by Nora Roberts
"You did well enough." Maggie bent down to a small refrigerator and took out two cold drinks. "You're not ham-handed or stupid."
"Thanks," Shannon said dryly. She took a long drink. "I think the hands-on lesson overbalanced the bargain."
Maggie smiled. "Then you owe me, don't you?"
"Apparently." Casually Shannon brushed through the sketches littering a workbench. "These are excellent. I saw some of your sketches and paintings in New York."
"I'm not a painter. Rogan isn't one to let any bit of business pass by, so he takes what he likes from them, has them mounted."
"I won't argue that your glasswork is superior to your drawing."
Maggie swallowed the soft drink before she choked. "Won't you?"
"No. But Rogan has an excellent eye, and I'm sure he culls out your best."
"Oh, to be sure. You're the painter, aren't you? I'm sure it takes tremendous talent to draw advertisements."
Challenged, Shannon set down her drink. "You don't really think you're better at it than I am."
"Well, I haven't seen anything of yours, have I? Unless I flipped by in a magazine waiting to have my teeth cleaned."
Shannon set her own and snatched up one of Maggie's hunks of charcoal. It took her longer to find a sketch pad and a clean sheet. While Maggie leaned her hip idly on the edge of the bench, Shannon bent over her work.
She started with fast strokes, annoyance pushing her. Then she began to find the pleasure in it, and the desire for beauty.
"Why, 'tis Liam." Maggie's voice went soft as butter as she saw her son emerge. Shannon was drawing just the head and shoulders, concentrating on that impishness that danced in his eyes and around his mouth. The dark hair was mussed, the lips quirked on the verge of a laugh.
"He always looks as though he's just been in trouble, or looking for it," Shannon murmured as she shaded.
"He does, yes. He's a darling, my Liam. You've caught him so, Shannon."
Alarmed by the catch in Maggie's voice, Shannon glanced over. "You're not going to start crying. Please."
"Hormones." Maggie sniffled and shook her head. "Now I suppose I'll have to say you've a better hand than I at drawing."
"Acknowledgment accepted." Shannon dashed her initials at the corner of the page, then carefully tore it off. "Fair trade for a paperweight," she said, handing it to Maggie.
"No, it's not. The balance has tipped again. I owe you another boon."
Shannon picked up a rag to wipe the charcoal dust from her hands. She stared at her own fingers. "Tell me about Thomas Concannon."
She didn't know where the need had come from, and was no less surprised than Maggie that she had asked. The question hummed for several long seconds.
"Come inside." Maggie's tone was suddenly gentle, as was the hand she set on Shannon's arm. "We'll have tea and talk of it."
It was there Brianna found them when she walked into Maggie's kitchen with Kayla and a basket of soda bread.
"Oh, Shannon. I didn't know you were here." And she would never have pictured her there, sitting at Maggie's table while Maggie brewed tea. "I ... I brought you some bread, Maggie."
"Thanks. Why don't we slice some up? I'm starving."
"I wasn't going to stay-"
"I think you should." Maggie glanced over her shoulder, met Brianna's eyes. "Kayla's gone to sleep in her carrier, Brie. Why don't you put her down for a nap here?"
"All right." All too aware of the tension in the room, Brianna set the bread down and took the baby out with her.
"She's worried we'll start spitting at each other," Maggie commented. "Brie's not one for fighting."
"She's very gentle."
"She is, yes. Unless you push the wrong spot. Then she's fierce. Always seems fiercer because it's never quite expected. It was she who found the letters your mother wrote. He'd kept them in the attic, you see. In a box where he liked to put things important to him. We didn't go through it, or some of his other things, for a long time after he'd died."
She brought the pot over, sat. "It was difficult for us, and my mother was living with Brie in the house until a couple years ago. To keep what peace could be kept, Brie didn't speak much of Da."
"Were things really so bad between your parents?"
"Worse than bad. They came to each other late in life. It was impulse, and passion. Though he told me there'd been love once, at the start of it."
"Maggie?" Brianna hesitated at the doorway.
"Come and sit. She wants to talk of Da."
Brianna came in, brushing a hand over Shannon's shoulder, perhaps in support, perhaps in gratitude, before she joined them. "I know it's hard for you, Shannon."
"It has to be dealt with. I've been avoiding it." She lifted her gaze, looked closely at each of her sisters. "I want you to understand I had a father."
"I would think it would be a lucky woman who could say she had two," Maggie put in. "Both who loved her." When Shannon shook her head, she barreled on. "He was a loving man. A generous one. Too generous at times. As a father he was kind, and patient, and full of fun. He wasn't wise, nor successful. And he had a habit of leaving a chore half done."
"He was always there if you needed cheering," Brianna murmured. "He had big dreams, outrageous ones, and schemes that were so foolish. He was always after making his fortune, but he died more rich in friends than in money. Do you remember the time, Maggie, when he decided we would raise rabbits, for the pelts?"
"And he built pens for them and bought a pair of those long-haired white ones. Oh, Mother was furious at the money it cost-and the idea of it." Maggie snickered. "Rabbits in the yard."
Brianna chuckled and poured out the tea. "And soon they were. Once they bred he didn't have the heart to sell them off to be skinned. And Maggie and I were wailing at the idea of the little bunnies being killed."
"So we went out one night," Maggie said, picking up the story, "the three of us sneaking about like thieves, and let them out, the mother and father and the babies. And we laughed like fools when they went bounding off into the fields." She sighed and picked up her tea. "He didn't have the heart, or the head, for business. He used to write poetry," she remembered. "Terrible stuff, blank verse. It was always a disappointment to him that he didn't have the words."
Brianna pressed her lips together. "He wasn't happy. He tried to be, and he worked hard as any man could to see that Maggie and I would be. But the house was full of anger, and as we found later, his own sorrow went deeper than anyone could reach. He had pride. He was so proud of you, Maggie."
