You'll Always Have Tara

by Leah Marie Brown

  Aidan nods, the corners of his lips pulling up in a furtive smile, and then takes a sip of his cider.

  “What is Bananck?”

  “Bánánach,” he says, pronouncing the word as if he is about to hock a mouthful of saliva. “It is a creature from Irish mythology, a female specter that haunts battlefields.”

  “Yikes! That’s morbid.”

  Aidan doesn’t respond. He leans back and studies the label. He’s slipping away again, retreating to a place in his mind. I can feel it.

  “Do you hike up here often?”

  “What?” He blinks at me. “Hiking? I wasn’t hiking.”

  “You weren’t?” I say, pointing to his rucksack. “What were you doing then? Running away from home?”

  “I was returning from home, actually.”

  I frown because the Gallagher cottage is located between the castle and the village, not up in these hills.

  “I don’t live with me aul fella anymore.”

  “Of course you don’t,” I say, embarrassed. “I don’t know why I assumed you would still be living with your father and sisters. I guess I froze you in my mind, where you have lived as a lanky, laughing eighteen-year-old boy.”

  “I’m not that fella.”

  “I know.”

  “But ya wish I was, because ya don’t like Aidan Gallagher, the man.”

  “I don’t know Aidan Gallagher, the man.”

  “What do ya want to know?”

  Everything. Where have you been? Where do you go when you get the faraway look in your eyes? Why don’t you laugh like you used to? Do you have a girlfriend? Did she break your heart? What is up with all of those tattoos?

  “Did you miss me?” I say, smiling and batting my lashes at him.

  “Of all of the questions ya could have asked me, that’s the one that’s been gnawing away at ya? Did I miss ya?”

  I take another sip of my cider and feel emboldened. “Is that a yes?”

  He rolls his eyes and takes a swig of his cider.

  “Well? Is it?” I prompt.

  “Yes.”

  My heart skips a silly beat. “Where do you live now?”

  “I have a wee cottage on some land just over the next hill.”

  Go ahead. Ask him. Do you have a girlfriend? Just say it. Do you have a girlfriend?

  “What does that tattoo mean?”

  He frowns.

  “Which tattoo?”

  “The one over your heart.”

  “It says, Buaidh nó Bás. Victory or death. It’s the Gallagher motto.”

  I set my cider bottle on the floor beside me and look at Aidan, reaching my hand out and gently touching the scar behind his ear with my fingertips.

  “How did you get this scar?”

  He stiffens. “Ya don’t want to hear about that,” he says, grabbing my hand and pushing it away from his head. “Believe me.”

  The unspoken subtext in his words: Mind your own damn business, dahlin’. Chastened, I do what any Southern woman does when she commits a social faux pas: I change the subject by making polite small talk.

  “How is Catriona?”

  “Grand,” he says, relaxing. “Our Catriona is grand. She’s in Galway on a Hen Weekend.”

  “Is she engaged?”

  “Cat? Engaged?” He chuckles. “No, our Catriona is not engaged. Her best mate is getting married. She is probably on the tear, having a deadly time.”

  “How nice.”

  “She can’t wait to see ya again.”

  “I can’t wait to see her. It’s been a long time.”

  I lean back on my elbows and look at the window, the beads of rain sliding down the broken panes of glass, the frames painted red, and feel as if I am in an episode of Black Mirror. Everything is the same—Ireland, Tásúildun, Aidan—and everything is different. Sitting in this abandoned cottage, listening to the wind howling through the stones, smelling the wet thatch over our heads, feeling the nervous excitement of being alone with Aidan, it’s as if I never left Ireland, like my doppelgänger returned to America and lived my life these last ten years.

  Aidan lays down beside me and puts his arms behind his head. “What are ya thinking?”

  “I think someone cast a time spell on me.” I look at the damp thatch of sandy blonde hair on top of his head, and I have a powerful urge to touch him again. “The Gullah believe time is a mystical thing that can be manipulated. They believe you can put a root on someone and it will freeze them at a certain point while the rest of the world continues on.”

  “Put a root?”

  “A voodoo curse.”

  “A curse? Why?”

