This Irish House (3 page)

B
lood roses. Patrick's favorite. Kate Nolan pressed the last of the potting soil around the roots, sat back on her heels and read, once again, the inscription she had so painstakingly composed six years before:

Patrick Nolan
1955-1994
Beloved husband and father
He died as he lived, with no regrets

Dropping the trowel into her bag, she wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. Patrick would have liked it. She knew that, just as she knew he'd liked his tea weak, his meat rare, his house uncluttered and his newspaper with his breakfast. Over time she'd learned it all, right down to the way he tensed when she pulled the lobe of his ear through her teeth. It was a signal, theirs alone. It meant she wanted him, sometime soon, very soon, just as much after seventeen years of marriage as in the beginning.

Love, Kate decided, was details, built over a lifetime of private moments. Sometimes, for the fortunate, love lasted forever, beyond skin grown slack, crow's-feet and laugh lines, beyond stretch marks, faltering steps and fear-sharp words born of worry and pain.

Love? Had she known even the smallest measure of what could be between a man and woman when she'd decided in her ignorant youth to choose Patrick Nolan. By the greatest of miracles he'd loved her back. How did a woman explain the ache in her heart that comes from losing the kind of man who comes only once in a lifetime?

Her love was like that, so absolute and uncompromising that for years she lay awake at night trying to remember the exact phrasing of her husband's sentences. Patrick had been so good with words, much better than she ever was. When friends asked her why it was so important to remember, she had no answer for them except
It just is.

Patrick was a rarity. His dreams were simple, yet profound; to be happily married, to produce healthy children, to earn his own way, to provide for his family, to be blessed with good friends, to see his country at peace. How did one explain Patrick Nolan to those left behind in this land torn by war and religion, polarized by suspicion and politics? Kate could tell them, but no one would believe her.

Slowly, gracefully, she stood and brushed the dirt from her knees. Then she gathered her belongings, stepped around the head stones and made her way to her car.

It was late spring. The days were longer now. Deirdre would be home for spring recess. Kate frowned. Kevin might be home, too. She hadn't seen much of him lately with her late hours and his school and sports schedule. Tonight she would make a point of waiting up to ask him where he had been. Too many boys without fathers lost their way.

* * *

Deirdre's compact wasn't in the driveway. Kate unlocked the door and called out into the silence. No answer. She frowned. The house was quiet, too quiet. Shaking off her looming depression, she walked to the sink, washed her hands and automatically opened the refrigerator door. She would make dinner. Surely by the time it was ready, one of her children would be home.

Kate referred to herself as spaghetti thin. Slender was the term preferred by her friends and the more generous of her acquaintances. Eighteen-year-old Deirdre and sixteen-year-old Kevin shared her body type. Both were born weighing a respectable amount and gained steadily until their first birthdays, at which time they terrified their mother by stubbornly refusing to be fed. Whatever sustenance they ingested was through the laborious, frustrating and often unsuccessful process of curling awkward baby fingers around bite-size morsels of food and negotiating them in the direction of their mouths.

By age four Deirdre tipped the scale at a slight two stone. Her brother, two years younger and six inches taller, was a bit heavier. Miraculously they survived, their wiry, too-thin bodies amazingly resistant to illness or fracture. By the time they reached adolescence, Kate allowed herself to believe in the possibility of their reaching maturity and stopped bribing them to clean their plates.

Oddly, or perhaps in reaction to her children's disinterest in food, Kate kept two refrigerators, a side by side, subzero, sixteen-cubic-foot-size in the kitchen and another, not quite so large or so modern, in the basement near the freezer. Both were filled to capacity with containers of chicken divan, shepherd's pie, lamb stew, homemade trifle, brownies, gingerbread and scones, all precariously perched on top of containers of gravy and jars of homemade preserves, loaves of bread, tins of fruit, gallons of milk, three dozen eggs and several rolls of cookie dough, enough food for a regiment, much too much for three people, none of whom weighed enough to qualify as a blood donor at the Royal Victoria Hospital.

