by L. E. Rico
My sister sits on the edge of the bed. “Father Romance called me this morning. He told me all about what happened with Bryan. Sweetie, I’m so, so sorry,” she whispers, putting a hand on my arm. “Are you okay?”
I struggle to sit up, putting my back against the headboard. I shake my head.
“No, not really. But that’s the least of my worries today. I’ve got plenty of time to kick my own butt for being stupid enough to think…” I can’t finish the sentence.
But Jameson can. “To think that he had feelings for you? That he wanted to be with you, not just use you to get what he wanted?”
This last part makes me do a snort/scoff/laugh combo.
“He did warn me, you know. He told me from the very beginning that he always gets what he wants. I should have listened.”
“Yeah, well, take it from someone who knows, what they say and who they are can be two totally different things. I swear, I think God broke the mold after Pops. What happened to all the men like him? The men who put family above everything and everyone else?”
There’s no right answer to that question, so it just hangs there. I scoot over and pat the mattress next to me, inviting Jameson to come and sit. She does, and I lean my head on her shoulder.
“I don’t think we made it,” I say softly.
“You don’t know that. Walker was going to get the final report from the Fund My Goal website and bring it over to Wally this morning. He said he’d have the numbers tallied for us by about ten.”
“He said it was going to be tight,” I remind her.
“Tight, but not impossible.”
“Stop it, James. We need to look at this realistically. There’s an excellent chance that there won’t be an O’Halloran’s Pub for much longer.”
“Hennessy V.S. O’Halloran, what did Pops teach us?” my sister demands with an expectant glare.
“It ain’t over till it’s over,” I whisper unenthusiastically.
“That’s right. Now get your butt out of that bed and take a shower.”
I do as I’m told, trying hard to cry softly enough that she can’t hear me outside of the shower.
…
The sad resignation in Wally’s eyes tells me everything I need to know before he says a word. I just nod slowly and fight back the tears that I feel trying to escape past my rapidly blinking eyelids.
No. I will not do this. I will not fall apart. Not now. Not after all of this.
“I’m so sorry, Henny,” he says gently. “Even with the Fund My Goal website, it just wasn’t quite enough.”
I nod and plaster a polite smile to my face. “Okay. Okay. Thank you, Wally. Thanks for everything.”
I turn and walk back out into the lobby where I find the expectant faces of my sisters waiting for me. One glance at me and the expectation crumbles, and we’re all standing in the First National Bank of Mayhem, crying our eyes out for all that we have lost.
After a few very long, very wet minutes, I sniffle, wipe my face with my hands and stand up straight.
“Okay, well, as Pops would say, ‘it is what it is.’ And, as Father Romance would say, ‘the Lord’s will be done.’ So, I guess this is what was meant to happen, for whatever reason. But I’ll tell you something…” I take a deep breath and sweep the circle of their eyes, one by one. “I wouldn’t trade these last weeks for the world. I’ve never felt closer to all of you. And, in the end, I think that’s what Mama and Pops would’ve wanted.”
Some nodding and renewed tears.
“Are you going to go back home?” Walker asks.
For a split second I’m confused, and I’m about to tell her I am home when I realize she means home to my old life. God, is it possible it’s only been a month and a half since I left? It feels like another lifetime ago. But, without a business to manage here, there’s no reason not to go back. I guess.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “Yeah, I’ll be going back home. For a while, anyway. I have some loose ends to tie up.”
“Don’t.” The single word from Jameson is packed with more emotion than I’d have thought possible.
“James…”
“No,” she insists, shaking her head. “Don’t leave us. Stay here in Mayhem. Open your own practice. We need you here. You can come live with me.”
“Or with us,” Bailey chirps.
“I promise I’ll think about it. But that’ll have to wait because we’ve got a wake to plan.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Bryan
Truittism No. 18: You can go home again. But you likely won’t be the same person you were when you left.
He looks so much older, and frailer, in the satin-draped coffin. I hardly recognize the man I last saw five years ago in court for his sentencing. The day that the judge shamed him for implicating his own son in a crime in order to deflect attention from himself and his own guilt.
I smell my mother’s jasmine perfume before I see her, then I feel her hand at my elbow.
“Hello, Mother,” I say quietly. Her brown eyes look huge in her face, also considerably aged over the last five years.
“Bryan, sweetheart, I’m so glad you came,” she says, her voice choked with emotion. “I–I didn’t think you would, honestly. I mean, I hoped…”
“You can thank Helen for that,” I tell her honestly, and she gives me a weak smile.
“Ah yes. We spoke on the telephone, and she offered me her condolences a few moments ago.”
I look around at the room full of empty seats and wonder just what she was thinking.
“Why did you have a wake? Did you really think people would come, Mother?”
“I hoped,” she says again, and I can see that she really did. She somehow imagined that there would be people saddened by the loss of such a greedy, unscrupulous man. “He wasn’t always like that,” she continues, as if reading my thoughts. “When we were first married, when you were a little boy, we had good times. We were a family. But then something changed.”