  “It feels as if we have been here together forever, that time has continued around us, but we have stayed the same as we were when we were young . . . but I also feel as if I don’t know you at all. I don’t know myself anymore, either. Do you know what I mean?”

  He turns his head, looking at me through his thick eyelashes, and my breath catches in my throat.

  “I know what ya mean.” He smiles. “The posh clothes, caked-up face, and fussy hair. I don’t know ya, either.”

  “What?”

  “Eat some chips and have a Guinness, will ya? You’re too fecking thin.”

  I hear Grayson’s voice in my head, When’s the last time you ate a Goo Cluster?

  Did I stand too close to one of B. Crav’s polo ponies because my heart aches something fierce, like a thousand-pound thoroughbred just kicked me in the chest.

  “Do you have any idea how hard I have worked to shed my pudgy, fudgy middle, how many boxes of Fiddle Faddle and cartons of Goo Goo Clusters I have had to forsake to fit into a size four . . . ish?” I am weeping like a televangelist caught in a sex scandal. “If I’ve learned one thing it’s that no matter how damned hard you try; you’re not going to please everyone.”

  He waits until I am done pitching my hissy fit and then reaches his arm out and pushes my elbow. I fall on my back beside him. He rolls over, props himself up on one elbow, and looks down at me.

  “What are ya on about?” He brushes a lock of hair off my face. “You’re beautiful, Tara. You’ve always been beautiful.”

  “You think?”

  He smiles.

  “I know it, as sure as I know me name is Aidan Pádraic Gallagher,” he says, his voice low and tender.

  I look up at him, losing myself in the depths of his blue, blue eyes, swimming back through time to when I was an innocent girl, holding my breath and hoping a handsome Irish fella would kiss me in a rowboat in the middle of a lough in Donegal.

  Everything is different—and everything is the same.

  He leans down and presses his lips to mine, a sweet, undemanding kiss that makes me forget about the years and differences between us.

  I am just a girl and he is just an Irish fella.

  An Irish fella with whiskers that tickle my cheeks and lips that taste like apples so sweet they make my teeth ache. That’s the way I would describe what I am feeling: a deep kind of aching. I think I have been aching for a long time.

  I close my eyes and let Aidan kiss me, and for a little while, I forget about the unfulfilled and unrealized dreams that have been gnawing away at me, paining me something fierce.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Text from Manderley Maxwell de Maloret:

  I am sorry, darling, but I can’t tell you what you should be doing with your life. Nobody can. It’s one of those things you have to figure out for yourself. You will figure it out, Tara. You will figure it out and you will be a spectacular success, an awe-inspiring, breathtaking, beautiful success. You always are.

  Text to Manderley Maxwell de Maloret:

  Thank you, Mandy. I wish we were kids again. I can’t believe I am saying this, but I actually miss the days of you telling me what to do. It was so much easier when you put your hands on your hips, looked at me over the tops of your glasses, and gave me what-for. I miss you, Little Miss Bossy Pants.

  Text from Manderley Maxwell de
Maloret:

  I miss you, too.

  Text from Emma Lee Maxwell:

  Yay! I am so glad you traded in your sorry old Doc Martens for a pair of rain boots. I met a girl in the village and she said Hunter wellies have suffered prole drift.

  Text to Emma Lee Maxwell:

  What is prole drift?

  Text from Emma Lee Maxwell:

  A stupid term used by uppity Brits to describe when an upscale product becomes popular with the non-aristo classes. Like I care. If Hunter wellies were good enough for Princess Diana, they’re good enough for us! Right?

  Text from Emma Lee Maxwell:

  Right?

  A girl can only go on so many aimless hikes before she starts to question her purpose on this planet—even if she is taking those hikes while wearing shiny, new, prole drift Hunter wellies.

  The weeks have melted away like ice cubes on hot asphalt and I haven’t accomplished an apple-picking thing. I say apple-picking, because I am pretty sure one of my roommates has kept busy picking produce.