Kate needed to feed people. She didn't understand nor could she explain her compulsion but there it was, an overwhelming desire to sate the appetites of anyone and everyone who came to her door, to share the fruits of her home, her prosperity, her well-stocked larder. Over the course of her life she'd prepared hundreds of dishes: fish fries and pot roasts, roasted chickens and legs of lamb, wrapped casseroles and meat patties, blanched vegetables and fruit, baked cakes, pies and puddings, all the while sealing, labeling and storing her own private version of security through abundance.

Patrick had laughed at her. But the truth of the matter was he could no more pass by a hand outstretched in need without filling it than Kate could refuse a hungry body a hot meal. They were well matched. Bleeding hearts people called them. Philanthropists. A man and woman who, at the end of their lives, would not approach St. Peter and the pearly gates in vain.

Yet, for all Patrick's goodness they had killed him, at home while eating dinner, in front of his wife, his children. Black-masked men carrying guns had burst through the door, dragged him from his chair, pushed him hard against the wall and, without a word, murdered him.

That scene, called up from the dark days of Ulster's violent years, rolled Once again through Kate's mind. As always, she focused on the contrasts. The peaceful aura that surrounded their weekend home. The golden afternoon light of Sligo, Yeats country. The gleam of polished wood. Copper pots hanging from the island in the kitchen. Food smells, hearty, rich. Wine, ruby-colored, filling deep, long-stemmed glasses. The comfortable bickering of her children's voices. And then the world exploded.

Heavy boots pounded into the dining room. Cruel eyes, slits behind anonymous masks, stared at them. Kate inhaled the sharp, feral smell of fear, sensed her own rising panic, heard the muffled rat-a-tat of shots through a silencer.
Why a silencer
she'd wondered.
Who was to hear the shots way out in the country?
She saw her husband's blood spurt, watched his body slump to the floor. Deirdre screamed and Kate's terror heightened.
“Please
,” she'd begged,
“don't hurt my children.”

And they hadn't. As suddenly as they'd come, the men were gone, melting into the golden dusk of County Sligo as if they'd never been. Kate had looked at the clock. She'd called her family to dinner at six. It was twelve minutes past the hour. Twelve minutes to snuff out a man's life. Twelve minutes to destroy a family, a man, a woman and their children.

“Katie,” a familiar voice called through the front door before stepping inside. “Are you home?”

She shook her head to clear the ugly picture, turned on the flame under the pot of water and waited for her father to find his way. “In the kitchen, Da.”

“I was hopin' you'd be up to some company for dinner,” he said, filling the doorway with his sturdy frame.

She smiled. “You know you're always welcome.”

“Will Deirdre and Kevin be joining us?”

Kate nodded. “I think so.”

John O'Donnell sat down at the table, glanced at the newspaper headlines and frowned. “They'll never settle it, not in my lifetime.”

Sliding a pat of butter into a frying pan, she rummaged for the kitchen sheers, found them and began to snip slivers of dill into the melted butter. “Don't be such a pessimist.”

“A pessimist you say.” He turned disapproving blue eyes on his daughter. “And hasn't our country been at war for eight hundred years?”

“Actually it's more like four hundred.” She pointed to a spud-filled bowl on the counter. “Can you manage to peel the potatoes or are you here only to discuss politics?”

“Very funny. I can peel and talk at the same time.”

Kate kissed her father's balding head. “I was afraid of that.”

“Will you take nothing seriously, Katie? The hoodlums are gathering to march as we speak. Every year, nothing changes. I would have thought after Patrick—”

Kate's hands shook. She turned around and leaned against the counter, crossing her arms. She took several deep breaths and uttered a short prayer for patience. “I take a great deal seriously, Da. That's why I sold our country house in Sligo. I believe in what I'm doing. It isn't easy to convince these people to compromise and it doesn't help me to hear that nothing will ever be settled. Besides, it isn't true. We've come a long way in a very short time. It will work. Give it some time and have a bit of faith.”

“I don't like you crossing over the border as often as you do,” John O'Donnell grumbled, “and I don't trust David Trimble. It's best to say nothing to those people.”

“I trust him. He's an educated man and the best possible choice for his party.” She ignored the reference to the border. They both knew her job required regular visits to Northern Ireland.

