“It’s me!” he said, and in that enthusiastic response, the crinkling around the eyes, the exposure of a big mouth full of straight, white teeth, it all came back to me in a rush. Brendan Joyce, the kid who had worn braces from seemingly the moment he arrived on our American shores until we graduated. Whoever his orthodontist was, he or she had had no idea of a reasonable timetable for wearing braces, just an eye for detail. Brendan Joyce now had some amazing teeth and an even more amazing smile, warm and sexy. “What are you doing back here, Bel?”
Where to begin? I kept it short and sweet. “I missed the Landing.”
“You did? No one misses the Landing after they leave.” He looked confused.
I shrugged, leaving it at that. He was right, after all.
“Where are you living?” he asked.
Giving someone that answer was akin to ripping off a Band-Aid so quickly that you wouldn’t realize what you had done. Or, in this case, what you had said. “My parents’. Behind Shamrock Manor.”
His face clouded over a bit, not at the mention of my parents but likely at the thought that I, a woman with a history and a life, was back in town and living with my parents. He moved on from that, letting out a little laugh. “My mother takes your mother’s Pilates class. First time, she couldn’t walk for a week.” The cloud lifted and he burst out laughing. “Funny thing, that Pilates. I don’t think they have it in Ireland yet. My sister would have told me.”
“She’s gone back?” I asked, remembering a freckle-faced girl who waited for her brother outside of school, a violin case in her hand, Irish-dancing shoes slung over her shoulder. They always walked together, Brendan and the little girl whose name I couldn’t remember, him being kinder than any big brother that I had, putting his arm around her as they crossed the street, picking up her dancing shoes when the laces broke and they fell with a clatter to the ground.
“She has,” he said. “She always missed the old country more than I did.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Heard you had a little trouble at the Manor on Saturday.”
“Yeah, and that was just my brothers’ fight on the opening of the second set,” I said, attempting a joke that fell way flat. He looked confused. “Sorry. This isn’t really the right time for humor. Yes, a man died at the wedding. Murdered,” I said, shuddering at the thought.
“Guest?”
“Sort of? We don’t know,” I said. “No one really knows who he is.”
“So how did he get into the Manor?” he asked.
“Well, it’s not like we have a crack security system. He basically walked in, sat down, and helped himself to a pint or three,” I said. And the bride. He helped himself to the bride as well, I thought, but I didn’t let that part slip. I turned away from the pool to get a better look at Brendan.
“Not a clue as to who he was?” Brendan asked.
“He told me something about being Caleigh’s third cousin or some shite, but no one owns up to knowing him.”
“Owns up?”
“He talked to a few people and I thought they looked chummy, but no one saw him before,” I said. I had said too much. Those “few people” were my family after all. I turned back to the pool. “So, no pool.”
He shook his head. “No pool.”
“That’s a shame,” I said. I had wrestled myself into a bathing suit right before coming over, never thinking that swimming wouldn’t be an option. “Don’t you have some pull here? Can’t you use the hose when no one’s looking?” I asked, even though I knew that water rationing was a state-mandated thing and not the purview of the village board. And using the hose might net a full pool somewhere around the year 20-never.
He laughed, and I got a glimpse of those great teeth again. “If only I could. I run the village’s summer camp program and I’d love to have the pool available for the little bastards,” he said. “But no such luck. I’ve been sending them to that sketchy waterpark that’s north of here one day a week just to get them out of here.” He pointed to the bunch of keys attached to his Bermuda shorts. “I know I look important what with the keys to everything around here in my possession,” he said, sweeping out his arms, gesturing toward the snack bar, the restrooms, the picnic tables, “but I’m just the hired help.”
I put up a hand, shading my eyes from the sun, which appeared behind his head, giving him a kind of halo. I didn’t remember him being this much of an angel, but my return to Foster’s Landing so far had been full of surprises and they were starting to become a little more positive, Brendan Joyce being proof positive of that. “Well, thanks, Brendan. It was good to see you again,” I said, the spandex of my bathing suit concealed beneath a long muumuu that I had picked up on 10th Street starting to become uncomfortably warm in the summer sun. I started back up the hill toward the parking lot.
