The Last Bride in Ballymuir (33 page)

“
With you?” they howled in
unison.

He tried on a big-brotherly voice for fit.
“Did you have any other plans in mind?”

“
Uh, we thought maybe we’d
put our feet up for the day and have a rest,” Pat—or was it Danny?—
ventured.

“
You’re not lazing about
here all day. To begin with,
Vi doesn’t
even have a telly.”

The twins’ panic-stricken gazes shot about
the corners of the room, then to their sister. She raised her mug
of tea in silent salute. Michael tried not to smile at their acute
disbelief.

“
And beyond that,” he said,
“I won’t have you doing here in Ballymuir whatever the hell it is
you did with chickens back at home. I’ve given the family name
enough to live down as it is. You’ll come with me, do some hard
work and get paid a fair wage. Understood?”

One of the twins muttered a
string of words under
his breath while the
other pinned Michael with what he supposed was meant to be a
threatening glare. Michael
gave him the
bared-teeth version of a smile in return.

“
Enough,” he ordered. “We
can go about this one of two ways: either you come along like
gentlemen,
or I grab you by your balls—and
don’t think I can’t—
and persuade you
upstairs to get ready.” He cracked his knuckles and waggled his
fingers as though preparing to seize the royal gems.

Freckles stood out on
milky-white faces. Chair legs
scraped
noisily across the tile floor, and twin sets of gangly legs made
their way upstairs. A few reverent curses drifted down.

Michael cleared the table while Vi observed
him as if she’d never seen him before.

He cleared his throat. “I’d say we’re off to
a fair start, wouldn’t you?”

“
I’d say you’re going to be
taking over the cooking
while they’re
here.”

“
To take it over implies
that you’ve been cooking in the first place.”

She arched her brow. “So you want their
laundry instead?”

“
By the time I’m done with
them, Sis, they’ll be self-sufficient enough to live on their own.
Which is what they’ll be doing anyway when they’re back in Mam’s
claws.”

She toyed with her empty mug. “True enough. I
don’t suppose we can really do wrong by them, can we?”

As he looked into her worried face, it
occurred to Michael that for the first time in as long as he could
remember, his perfect harridan of a baby sister was looking to him
for guidance. Pride, love, and relief made him stand a little
taller. He’d arrived at what he had always considered his rightful
place. Not that he didn’t love Vi, and not that he wouldn’t be
indebted to her forever. Now, though, he could stand on his own,
and God willing, show Pat and Danny how it was done, too.

He slipped Vi’s mug from her slack fingers,
then took it to the sink. “We’ll do fine by the two of them, I
promise,” he said. “And don’t be in any hurry to ring up Mam and
try to change her mind. We’ll keep them here for as long as we
can.”

Vi came up behind him and
wrapped her arms around his waist. “You’re a man to love,
Michael
Kilbride. Truly a man to love.” She
hugged him, then
began puttering about the
small kitchen.

He ducked his head and stared intently into
the sink. The bubbles from the washing-up liquid seemed more
shimmery, and he was having trouble finding his voice.

“
Well, then ...” He stopped
to rid his throat of an embarrassing tightness. “I’ll keep the boys
busy
today. I want some time with Kylie
tonight, and I can
see that the only way
I’ll be having it is to knock those two off their feet.”

Vi chuckled. “If that’s your goal, I’d
suggest a hard shove behind their knees. You’re no match for
seventeen-year-olds.”

A challenge, if ever he’d heard one. “We’ll
see who’s left standing at the end of the day, and who’s down for
the count.”

“
I’m putting my money on the
wild reds,” she announced with a shake of her own blazing hair.
“Double or nothing, of course.”

They’d scarcely made it into the car—a nasty
tight fit—when Michael was wondering whether his sister wasn’t on
the winning side of the wager. The twins were hungry again, and
this with breakfast just down their gullets.

“
We’ll have a stop and pick
up a bite or two,” he said as he pulled up in front of Spillane’s
Market. Knowing the grocer’s greeting would be none too warm, he
went on the offensive. “Stay by me,” he ordered the
boys.

“
Morning, Spillane,” Michael
offered as they came into the store. Mr. Spillane’s face had
already eroded into a geography of anxious crags and chasms. “These
are my brothers, Pat and Dan. To be making things easy on you, I
promise we’ll keep in a tight pack while we’re here. No point in
having you panic in three directions at once, now is
there?”

Spillane stammered something that could be
taken either as agreement or outright shock at the thought of
having three male Kilbrides to contend with.

Michael gave the twins—who were busy staring
at Spillane—a push forward. “Find what you’re wanting.”

As he trailed behind them,
he said over his shoulder to Spillane, who tailed him, “Pat and
Danny,
here, will be staying with Vi for a
while, and the way
they eat, I expect
you’ll be seeing a lot of them.

“
I’m asking one thing of
you, though I expect you don’t feel that you owe me much of
anything. Judge the boys on who they are, and don’t let your
opinion of me fall into the mix.” He stopped and turned to face the
man. “Do it for Vi. She has strong feelings about family, Spillane,
and I don’t want to see her hurt. I don’t think you do,
either.”

The tips of Spillane’s ears grew pink. He
shuffled his feet and aligned a box of pasta that had been nudged
from its militarily straight row.

“
Vi’s a fine woman,” he
said, then went to stand by the register.

Michael knew that was as close to a
concession as he’d be getting. And it was more than he’d expected,
too.

“
Vi would thank you,
Spillane,” he said. He didn’t add his own genuine gratitude because
he knew it
carried no weight with the
grocer. A fact for which he
now knew some
small regret.

After Michael had paid for the twins’ haul,
and Spillane had packaged it down to the last packet of
vinegar-flavored potato crisps, Spillane said, “Have a grand one,
boys.” He met Michael’s eyes for the first time in months. “And you
too, Kilbride,” he added in a voice not quite warm, but better than
ice.