"He was proud of both of us. He fought a terrible battle with Mother to see that I went to Venice to study. He wouldn't back down from that. And what he won for me cost him, and Brianna."
"It didn't-"
"It did." Maggie cut Brianna off. "All of us knew it. With me gone there was no choice but to lean on you, to depend on you to see to the house, to her, to everything."
"It was what I wanted, too."
"He'd have given you the moon if he could." Maggie laid a hand over Brianna's. "You were his rose. It was how he spoke of you the day he died."
"How did he die?" Shannon asked. It was hard to put the picture together, but she was beginning to see a man, flesh and blood, faults and virtues. "Was he ill?"
"He was, but none of us knew." It was painful for Maggie, would always be to go back to that day. "I went looking for him, in O'Malley's. I'd just sold my first piece of glass, in Ennis. We celebrated there. It was a huge day for both of us. It was cold, threatening rain, but he asked me to drive with him. We went out to Loop Head, as he often did."
"Loop Head." Shannon's heart stuttered, clutched.
"It was his favorite of all places," Maggie told her. "He liked to stand on the edge of Ireland, looking across the sea toward America."
No, Shannon thought, not toward a place. Toward a person. "My mother told me they met there. They met at Loop Head."
"Oh." Brianna folded her hands and looked down at them. "Oh, po
or Da. He must have seen her every time he went there."
"It was her name he said, when he was dying." Maggie didn't mind the tears, and let them fall. "It was cold, bitter cold, and windy, with the rain just beginning to blow in. I was asking him why, why he'd stayed all these years in unhappiness. He tried to tell me, to explain that it takes two people to make a marriage good or bad. I didn't want to hear it. And I wondered if there'd ever been anyone else in his life. And he told me he'd loved someone, and that it was like an arrow in the heart. That he'd had no right to her."
After a shaky breath, she continued. "He staggered and went gray. The pain took him to his knees, and I was so scared, shouting at him to get up, and trying to pull him. He wanted a priest, but it was just the two of us alone there, in the rain. He was telling me to be strong, not to turn my back on my dreams. I couldn't keep the rain off him. He said my name. Then he said Amanda. Just Amanda. And he died."
Abruptly Maggie pushed the chair back and walked out of the room.
"It hurts her," Brianna murmured. "She had no one to help, had to get Da into the truck by herself, drive him all the way back. I need to go to her."
"No, let me. Please." Without waiting for assent, Shannon stood and walked into the front room. Maggie was there, staring out the window.
"I was alone with my mother when she went into the coma she never revived from." Leading with her heart, Shannon stepped closer, laid a hand on Maggie's shoulder. "It wasn't at the end of the earth, and the sun was shining. Technically, she was still alive. But I knew I'd lost her. There was no one there to help."
Saying nothing, Maggie lifted her hand, rested it over Shannon's.
"It was the day she told me about-myself. About her and Tom Concannon. I was angry and hurt and said things to her I can never take back. I know that she loved my father. She loved Colin Bodine. And I know she was thinking of her Tommy when she left me."
"Do we blame them?" Maggie said quietly.
"I don't know. I'm still angry, and I'm still hurt. And more than anything I don't know who I really am. I was supposed to take after my father. I thought I did." Her voice cracked, and she fought hard to even it again. "The man you and Brie described is a stranger to me, and I'm not sure if I can care."
"I know about the anger. I feel it, too. And I know, for different reasons, what it's like to not be sure who and what is really inside you."
"He wouldn't have asked for more than you could give, Shannon." Brianna stepped into the room. "He never asked that of anyone." She slipped her hand over Shannon's so that the three of them stood together, looking out. "We're family, by the blood. It's up to us to decide if we can be family by the heart."
Chapter Twelve
She had a great deal to think about, and wanted the time to do it. Shannon knew she'd turned one very sharp corner in Maggie's kitchen.
She had sisters.
She couldn't deny the connection any longer, nor could she seem to stop the spread of emotion. She cared about them, their families, their lives. When she was back in New York, she imagined the contact would continue, with letters, calls, occasional visits. She could even see herself returning to Blackthorn Cottage for a week or two now and again through the years.
She'd have the paintings, too. Her first study of the stone dance was finished. When she'd stepped back from the completed canvas, she'd been stunned that the power and scope of it, the sheer passion of it, had come from her.
She'd never painted that vividly before, or felt such a fierce emotional attachment to any of her work.
And it had driven her to start another even as the paint was drying on the first. The sketch she'd done of Brianna in her garden was now a muted, undeniably romantic watercolor, nearly complete.
There were so many other ideas, varied subjects. How could she resist the luminescent light, the varied shades of green-the old man with the thick ash stick she'd seen herding his cows down a twisting road? All of it, every thing and every face she saw cried out to be painted.
She didn't see the harm in extending her stay another week, or two. A busman's holiday, she liked to think of it, where she could explore a side of her art that had been largely ignored throughout her career.
Her financial freedom was an excellent justification for lengthening her time in Ireland. If her record at Ry-Tilghmanton wasn't strong enough to hold for her sabbatical, then she'd simply find another-better-position when she returned to New York.
Now she walked down the road with Murphy's jacket over her arm. She'd meant to get it back to him before, but as she'd been working closer to the inn the last couple of days, there hadn't been the opportunity.
And it had seemed too cowardly to pass such a petty chore onto Brianna or Gray.
In any case, she was heading for the front of the house and imagined he would be out in the fields, or in the barn. Leaving it on his porch with a quick note of thanks pinned to it seemed an easy way out.
But, of course, he wasn't in the fields or in the barn.
She supposed she should have known he wouldn't be with the way her luck ran