Although the second birthday of the April peace accord had come and gone, Northern Ireland's future was still unstable. Hope, fragile as spun glass, hung in the air, suspended by broken arms agreements, hard-line paramilitaries with nowhere to go and a population suspicious of all but their closest neighbors.

Despite it all, peace was moving forward in the Six Counties. The Sinn Fein delegation had taken their seats on the representative council as had the Social Democrats and David Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party. Government services were slowly becoming integrated with a proportionate number of Catholics and Protestants and the IRA had agreed to release their weapons. Kate wasn't naive enough to believe that every location would be divulged. But she recognized the gesture for what it was, a step in the direction of peace.

It was her lack of naiveté, her ability to settle on a resolution, and her subtle but logical progression toward a goal that had resulted in her appointment to the civilian police council as ombudsman. All government-subsidized institutions had been mandated to integrate work forces with equal numbers of Nationalists and Loyalists. Kate's job was to ensure that they followed the letter of the mandate and to mediate any disagreements arising from it. She had been remarkably successful in every area but law enforcement. The Royal Ulster Constabulary, Northern Ireland's police force, was disappointingly and predictably resistant to all forms of compromise. That she was Patrick Nolan's widow didn't help matters, either.

Kate sighed, slid the salmon into the pan, lowered the flame and began chopping tomatoes. Where were her children?

The familiar slap of the screen door reassured her. Deirdre's voice, cheerful, warm, followed. “Hello. I'm home.”

“Hello, love,” Kate returned. “Grandda and I are in the kitchen. I hope you're hungry.”

“Starved.” Deirdre breezed into the room, kissed her grandfather's cheek, smiled at Kate and opened the refrigerator. “Can I help?”

Kate reached out and affectionately tugged her daughter's casual ponytail. “You can set the table. Are you home for the rest of the week?”

Deirdre nodded. My last exam for the term was this morning. How many are eating?”

“Four,” her mother replied. “Maybe Kevin will show.”

Deirdre's lips tightened. “I doubt it,” she mumbled under her breath.

Kate picked up a fork and pierced a potato, testing it for doneness. “What did you say?”

Deirdre flushed, closed the refrigerator without taking out the olives she'd set her mind on, picked up the silverware and turned down the hall toward the dining room. “Nothing. It wasn't important.”

Keeping one eye on the clock, Kate managed to hold up her end of the conversation, finish her meal, rinse the dishes and stack them in the dishwasher, walk her father to his car and wave until he disappeared from view, bid her daughter good-night and watch the last of the late night news before she gave in to the panic that was slowly working its way up from her stomach to her chest, closing her throat. The dreaded asthma that debilitated her on rare occasions raised its ugly head. She fumbled for her inhaler always within reach. Where was her son?

It wasn't the first time Kevin had stayed out all night or even the second. Despite her threats, there was little she could do to discipline a sixteen-year-old boy. Kevin towered over her by nearly a foot and outweighed her by three stone. Kate knew he wasn't really a bad boy. The moody, sullen side of him wasn't really Kevin, neither was the simmering rage she'd seen unleashed recently, nor the sense of entitlement that so disturbed her. She brushed aside his defiance as nothing more than normal teenage rebellion. It was her fault really. She'd indulged him because he'd grown up without a father and because the real Kevin, the gregarious, sensitive, sweet son she adored, still showed himself often enough for her to overlook the new, dark side of his nature.

It was nearly three and she had a ten o'clock meeting in Strabane with Robbie Finnigan, chief constable of the RUC. She threw several more pieces of peat into the flame and walked to the window. A car turned down the street. The headlights dimmed. Kate tensed. Relief flared in her chest and then died as she recognized her neighbor's car. Another car passed and then another. Breathing deeply, Kate unclenched her fists. She would make a cup of tea. It would relax her and use up a few minutes.

The familiar ritual, boiling water, scalding the pot, shaking in loose tea leaves, pouring the milk, adding the steeped tea and two well-rounded teaspoons of sugar served its purpose. After methodically sipping two cups and pouring herself a third, she was able to analyze the matter of her son's habits with a relative degree of objectivity. Kevin was spoiled and willful. Her reluctance to discipline him had led to this act of disrespect toward his family.