Feeling humbled, yet somehow elated, too,
Michael nodded, then herded the twins back into the car.

“
What the fu—” one of the
twins began.

Michael cut him off. “I’ll
be charging for that particular word ... say, fifty pence for each
use. It shouldn’t be slipping from your mouth like rain
from the sky. Not at all the way a Kilbride should
act.
So unless you’re looking to be working
for free, I’d suggest you come up with a new word of
choice.”

The twin in the seat next to him swung around
in absolute rage. “Screw that! You can’t charge us!”

Michael raised one brow. “I can’t? Now, how
would you plan to be stopping me, Pat?”

“
I’m Dan, dammit to hell and
back. If you can’t even keep our names straight, how the f—” His
throat worked convulsively, oversized Adam’s apple bobbing with the
effort of swallowing the forbidden word. “How do you plan to keep
track of who to charge?”

“
I’ll just charge you
both.”

Michael grinned into the
faces of twin fits of
apoplectic rage. “You
each owe me two punts fifty so
far. Keep
‘em coming, boys, and I’m off to retirement
before I ever have to work.”

And hours later, he marveled
how the elimination of one small word reduced conflict. He gave
orders, and if the boys objected, it was done through guttural
grunts and moans. Over the course of the day, Michael had learned
that for all his mouth, Danny
was a hard
worker, and that Pat—a boy after his own
heart—had a way of trying to negotiate himself out of the
tough tasks.

Both possessed the Kilbride
sense of justice in full
measure, too. When
Michael slammed his thumb with a hammer and voiced his displeasure,
the twins had demanded fifty pence knocked off each of their
accounts. He had, of course, agreed.

By the time the sun touched
the horizon, the barn
was as clean as the
day it had been built, and the three of them were head-to-toe
grime. Michael pulled out a
length of hose
and attached it to a spigot outside the barn. After peeling off his
shirt and throwing it aside,
he stuck his
head under a stream of icy-cold water. He
howled as it hit him, enjoying the shock.

The boys laughed as he shook his head,
sending water flying.

“
Your turn,” he announced at
the exact moment that he trained the hose on them. What had been
meant as a quick clean-up immediately degraded into mud throwing
with war whoops and bellows loud enough to bring legendary
CuChulainn back from his hero’s sleep.

Hard work and hard play—Michael wished like
hell someone had shown him at age seventeen that both could be
fun.

Kylie sat in her car, not quite certain she
wanted to get out. She had stopped at Breege’s hoping to find
Michael and his strong shoulder to rest her head on. Not bloody
likely, given the state of that shoulder.

The sight of Michael and two mud-spattered
strangers laughing and grappling about had her mind traveling on
odd tangents. She felt almost naughty watching them. Her mouth
curved into a smile. For the first time today, she was blessedly
free of worry. And it pleased her that she liked feeling
naughty.

Even more than that, she
liked looking at Michael with no shirt on, especially when he was
coated with mud. As though he sensed her thoughts, he
suddenly
looked up, one stranger’s head
still locked into the lee
between his elbow
and body. Michael smiled, teeth white in all that dark. He released
his captive and headed toward the car.

Still smiling herself, Kylie stepped out. The
two men—quite young men, Kylie saw now—back-pedaled toward the
barn.

“
I didn’t hear you pull up,”
he said.

“
Small wonder. I heard you.”
She encompassed the strangers in her look. “Even over my
car.”

Michael laughed. “That loud,
eh?” He glanced
over his shoulder before
saying, “I have somebody—
make that two
bodies—I want you to meet. Pat! Danny!” he called without looking
away from her. “Come here.”

They approached cautiously and stood one to
either side of him. It was obvious they’d rather be back rolling in
the mud than meeting her.

“
Kylie, I want you to meet
my brothers.” He looked
at one, then the
other, and frowned. Muttering something under his breath, Michael
ran his hand over the
face of the person to
his left, then wiped the resulting
palmful
of muck on his leg.

“
Better,” he said. “This is
Danny, and that dangerous-
lookin’ fellow on
the other side of me is Pat. They’ve come for a little
visit.

“
Boys, this is Miss Kylie
O’Shea, and I’d suggest
you be very nice to
her. Kylie’s a teacher, and though
you’re a
bit older than her usual students, I’m sure she’d be happy to put
together a lesson or two during your ... ah ... holiday from
school.”

“
A teacher?” the boy named
Pat said. “Can you believe it, Danny?”

“
Jesus, if Mrs. McGilray
looked anything like her,
we’d never have
locked the f—” Pat leaned across
Michael
and smacked Danny on the side of the head.
Danny winced, shook it off, then finished, “—the chickens in
the loo with her.”

Between the mud and the
mystifying talk of chick
ens, Kylie didn’t
know how to respond. Not that anything the boys had said had been
directed at her, anyway. She looked to Michael for help, but he was
too busy laughing.

“
Chickens in the loo?” he
finally sputtered. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“
I don’t suppose that we
were thinking at all.”

“
It’s a pleasure to meet you
both,” Kylie cut in, seeing that the evening was about to devolve
into a
discussion of whether male
adolescents ever thought.
She held out a
hand and bit back a smile when they glanced down at their own muddy
paws, then at their brother. He nodded firmly.

Two gritty handshakes later,
they scurried off to the
hose and began
cleaning up. Michael took the hand his brothers had already
dirtied, brushed off the grit, and then drew it to his mouth. He
kissed her palm; it was all she could do not to wrap her free
hand
beneath his jaw and bring his mouth to
hers. But some
remaining desire for
cleanliness and knowledge of their audience stopped her. The
boys—their hair as
red as Vi’s, she now
saw—watched warily.