  Aidan leaves the castle before sunrise and returns just before dinner, his rucksack heavy with squat apples with red-tinged, strawberry-flavored flesh, and dark-blue plums with yellow, spicy-flavored flesh. He delivers his bounty onto Mrs. McGregor, dumping the fruit into an ancient wooden trencher on the counter, and then climbs the narrow, twisting tower stairs to his room, returning freshly scrubbed and smelling of soap. Discovering why Aidan has developed an addiction to apples and apple products has become the riddle in my very own Nancy Drew mystery.

  The Message in the Apples.

  The Mystery in the Rucksack.

  Sin, on the other hand, spends his days involved in more cerebral pursuits. He has claimed the Steward’s Room as his own, transforming it into his office. In the old days, the steward would have been in charge of collecting rent from the tenants of the estate. The tenants offered their coins to the steward, who would deposit them through a slot on the top of his desk, where they would drop into a hidden, secured compartment. Sin cleared away the old leather bound ledgers and replaced them with dual computer monitors and stacks of black, three ring binders. He stays holed up in his makeshift office for most of the day, only venturing out for his afternoon tea. I am not sure when he sleeps—if he sleeps. Discovering how he is able to keep his body so fit and his skin so healthy with lack of apparent exercise or fresh air has become the riddle in my second Nancy Drew mystery.

  Clue in the Steward’s Room.

  The Workaholic’s Secret.

  Mystery at Tásúildun Castle.

  Actually, The Ridiculous Wonderings of an Aimless Woman would be a better title for the story of how I spend my time.

  This morning is going to be different, though. This morning, I am not going to stay in bed binge watching Cooked on my Netflix app and puzzling over the riddle that is Aidan Gallagher. This morning, I am going to stop being the Girl Detective and start being Woman Determined (to find her purpose).

  Showered and dressed, I am ready to boldly go where very few have gone before: Mrs. McGregor’s kitchen. I’ve had this little caterpillar of an idea wriggling around inside me and I want to give it some room, see if it will develop into a big, beautiful butterfly. The idea came to me yesterday while I was sunning myself on the boulder beside the prayer stone. It was unusually warm so I took my boots off and stretched out on the rock, my bare feet dangling off the side. The sun on my face, the sound of the distant surf like white noise in my ears, lured me to that place between consciousness and sleep, where ideas pass through your brain unfiltered. I was just about to drift off to sleep when an overactive neuron in my brain fired off a memory of the article I had read about the women who gave up their jobs to start lucrative food-based businesses.

  The hairdresser and her cheesecakes.

  How does a hairdresser with no culinary experience become the president of a million-dollar gourmet cheesecake company?

  People love my cheesecake.

  Goats. She used cream cheese made from goat’s milk. Big whoopee pie. I could make a cheesecake using goat’s milk cheese.

  Man, this sun feels good on my face.

  Did I remember to put on my moisturizer with SPF this morning? I hope so or else my face is going to be one giant freckle. Aunt Pattycake used to have a German shorthaired pointer with freckles all over his face. She called him Herr Sommersprossen, which she said meant Mister Freckles in German. He would do tricks for Cheetos. A dog that ate Cheetos. Funny . . .

  . . . almost as funny as a hairdresser making goat cheese cheesecakes.

  I should start selling cheesecakes. I’ll bet there are loads of people in Donegal hankering for cheesecake, especially one made by a trained American pastry chef. Cheesecake made with Bailey’s Irish Cream.

  Ooo, I know! I could make glazed plum cheesecake using those fat, juicy plums Aidan brings home each night. I could pair the plum cake with a strong ginger tea or a delicately flavored citrus tea. I could turn the old stables into a tea room and serve—

  And that’s when my little wriggling caterpillar was born, while I was sunning myself on a boulder high in the hills over Tásúildun.

  Mrs. McGregor is standing at the island, scrubbing a copper pot with a paste of salt and white wine vinegar, when I walk into the kitchen.

  “Good Morning, Mrs. McGregor.”

  “Good Morning, luv,” she says, smiling. “Be sure to take the brolly with ya. The clouds over the hills are trying to rain.”

  “I’m not taking a hike today.” I grab one of the tarnished copper pots and a handful of Mrs. McGregor’s paste. “If you don’t mind me lollygagging around the kitchen, I thought I would do some baking.”

