to meet you, dear,” smiled Agnes as she got out of the car. “I only wish ....”

  “I know, it’s okay. It’s not what we expected to happen.” I gave her a little hug. “Have a good trip back. Thanks for everything, Dub,” I added, turning to shake his hand. He leaned forward and down to kiss my cheek.

  “Thank you. And if there is anything you need, other questions,” he paused. “Well, our Elizabeth will pass it along, I’m sure. We’re happy to help if we can. After this.”

  I nodded. “See you later, Lizzy.”

  “You’re okay back?”

  “It’s a hundred steps. I’ll be fine.” I was already walking towards ValeSong.

  Climbing my porch, I caught motion out of the corner of my eye. It was Caleb, saddled with a couple of cameras and in the process of adjusting a lens as he walked through the trees. He turned my way as the keypad beeped with my entry code, but without looking back I stepped over the threshold and shut the door.

  Chapter 8

  Someone knocked on the cabin door around dusk. Sounded like Lizzy. I stayed in my studio; I had unhung Chains and folded it away, and was sitting at the drafting table scrawling random patterns, detailing each one more and more until the gray lines of the pencil obscured the design, then starting over on a new sheet. I switched to colored pencils, but every sketch devolved into brown mush, until I finally stopped and just sat, rubbing at the accumulated graphite on my fingertips and along my palm’s Mercury line.

  Time for a bath. Or a shower. But since the shower head didn’t have quite as much pressure as the situation required, I poured a mug full of white wine and a capful of bubbles, which in FireWind goes by the name ‘Spirit Rejuvenating Bath Foam,’ and sank into the moist heat.

  I emerged after giving in to the steam and a good cry, and went for another mug of wine. I was going to have to take everyone’s orders again soon so Zach would have time for an alcohol run before coming up Friday. On my drainboard was a plate of pasta salad and a bowl of dried fruits and nuts in strawberry yogurt. There was also a note from Caleb: ‘You promised me a date tonight. Come by later?’ Except instead of the word ‘date’ he’d taped an actual date to the paper.

  I sank onto the sofa and picked at the food. Before I could decide whether to go see him, Lizzy knocked again.

  “Can I come in? I saw your studio light was off now.”

  “Sure.” I stood back. “Did your parents make it off okay?”

  She nodded. “They said to tell you of course they’ll be discreet back home, not tell anyone or anything.”

  “Oh crap, I hadn’t even thought about that.”

  “It’s not a problem, them being quiet about it, you know. Yous all laugh at me for being a gossip, but I didn’t get it from them.”

  The rundown of news from home earlier kinda belied her statement, but I let it go. There wasn’t much I could do about it regardless.

  “You know,” she started carefully, watching my face, “it has such a stigma even now, abortion. Even out of wedlock births—not so much in our generation, but we all grew up hearing how shocking it all was. Even my friends with younger parents than mine, it was practically top story of the news if someone they knew had an early birth. It would have been a lot for them to face.”

  I let her talk, unsure though why she thought some sociology would negate this total inversion of Pappa.

  “I could do some research on it, you know, if you want.”

  Now I shook my head. “Thanks, Lizzy, I know you’re trying tot help, but I don’t even know what I want right now, I couldn’t begin to tell you how I feel about it all. I should sleep on it, I guess.”

  She started. “I should let you go, I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. I just meant later.”

  “But you obviously don’t want to talk about it.”

  I shook my head again. Sitting down, I noticed my plate and bowl next to the sink. “Do you want a drink?”

  “No, I’m just after cleaning up back there, I don’t want to see any more dishes for a while.”

  “It’ll be strange to have all this free time again, I think I’ll appreciate it more. And I know I’ll appreciate being able to sleep in. Finally.”

  “Uh-hum.” She toed the note, where I had left it on the coffee table. “And I, well, noticed your food partner w
as looking out for you tonight.”

  One of those moments—should I leave the note, or stuff it into my pocket? It was folded over so just my name showed, so I left it. “Did ...? Did Wren notice, too?”

  Lizzy stared me down for a minute before pushing her glasses back up her nose and answering, “No. He got the food after she’d left.” She paused. “But I did.”

  “Yeah.” I went to make myself some tea. “He wanted to talk to me tonight. I guess he was just trying to wile his way into my den with food, but I must have been in the bath when he came.”

  The coffee maker heated the water. Lizzy still didn’t say anything. “I ought never to have told any of you my door code,” I added.

  “You’re bluffing. Or at least covering. So I get your point; it’s none of my business. Just that, you have to remember I’m not dense and I don’t think Wren is, either. And you’re both my friends. So don’t expect me to cover for you if it comes up. And knowing Wren, the subject of Caleb Kendall is going to come up, soon.”

  I put out my hand to stop her standing up. “Oh, Lizzy, don’t. I’m not trying to deceive you, I just don’t know the answer to the question you’re trying not to ask.”

  “What question?”

  “Do Caleb and I have something beyond friendship going on.”

  “And do you?”

  I shrugged. “No. Not, well, explicitly, anyway. And between Wren and my Pappa, I wasn’t going to go over like he asked to find out.” She simply looked at me—well, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have gone over. It wasn’t a complete lie. “He wasn’t asking me so we could start something. He had a question. Something related, I think, but not about us. We haven’t either of us said anything about us.”

  “But there’s been enough, shall we say, non-verbal communication between you to hint at it, hasn’t there?”

  I thought of the note, and the gesture with my hair this morning. Other moments, other touches. Other looks. “Yeah.”

  “And this thing he wants to talk about?”