One Year (29 page)

“W
hat's wrong, Mary? Your face is a thundercloud.” Mary Bernadette pulled a chair out from the kitchen table, where her husband sat with a cup of tea, and dropped into it with less than her usual grace.

“I'll tell you what's wrong,” she said. “Wynston Meadows is what's wrong.”

“Now, calm down,” Paddy said in his much practiced soothing voice. “What did he do this time?”

“I received a call earlier from Marilyn Windsor. She was having dinner at The Angry Squire last night and she overheard Wynston Meadows talking to Jack Burton from the bank. She swears his exact words were ‘Mary Bernadette Fitzgibbon wasn't even born in this town, let alone this country, yet she acts as if she's the sole and proper heiress to its history.'”

Paddy shook his head. “Gossip,” he said. “There should be a law against it.”

“What gives him the right to defame me like this?”

“Nothing gives him the right, Mary,” Paddy assured her.

“Doesn't a flag fly proudly outside my home? Don't I march in the Independence Day Parade every year, no matter the weather? Don't I vote in every single election? I'm as much a citizen of the United States as Wynston Meadows!”

“No one doubts that, Mary.”

“Don't they? Mr. Meadows certainly does!”

“Gossip, again. Marilyn Windsor shouldn't have passed on Mr. Meadows's words. There was no need for you to hear them. They've only caused you more worry.”

Mary Bernadette shook her head. “Marilyn only meant to warn me. Forewarned is forearmed.”

“I'm not so sure she meant well,” Paddy argued. “Maybe she regrets having given you those family diaries. Maybe this was a way to get back at you for . . .”

“For what, Paddy?” Mary Bernadette demanded. “For persuading her to donate a valuable item to the OWHA for the benefit of the entire town?”

Paddy said no more on the subject of Marilyn Windsor.

Mary Bernadette suddenly got up from the table, her chair screeching against the tiled floor. “I defy that man to name every president of these great United States and in order.”

“Mary. Please, let it go.”

She did not respond to her husband. Paddy sighed, got up from the table, and brought his teacup to the sink. “I'm going to take Mercy for a walk,” he said.

When he was gone, Mary Bernadette continued to fume. As much as she knew that a good Catholic was called upon to forgive her enemies, in this case she simply could not do so. And she would never admit—especially not to her husband—that at times she felt a murderous rage against the man, when she wasn't feeling out of her wits with fear.

Mary Bernadette made the sign of the cross, bowed her head, and prayed. When the prayer had been uttered, she made the sign of the cross again. “No,” she said with conviction, to the air around her, to whoever would listen. “Wynston Meadows does not deserve my forgiveness.”

“T
he procedure is called derotation osteotomy. It involves cutting the femur and repositioning the ball of the femur in the hip socket,” Pat told his mother over the phone the next morning.

“And why is this necessary?” Mary Bernadette asked, her hand over her heart.

“Because his hips are coming out of the sockets. The spastic muscles are causing abnormal forces on the bone. The result is what they call in-toeing, which is just what it sounds like. You've seen how David's gait has deteriorated in the past two years.”

“Yes. Of course. Both legs will be . . . will be broken?”

“Cut, yes. They'll insert a metal plate in each femur so the legs will stay in their new position, pointing straight ahead. He probably won't need a cast, just some bandages over the incisions. Recovery could take some time, which is why we're doing this in the summer. Maybe four weeks or so depending on how comfortable he feels getting back to everyday activities.”

“And how long will he be in the hospital?”

“Four or five days. And he'll probably need a walker for a bit, and some meds and a muscle relaxant for the pain. And, of course, he'll work with a physical therapist. But David's a pro at actively managing his CP. I know he'll be a fantastic patient. He's one hundred percent in favor of the surgery.”

“Of course he'll be a good patient.”

“Hopefully,” Pat went on, “when all this is over he won't be in constant pain. Not that he complains, but it's a lousy way to live, always compensating for pain. It holds him back, and David hates being held back, in anything.”

“Yes,” Mary Bernadette said, very carefully. “Well, thank you for informing me. We'll certainly all be praying for him.”

“I'm sure you will be, Mom. Say hi to Dad for me. And don't worry, all right? If you or Dad have any questions about David's surgery, call Meg or me. Okay?”

Mary Bernadette promised her son and hung up the receiver. She took a seat at the kitchen table. Her worst fears were being realized. People went into the hospital and never came out. Children. Children like her son William and now perhaps her grandson David. To purposely cut into a child's legs . . . It was an abomination.

They should have listened to me,
she thought, her hands squeezing into fists. She had warned her son that something terrible would happen if David and his sister weren't baptized. Hadn't her mother and her aunt Catherine told her that children who weren't baptized were prey to the fairies, evil and mischievous creatures who would snatch the children right out of their cribs and make off with them, leaving behind a weak and mewling thing for the grieving mother to support.

