Page 25 of Road Trip
She heard a faint ding coming from the coffee table, and moved aside some papers, where she discovered Maeve’s cell phone.
Without consciously meaning to, she picked up the phone and read the incoming text from someone named Zorayah.
Oh no, sis! Sasha says that bitch Janelle axed you. Call me if you wanna talk.
“Holy shit,” she breathed. Saint Maeve, fired?
“What the hell?”
She looked up to see her sister glaring down at her.
“So, now you’re a thief and a sneak?”
Therese dropped the phone. “I didn’t mean to…” It sounded lame even to her.
Maeve snatched up the phone and glanced at the text message.She felt her cheeks redden. “So now you know. You’re not the only one out of a job.”
“I’m sorry,” Therese managed, her eyes filling with tears. “Really, really sorry. About the money, and the house, and you losing your job, and me not coming to see Mom when she was sick…”
She was full-on blubbering now, snot running down her face. “And I know you read those postcards I sent her. I’m such a loser. Such a fucking loser. I couldn’t face you guys. I tried so hard, I really did. I got a new agent, new headshots. I went on every fucking call, and nothing worked. After the pandemic, and then the writers’ strike, there was just no work in Atlanta, and I couldn’t afford to go back out to California or New York. And yeah, I’m a grown-ass woman, an out-of-work so-called actress, staring at forty, taking money from my widowed mom.”
Maeve sank down onto the sofa and wrapped her arms around her sister, whose shuddering sobs were muffled against her chest.
“It’s okay,” she murmured, stroking Therese’s back the way you’d soothe a fussy baby. “We really are in the same boat now, right? A couple of unemployed old maids.”
Therese raised her head and sniffled. “What are we gonna do, Maeve?”
“Only thing we can do, I guess. Mary Helen Dunagin strikes again. Mama always did know how to get what she wanted. We call Uncle Keith and then book our trip to Ireland.”
CHAPTER 11
“Girls!” Bernie exclaimed, clapping her hands together. “Frannie and I are so happy you had a change of heart. Aren’t we, Fran?”
“I can’t believe it,” Frannie said. “And I know Mary Helen is up there dancing in heaven. It’s truly an answer to her prayers. And ours.”
Maeve and Therese exchanged a look. “We’re glad you’re glad,” Maeve said. “But we could use some help with this family tree you gave us. Like, who exactly brought our painting over here from Ireland?”
Fran stabbed a fingertip at the printout from Ancestry.com. “Okay, this is about as far back as I was able to go. Your great-grandmother, Kathleen Connor, came over in 1926. We found her name on the manifest for a ship called the S.S.Cedric, which was a White Star Line ship. Same company that owned theTitanic, and it left out of Cobh too.”
Bernie rooted around in her overflowing pocketbook, mumbling to herself. “Now, where did I put that doggone thing?”
“Oh Lord, no telling,” Frances said.
“I got it!”
Bernie slapped a plastic-wrapped vintage postcard on the kitchen tabletop.
“It kinda looks like the pictures of theTitanicthat I’ve seen,” Maeve said.
“But I bet Great-Grandma Kathleen wasn’t up there dancing in the ballroom with Kate Winslet, and all the aristocrats and nouveau riche,” Therese said, peering down at the postcard.
“Probably not,” Frannie agreed. “She came over in steerage. I think I read somewhere they had sort of bunk rooms for the passengers down there. During the years of the potato famine, so many people died of disease making that trip over, they used to call them ‘coffin ships.’ But I think it was a lot better by the time Kathleen came over.”
“And she came in through Ellis Island?” Therese asked. “I took the Circle Line Ferry out there when I was living in New York. I remember they had a sort of museum in the main building, where immigrants would be processed, and there was this huge stack of old trunks and leather suitcases.”
“That’s right,” Bernie agreed. “According to what we found, Kathleen was an orphan. We don’t know who would have paid her ship’s passage, which was only about five pounds, but that was a lot of money back then.”
“Do we know where in Ireland the family came from, Aunt Fran?”