I’m relieved when she stops there, because what she doesn’t realize is that I remember those days. And that is what made this so much more painful. If my father had been a bastard all along, I never would have known he was capable of anything else. But to have him be a good father who somewhere along the way lost sight of his humanity was so much worse.
And what he did… He didn’t just obliterate my past, erasing all the good years, he also destroyed my future. By throwing me under the bus, Bryan Broadmore Sr. ensured I would never be able to use my name again without a cloud of suspicion hanging over me.
My mother takes my hand in hers and leads me to a sofa on the side of the room. From here, I can see Helen sitting out in the lobby by a koi pond, scanning her phone. Otherwise, we’re alone.
“I didn’t do this for him,” my mother explains. “I did it for me. You see, when I took my marriage vows, I was very serious, Bryan. I promised before God to stand by that man until the day one of us passed. I did. And now, that day has come. This is the last thing I can do for him.” She pauses and looks off in the distance for a long moment, then turns back to me. “I believe that we all have to face our maker someday. Your father will have to answer for the sins he’s committed, but I will be able to stand once again before God and say that I stayed true to my marriage, to my husband, and to my vows.”
I can see that this makes perfect sense to my mother. And she’s right. No wife could have been more devoted to her husband, right up till this very moment—right up till the end. But there’s still that part of me, that barely-mature twenty-four-year-old part of me, who is devastated at her refusal to disavow the man who so callously threw away their son’s life in a desperate attempt to save his own.
I reach over and take her hand in mine, giving it a squeeze. “What will you do now, Mother?”
She sighs, and I see the slightest hint of light creep into her haunted eyes. My God, could that possibly be hope that I’m looking at?
“I’ve met my obligations, son. Now i
t’s time to get on with my life. You know there wasn’t really anything left—not after restitutions were made, what little we could give back to those poor people who lost everything. But I’ve got a bit put by, and my pension from when I was teaching. Your aunt Barbara has asked me to come and live with her down in Tampa, and I’m going to do it. The house is already on the market. I’m going to start fresh somewhere else. New state, new name, new life.”
“New name?”
She smiles at me, and this time, there’s nothing weak about it. “Yes, love, I think it’s time my son and I had the same name again, so I’ll be going back to my maiden name. Clara Truitt.”
I don’t know why this makes me emotional, but before I can stop myself, I’m crying in my mother’s arms like a lost little boy who’s finally found his way home.
…
Our one-day detour turns into three when Helen convinces me we should stay for the funeral and burial. In sharp contrast to the wake, several people turn out for the church service and at the cemetery, not to honor my father’s life, but my mother’s. I’m surprised by how relieved I am to find that she didn’t lose everything with our family’s reversal of fortune. It is obvious that Clara Broadmore is a well-respected, much-loved part of her church and community.
Her friends tell me what she was too humble to disclose, that she wrote to each and every victim of my father’s schemes—more than one hundred letters in all—personally apologizing for their pain and suffering at the hands of her husband. She’s made a point of living her life well below the radar and giving back to her community in earnest.
By the time I board the plane home on Sunday, I’m amazed by how much lighter I feel. It’s as if I’m finally free of the anvil secured to my ankle for the last five years. Helen sees it as clearly as I feel it.
“Good Lord, you look better than I’ve ever seen you, Bryan,” she observes with a grin, somewhere over Tennessee.
“Yeah, I have to admit, I feel better than I have in a very long time. I needed to do this. Thank you,” I say sincerely.
“Just helping a friend,” she replies. “Now that we’ve got your past sorted out, can we talk about your future?”
“What, the Iowa project?” I reply, knowing very well Iowa is not what’s on her mind. She swats me with her copy of People. “All right! All right, already, I surrender!” I say with a laugh.
“Good. Now, about this Hennessy…”
She leaves the sentence hanging for me to fill in the blanks. With a sigh, I look straight ahead and consider my reply.
“This Hennessy is beautiful and sweet and brilliant and sexy. She thinks she has to live a bigger, shinier life than the one she grew-up with, and so she’s miserable. But when she’s at home, in Mayhem, with her crazy sisters and those nut-ball neighbors of hers, she just…” I pause, searching for the right words. “She just comes alive.”
Helen is staring at me as if I’ve sprouted a second head.
“What?” I ask, feeling myself growing defensive.
She shakes her head. “No, it’s just that I’ve never heard you talk about a woman that way. They’re usually just hot or, if you really like them, smokin’ hot. But she’s different, this Hennessy,” Helen deduces correctly.
“Yes, she is,” I agree. “If I’m honest, it’s why I made that ridiculous bet with her. It was just a stupid excuse to stay in town—to stay close to her. And then, once I was there and I got to know her and to feel like a part of the community, I didn’t want to leave. For just a little while I could pretend that I was a normal guy, falling for a normal girl.”
“Bryan…you don’t have to pretend. You can have a normal life. You deserve to be happy. Why don’t you just go and get her?”
“I can’t,” I say with a sad smile. “This time it can’t be about getting everything that I want. It’s about her getting everything she wants. And she doesn’t want me, Helen.”