And so Mary Bernadette had wondered about her grandson, no matter that David's affliction had occurred at birth, before he could possibly have been baptized. Paddy had laughed at her fears. “Now, Mary,” he had said, “fairies stealing babies indeed! It's just a silly old superstition and you know it. Besides, Danica is just fine and she's not baptized, either.”

“God works in mysterious ways,” she had replied. “No doubt he has some trial planned for her, too.”

Her husband had admonished her. “Are you saying that your grandson is a changeling child? Mary, get ahold of yourself. Next you'll be seeing leprechauns behind the hedges!”

Paddy was right, of course. They were awful old superstitions, full of trickery and malice around every bend. They had no place in the modern world. Yet they had pursued her all her life and now they would not let her rest for two moments at a time.

Mary Bernadette unclenched her hands and folded them on the table before her. She knew that despair was a sin. She knew that it was wrong to question God's wisdom. She knew also that she wanted very badly to release her fears and her anguish in a great and awful howl. Maybe then God would finally hear and come to her rescue.

But she would never do it.

M
egan was in the kitchen preparing dinner when she heard her husband pull up the driveway. A few minutes later he appeared, yanking off his tie and opening the top buttons of his shirt.

“Hi,” he said. “Smells good.”

“Hi. It should. I'm sautéing onions in butter.”

“Heaven. Where are the twins?” Pat asked, retrieving a bottle of red wine from the cupboard and loudly scrambling through the drawer that housed the corkscrew.

“In their rooms,” Megan said, “doing homework. Or so they say.”

Pat opened the bottle and poured them each a glass. “Sante,” he said.

“Your good health.” Megan took an appreciative sip of the cabernet.

“I did something very stupid today,” Pat announced.

“Oh?” Megan said, turning back to the stove. “What was it?”

“I called PJ.”

Megan looked over her shoulder at her husband. “You never call PJ.”

“Seems there's a good reason for that.”

“Okay, what happened?” Megan asked. She turned off the heat under the saucepan and turned back to her husband.

“In a fit of self-righteousness and know-it-all-icity, I suggested again that he might convince Dad to sell the company. I suggested that he finally go to law school and escape all that small-town nonsense and in-fighting. Not to mention his grandmother's overwhelming influence. Well, I kept that bit to myself.”

Megan winced. “And what did he say to all that?”

“He wasn't receptive. Wait, that's an understatement. He told me to back off. He said that he'd made his decision and was sticking to it. He said that he was happy.”

“Well, he is an adult, Pat. He has a right to make up his own mind. Which is not to say that on some level I wish he had settled somewhere other than Oliver's Well. But it's his life to lead, not ours.”

“I know. I just wanted to help, but I guess I screwed things up even more.”

“I wouldn't say that. Exactly.”

Pat finished his glass of wine. “Anyway,” he said, “I couldn't keep my mind on work after that, so I spent most of the afternoon thinking about how I've—let's say, how I've related to my oldest son. And you know what I realized?”

“What?” Megan asked.

“I realized that I've been behaving too much like how my parents behaved when I made the decision to reject the family business. In other words, I've failed to accept PJ for who he is. Not me. His own man.”

And haven't I been hinting as much for years,
Megan thought. What she said was, “I think all parents have to struggle at some point with the idea of a child being an entirely separate person.”

“Don't try to make things easy for me, Meg. I know when I've been wrong. I know when I've been pigheaded.”

“Well . . .”

“But I'm still worried about my mother and PJ. She's got undue influence over him. She could ruin PJ's marriage if she had a mind to.”

Megan nodded. “I agree. But if PJ
is
weak enough to allow his grandmother's interference to destroy his marriage, then the fault lies with PJ as much as it does with Mary Bernadette.”

“You'd think that with all her professions of faith she'd take the sacrament of marriage a bit more seriously.”

“Your mother,” Megan noted, “like most people, exercises selective morality. She believes that not all of the rules apply to her all of the time.”

Pat was quiet and Megan let him be.

“I think we should go down to Oliver's Well again this weekend,” he said after a time. “I want to apologize to PJ face-to-face.”

“All right. I'll see if I can get the kids situated at a friend's house for Saturday night. Danica's been going on about a sleepover with Rachel. And David loves any excuse to hang out with Clay. His parents got a pool table, and it seems David's determined to become a shark.”

“He didn't tell me that. Sheesh, another son I'm alienating.”

“Pat. Stop it. He didn't even tell me. Danica told me in passing.”

“So they're already at the age when they're hiding stuff from their parents. Where does the time go, Meg?”

Megan laughed. “If I had a good answer to that,” she said, “we'd be rich.”

I
t was a Saturday in late April, about three in the afternoon. Megan and Pat had just arrived at the house on Honeysuckle Lane.