“Hey, Bel! Bel McGrath!” he said, and I turned to find him running up behind me. “Listen, I know it’s kind of sudden and all, but would you like to get a drink?” he asked.
The brace-faced kid who was nice to his sister had turned into a fine specimen of a man, and besides the fact that I had been planning on becoming a hermit or maybe even a cloistered nun and was well on my toward achieving one of those goals, I couldn’t think of any reason at all why I shouldn’t have a drink with this nice guy with the beautiful smile. I could play just so many games of poker with my card-shark nephew, Domhnall. “Well, sure. That would be nice, Brendan.”
“You know? Catch up and everything?” he said.
“That would be great. Where and when?” I asked.
“The Dugout?” he asked, realizing too late, based on history, that the place might not be the best meeting point. He didn’t know that I had been there twice already and that I was trying to make visits there feel more normal. Routine. He came up with an alternative quickly. “Oh, sorry. How about Saturday? The Grand Mill?” he said, referencing a restaurant walking distance from my house. “Seven o’clock?”
“The Grand Mill it is. But make it Friday. I’m busy on Saturday,” I said, crossing the street from the pool to the parking lot. I turned and called after him, “And they do, you know!”
He looked at me. “They do what?”
“Have Pilates in Ireland,” I said.
“Good to know,” he said. “I’ll tell Francine.”
“Who?”
“My sister!” he called, and turned off running at the sound of a phalanx of buses pulling into the pool area, all filled with the “little bastards” who were in his care.
I was starting to rethink the hermit thing, the staying-in-the-house-all-the-time plan. Being a cloistered nun really didn’t hold a lot of appeal. And besides, getting out was proving to be a little more interesting than I would have thought.
CHAPTER Twelve
I finally stopped stalling and went into the kitchen of the Manor the next day, thinking that getting started on the preparations for the wedding might be in order. At four o’clock in a few days one hundred starving Irish wedding guests would descend upon Shamrock Manor, and I needed to be ready to knock their socks off.
Before I left the apartment, my black-and-white-checkered pants on, my chef’s coat buttoned, black clogs on my feet, and my hair held back by a colorful scarf that I had picked up on Canal Street years before, I could feel that old fire start in the pit of my stomach, the need to experiment with ingredients and spices. I took the short walk from my apartment to the kitchen, letting myself in with the key that Dad had given me, and took a look around.
Inside the walk-in freezer I found frozen canapés, egg rolls, and a hundred pounds of fresh ham.
On the wire rack next to the oven I discovered eighty pounds of potatoes. In the cupboards were some paper goods and a few large, industrial-sized cans of carrots, floating, I knew, in a putrid, ginger-colored liquid if I were to be so bold as to open one up. The refrigerator held a gross of eggs from a local farm, so that was good, and the requisite Irish butter that I knew my dad had imported for his guests. The Irish are nothing if not
particular about their butter. His mother, Bridgie, my grandmother, had been able to go on for hours about the proper color and consistency of butter. There had been no autopsy when she died, but I always suspected that maybe butter had played a role in the massive heart attack she had the day before Arney’s Confirmation.
I stood by the stainless-steel island in the middle of the kitchen and put my hands on my hips and looked around. This, in my humble opinion, was a sad excuse for a catering-hall kitchen.
But it was my sad excuse and my responsibility to make it not so.
I heard the office behind me whir to life, the printer spitting out paper, the fax machine beeping. I went through the back of the kitchen and into the main office where I found Cargan—whom my parents had elected “catering manager,” God help us all—sitting at a desk in the windowless room, staring at a ledger, a Rubik’s Cube in his hand, his fingers lazily turning the sections without him looking at it.
“The Maloney party canceled.”
“Who?”
“The Maloneys. February ninth.”