And just like that, the weight of my own words falls upon me. The anvil is back, and it feels about a hundred pounds heavier.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Hennessy
They fill the pub and spill out into the streets. I stopped counting somewhere around two-hundred. Sitting on one side of the room is a coffin, borrowed from the Mayhem High School drama department. The lid is down and littered with pictures of the pub, from the early days of Mama and Pops to the day we held Jackson’s christening here.
“…and so, Jack said to me, ‘Charlie my boy, you’d better put a ring on that girl’s finger before she realizes she’s much too good for you!’ And I did!”
A swell of laughter greets Charlie Edwards as he tells the story of how he came to propose to his wife, Sofia. They’ve been married for fifteen years now and have four children. Charlie is only one of more than a dozen people who have taken the stage, standing by the coffin to tell a story about the pub or my parents. There’s a bottle of Irish whiskey up there and a line of clean shot glasses so that each story can be toasted.
Most of these tales have had us rolling on the floor, but more than a few have brought tears to my eyes. And to my sisters’, as well. Our part-timer, Carly, has taken over bar duties so that Jameson, Walker, Bailey, and I can have front row seats for this part of the wake. We’ve heard about marriages and births, as well as the dearly departed, but my favorite memories are the ones about the young couple who scrimped and saved to buy this pub and run it while their family grew along with the town.
I’m stunned when King Colby walks out of the mob and pours himself a shot. His eyes find ours.
“Hennessy, Jameson, Walker, Bailey… I knew your father more than twenty years ago, when I first came to Mayhem. He was an affable man who always had a story or a smile or a joke. Only, I didn’t want to hear any jokes or tall tales. You see, when I moved to Mayhem, it wasn’t to retire from my job, it was to hide. I was hiding from the grief of losing my wife, Abigail. I moved here to get away from the happy memories that should have comforted me…but which haunted me, instead.”
The four of us look at one another, and I realize the pub has grown perfectly still. This is the most that King has ever spoken to any of us, about anything. And it’s the first that anyone in this building has ever heard of his life outside of Mayhem.
“It was my first Christmas here—my first Christmas without her—and I just couldn’t bear to sit at home and watch television, so I went to work in that same office, right across the street. Your family was living here at the time, upstairs in the apartment. I guess you could see the light on in my office from there, because I’d barely been at my desk for half an hour when I heard a soft knock on the glass door. I looked up, and there was your sweet mother, Elaine.”
I gasp out loud. I can’t help it… It’s the first time anyone’s said her name in ages, and it’s the first time I’ve ever heard this particular story. I lean forward, riveted by the surly old man standing in front of the coffin.
“If it’d been anyone else, I’d have shooed them away. But I just couldn’t leave that pretty young woman standing out there in the cold. Especially when I saw the child holding her hand. A little girl, pretty as a doll, with rosy cheeks and hair the color of sunshine. That was you, Hennessy,” King says with a nod in my direction. “You had on a little red coat, and your hair was up in a big, red bow. You couldn’t have been more than three or four years old. So, I unlocked the door…” King’s voice suddenly catches, and he wipes at the dampness around his eyes with his calloused palms.
“I unlocked the door and looked at Elaine. And she just looked down at you, Hennessy, and nodded. You smiled at me, then—I remember so clearly because your front tooth was missing—and you said, ‘Santa came, Mister Colby, and he left a present for you under our tree!’”
Oh my God. I think I remember this…
“Elaine insisted that I come up for Christmas dinner. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, no matter how hard I tried. You held my hand, Henny, all the way across the street and up the stairs. When
I got there, I found that your mother had already set a place for me at the table, and there was, indeed, a present for me under that Christmas tree. Jack put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘King! We’ve been waiting for you.’ And they had been. Not for a single moment did I feel as if I was intruding. That was their gift, your parents, making people feel welcome, no matter who they were, where they were from, or what they’d done, or said, or been. It just didn’t matter to them. While you were in O’Halloran’s, you were a member of the family.”
Bailey is bawling while Walker makes an unsuccessful attempt to hide her tears by pretending she’s got something in her eye. Somewhere along the way, James has grabbed hold of my hand and is hanging on for dear life. As for me, the only thing I can think of right now is Bryan Truitt, and how my parents would have been ashamed of the way I treated him before he left town. Before I forced him to leave town. I wipe a rogue tear with the back of my hand and try to focus on moment. Plenty of time for guilt and recriminations later, I suppose.
“I’d like to raise this glass to Elaine and Jack O’Halloran and their girls—the Whiskey Sisters—who helped to give this community its soul. Mayhem, and the rest of the world, will be a lesser place without O’Halloran’s Pub in it.”
By the time King Colby raises his shot glass, there isn’t a dry eye in the house.
…
I’ve stepped out along the side of the building to get a little fresh air when King finds me. Before he can say a word, I throw my arms around him.
“Thank you for that,” I whisper and deliver a soft peck to his cheek. I can see him blushing, even in the dark.
“Uh…yeah, well… It’s one of my special memories, Hennessy. And it’s not one I share. Ever. I wouldn’t have tonight, except I wanted you to hear it before I tell you something else.”
“What is it?” I ask slowly, not sure this is going to be something I want to hear.
“It’s about Bryan…”
Oh God. I just don’t think I can do this right now.