“Why aren't the twins with you?” Mary Bernadette asked her son as she poured him a cup of tea.

Pat sighed. “Mom, I already told you over the phone. They each have a sleepover.”

Mary Bernadette frowned. “I don't understand the need for parents to let their children sleep in other people's homes. I certainly didn't let you or your sister spend the night in some strange house where who knows what might have gone on.”

“I'm aware,” Pat said. “Not that it bothered
me
all that much, but I remember Grace being pretty pissed about it.”

“She most certainly was not—annoyed. Grace was always a sensible girl.”

“A sensible girl who really wanted to sleep over at her friend's house and eat junk food and stay up all night watching movies and talking about boys.”

“That's all in the past,” Megan said. “There's no point in digging it up.”

“Let sleeping dogs lie,” Paddy murmured.

Mary Bernadette would happily have continued to press her point about the dangers and silliness of sleepovers. Still, there were other matters that needed to be addressed.

“Is it really necessary that the poor boy go under the knife?” she asked her son.

Pat rolled his eyes. It was a rude habit Mary Bernadette had failed to break him of long ago. True, she occasionally indulged, but only when she was alone. “Yes, Mom,” he said, “it is. Do you really think we would put our child through surgery if it
wasn't
necessary?”

“Doctors can be persuasive, and all for their own benefit. It's why I never go to them. They can talk all manner of foolishness.”
And they failed to save the life of my son,
she added silently.
They might as well have killed him outright
.

“David's doctors are wonderful,” Megan said. “We have complete faith in them.”

The woman is so naïve,
Mary Bernadette thought.
What kind of lawyer must she be if she can be so easily deceived?

“He should be in a special school,” she said now, “one where the teachers and nurses know how to properly take care of a child with David's affliction.”

“Mom, that word—”

Mary Bernadette ignored her son's interruption. “All that running around and trying to keep up with the normal children is probably why his legs are in the state they're in.”

“Actually, Mary Bernadette—”

Mary Bernadette ignored her daughter-in-law's interruption as well. Would no one listen to her any longer? Would no one give her thoughts and opinions the consideration and respect they deserved ?

“You should have had those children baptized,” she said firmly.

Pat sighed. “Mom, we've been over this before. Baptized or not, David would still have CP.”

“I've tried to tell her,” Paddy said quietly. “Time and again.”

And then Mary Bernadette had had enough, enough of being ignored, and doubted, and treated with disrespect. “Poor David!” she cried. “We should have taken that child away from the two of you when he was born. We might have done something positive for him! Instead, look at what's become of the boy, and not even going to Heaven when he dies!”

With a strange sense of detachment, Mary Bernadette watched her family react to her words. For a very brief moment she wondered if she had indeed said what she thought that she had.
We should have taken that child away from the two of you.

“Mary—” Paddy put out his hand, as if to reach for her, but then stepped back. Vaguely, Mary Bernadette wondered if her husband was afraid that she might slap him away. Vaguely, she thought that she might.

Megan got up from the table and quietly left the kitchen. No stomping of feet or slamming of doors. No muttering under her breath and no angry looks. Not a tear in her eye.
Unnatural,
Mary Bernadette thought.
Does nothing move that woman
?

Pat now took a step toward his mother, his fists clenched at his side. “That was reprehensible,” he said angrily. “That was completely disrespectful of the mother of my children. And of me, your own son.”

Mary Bernadette turned from Pat and Paddy. She wished they would both go away. Shame warred with anger in her breast. Embarrassment wrestled with pride. “When wrathful words arise, a closed mouth is soothing.” She heard her father's voice whispering in her ear. She shivered.

Pat's laugh was angry and dark. “I don't know why I bother to come here anymore,” he said, and walked resolutely out of the room.

Paddy cleared his throat. “Mary,” he said, quietly but forcefully, “you were cruel. Apologize now, before it's too late. If it's not too late already.”

Mary Bernadette kept her back to her husband. “I have nothing for which to apologize,” she said, her voice a bit shrill. “I simply spoke my mind.”
I spoke,
she added silently,
the violence in my heart
.

“If not for Pat's sake, then for Megan's,” Paddy went on. “Megan has always been so good to you, to all of us. She doesn't deserve to be treated so shabbily.”

“I've said what I've said.” Mary Bernadette turned again to face her husband. She realized that her hands were shaking, and she put them firmly on the back of a chair.

“Mary, you're flushed. Sit down and let me make you another cup of tea.”

“I don't need a cup of tea, thank you. I'm perfectly fine.” She walked over to the oven. With a hand still trembling she turned it on to preheat. “I must start dinner now. Would you like peas or string beans this evening, Paddy?”

“Mary—”

“I think it will be peas.”

She heard her husband leave the kitchen. When he was gone, Mary Bernadette put a hand to her aching head.