  “Of course I don’t mind.”

  I finish scrubbing the copper saucepot and then carry it over to the sink, rinse it under the faucet, and dry it with a soft cloth until it gleams.

  “Mrs. McGregor?” I place the saucepot back on its shelf. “What happened to all of those old cookbooks that used to be in the butler’s pantry?”

  “They’re still there. Why?”

  Mrs. McGregor stands quietly while I tell her about my burgeoning butterfly of an idea. I tell her about the plum cheesecakes and apple pies I want to bake, the pots of ginger tea, the cozy and inviting tea room that will beckon travelers from all over Donegal.

  “What do you think?” I ask. “Don’t worry. I won’t pitch a hissy fit if you say you think it sounds like a completely harebrained idea.”

  I mean what I said. I won’t pitch a hissy fit if Mrs. McGregor laughs at my idea. I am talking about creating a lucrative commercial venture even though I have no experience developing, implanting, or operating a business. It sounds as half-cocked as . . . Emma Lee saying she wants to be a marriage broker without ever having had a serious committed relationship.

  “I t’ink it sounds like a grand idea. Sure, a grand idea,” she says, reaching for a new pot to scrub. “And don’t ya worry, luv. I would tell ya if I thought it sounded like biscuits to a bear.”

  Biscuits to a bear has been one of Mrs. McGregor’s favorite phrases for as long as I can remember. It means a waste of time.

  “Thank you, Mrs. McGregor.” I hurry around the counter and throw my arms around her. “You’re better than butter. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Go on with ya,” she laughs, waving her salt covered hands at me. “Go fetch your cookbooks and I will pour ya a cuppa.”

  I hurry down the hall, energized by Mrs. McGregor’s enthusiasm. Instead of heading to the pantry, though, I head to the Steward’s Room and press my ear against the closed door. Sin is speaking Japanese.

  Sin speaks Japanese?

  Sweet Gary Stu! Is there nothing this man can’t do? Manderley taught me about Mary Sues and Gary Stus, seemingly perfect characters in novels, when we were reading a bestseller about a centerfold model/helicopter pilot/covert agent who disarmed an explosive device with a hairpin after hacking into the Pentagon’s computers to stop a Chinese-fired
nuclear weapon from obliterating London—while wearing six-inch heels! Sin, with his model good looks, financial acumen, and multi-linguistic abilities, is proving to be a Gary Stu.

  Sin switches to English and says goodbye to the person on the other end of his line. I wait a few seconds before knocking on the door.

  “Yes,” he says. “Come in Mrs. McGregor.”

  I open the door.

  “Actually, it’s me,” I say, peeking around the door.

  “Good Morning, Tara.” He smiles, pulls his ear piece out of his ear, and tosses it on the desk. “This is a lovely surprise.”

  “Good Morning, Sin,” I say, trying not to look directly into his model/business wizard/linguist beautiful eyes. “I was wondering if I might beg, borrow, or steal a few office supplies.”

  “Of course,” he says. “What do you need?”

  “A pad of paper, pen, highlighter, and some of those little colored sticky things you use to mark a passage in a book.”

  “Flags?”

  “Yes, Sir!” I laugh. “Flags.”

  He opens a desk drawer and pulls out a new yellow legal pad, pens, highlighters, and flags.

  “Here you are,” he says, handing me the supplies. “Good luck with the novel.”

  I stare blankly.

  “Cookbook?” He says, trying again. “New recipe? Epic tic-tac-toe battle with Mrs. McGregor?”

  I laugh.

  “Close,” I say, taking the supplies. “I am working on a potential new venture that could help raise the money to keep Tásúildun in the black.”

  “Bloody intriguing.” His phone rings and he smiles apologetically. “Sorry, but I have to get this.”

  “No worries.” I turn to leave. “Thanks for the supplies.”

  “Wait,” he says, putting his hand on the door. “If you’re free, would you like to go to dinner with me tomorrow night? I would love to hear all about your new venture.”

  If I am free? Hmmm. You mean, if I am not cuddling up with a box of Mrs. McGregor’s Butter Cookies or listening for Lady Margaret’s rasping death rattle?