“What year?”
“Next.”
Talking to Cargan was like putting together a puzzle with several missing pieces. I had learned over the years how to communicate with him, my mind able to fill in the blanks with just a few pointed questions. We were close in age, not quite “Irish twins,” being more than a year apart, but closer in age than any of the other siblings to each other. I was his protector in such a way that he always seemed younger than me, despite being two years ahead of me in school.
Amy had seen something in him, though, and they had dated his entire senior year, she wearing an iridescent purple dress to the prom that made her look like one of the girls who sang backup for Prince. Cargan had worn a matching bow tie and cummerbund, and together they had looked smashing, if purple was your thing.
“I’m worried,” he said, his fingers still working the Rubik’s Cube, a puzzle, like my brother, I had never been able to solve. His Shamrock Rovers soccer team jersey hung on his thin frame, wrinkled and voluminous. He played soccer on an adult team with a bunch of Ecuadorians in the next town over, his pale skin, often with a layer of unabsorbed sunscreen making him even whiter, blinding in the summer sun next to his darker teammates.
“That more will cancel?” I asked.
He nodded. “That we’ll lose the business. That Mom and Dad won’t have anywhere to live. That we’ll have to move.”
I held up a hand. “Slow your roll, pallie. Slow your roll.” I leaned over and eyed the ledger. Indeed, there were cross-outs through some of the booked parties, but the O’Donnell wedding, this coming weekend, was still a go. If we could pull that off and assure our guests that all was well at Shamrock Manor, in spite of the trouble we had had the weekend before, we might be able to right the ship. “This will blow over and we’ll get our footing back.” I gave him a little chuck to the shoulder. “And wait until you see what I have planned for the kitchen.”
He looked up at me, his eyes red rimmed; poor guy looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks. “The kitchen?”
“Yes,” I said, a surge of enthusiasm masking the hollow pit in my stomach at the thought of exactly what the “kitchen,” and I use that word loosely, looked like. “After a few weddings, we’ll be the talk of the Hudson Valley.”
“Because?”
“Because of the food, silly!” I said, wondering why it was that he looked like he was going to vomit instead of embracing my plan wholeheartedly. “Shamrock Manor has an award-winning chef at the helm and wedding fare will never be the same.” Geez, even the publicist I had had back in New York couldn’t have made me sound as fabulous and inventive as I made myself sound to my skeptical brother.
“But we want it to be the same,” he said, standing up behind the desk. I got a glimpse of his baggy soccer shorts, the socks that went to his knees. “We don’t want it to be different. We want it the same as it always was.” He pointed at the ledger. “These people want what they ordered. Ham. Potatoes. Shepherd’s pie,” he said, and stopped me before I could speak, “and not shepherd’s pie with duck crap in it.…”
“It’s call foie gras.” I crossed my arms over my chest, trying to steady my breathing, the tips from anger-management class still front and center in my mind.
“Whatever!” he said, kneeling down to pull up one of his drooping soccer socks, the elastic at the top having died an untimely death in a hot dryer. “We don’t want what you do. We want what we do. Simple. Classic. Irish cuisine.”
That really wasn’t what I had in mind. “People really want shepherd’s pie at a wedding? Really?”
“It’s our reputation. It’s what we serve. People want to eat things that remind them of home,” he said.
We weren’t really getting anywhere and I had work to do. “Well, what did the O’Donnells order?” I asked.
He pushed a piece of paper toward me and I scanned the menu. Canapés. Check. We had those in the freezer. Ham. Check again. We had a lot of ham. It was decent ham and could be manipulated but it was ham nonetheless. And we had potatoes, lots of potatoes for the desired mashed potatoes. We were all set. I grimaced when I looked at the menu and maybe even uttered a little groan.
“Arney was right,” Cargan said.
I arched an eyebrow in his direction. “About what?”
“About you. About how you’d come back here and want to change everything. About how you think you’re better than we are because you lived in the city.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “I don’t think I’m better. I just want to make things better.” I didn’t know if that clarified my intentions. By the look on his face, I would say the answer was “no.”
“It’s fine here, Bel. It always has been.” He leaned down and pulled at his sock, finally giving up and letting it fall to his ankle. “We don’t need your help.”
“Then why did you hire me?” I asked, the office now almost completely silent now that the printer had gone to sleep and the fax had ceased chirping. All I could hear was my brother’s shallow breathing, a panic attack coming over him at the thought of conflict with his younger sister, and the sound of my own heart beating.
He looked at me, not wanting to answer the question but knowing that I wouldn’t leave until he did. Cargan couldn’t tell a lie. He was incapable of a half-truth, let alone a full truth. “Because you were our only choice,” he said as if it was the most obvious answer of all.
And it was.
I knew that was the reason, but I didn’t know that I was going to be hamstrung—no pun intended—by our traditionally minded clientele, my parents’ adhesion to cuisine of Ireland circa 1964, by our “catering manager’s” intractability, by everyone’s collective inability to change.
“Well, okay then,” I said, feeling stupid and overdressed in my chef’s coat. Thankfully, I had left my toque at home. If I had been standing here in a high hat, a trademark of my profession, in front of my brother in his droopy socks and soccer uniform, I would have felt more foolish than I already did.
He closed the ledger with such force that a stack of papers flew around the desk before landing everywhere. I walked over to help him pick them up, but he stopped me. “Go. I’ll do it. I have practice in a few minutes, but I’ll be back later,” he said, and I could tell he was on the verge of tears, for what I wasn’t sure. For everything, I guessed. He placed the Rubik’s Cube on the desk, its colors all neatly matched up and perfectly aligned.
Before the book closed, I had seen a lot of red, a lot of minus signs. Not too much black to indicate that Shamrock Manor was thriving, that everyone involved was making money, supporting themselves in grand fashion. Rather, without anyone having to tell me, it had become apparent that things were a little worse than they had seemed and I, in my prolonged fugue state, had failed to realize it.
You want ham? I thought as I walked back to the kitchen.
I’ll give you ham.
CHAPTER Thirteen
> I returned to the apartment after putting a long day in in the kitchen, getting it as ready as it would ever be for the O’Donnell wedding and any future events in the Manor. The door to my apartment was unlocked, as it usually was after one of my mom’s visits; she always forgot to lock it and that’s how I knew she had been up there. I checked around. No smell of Febreze. No lentil crap in the fridge. No Dustbusters, or new mops, or a broom I hadn’t had before.
I went into my bedroom to change and noticed that Mom had been in here as well, a new development. She usually kept to the living areas. I’m not sure what she thought she might find in my bedroom, but up until now she had eschewed that space lest she come across something that didn’t suit her Puritan sensibilities. My copy of Fifty Shades of Grey maybe. A thong that had “YOLO” affixed to the front in sequins I had bought during a drunken night while watching Home Shopping Network. The vibrator that someone had given me at a bachelorette party and that might cause the immediate death of Mom or Dad should they happen to come upon it standing proudly on my nightstand, the pink rubber phallus waving jauntily from side to side. I shoved it under my bed.
My bed had a depression in it where someone had been sitting, my yearbook out and open to a page that showed me and Amy at a pep rally, my mouth wide open in some kind of cheer and her sitting next to me wearing a huge smile. My yearbook had been in my closet, so it had taken some searching to unearth it, but apparently Mom had done that.
I wondered why.
I put it back under the pile of chef’s pants that I kept on the top shelf of the closet and made sure that it was well hidden. Mom was slipping. Usually the only signs that she had been in the apartment were the things she left behind for me. I hadn’t thought she had taken to snooping, but the open yearbook on my bed led me to believe that she was looking deeper into my life by poking around. There was nothing to see here, really; I had nothing to hide. And right now I was just too tired to be angry at Mom. It just wasn’t worth it.
Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) Page 8