Page 67 of Road Trip
She has Patrick’s deep blue eyes, and the loveliest auburn curls that remind me of Mum’s, and the sweetest, rosy, pink cheeks. She is a quiet baby, so good I can scarcely believe our fortune, and only cries when she is wet or hungry. Oh, Tommy, I do wish you could meet our little girl.
Life must have gotten busy for Kathleen, Maeve decided, with a new baby, a new husband, and a tavern to help run. There was a lapse of two years before Kathleen’s next letter.
God has blessed us with a son! His name is Thomas Alloysius—and I suppose you can guess who he is named for. I know you can’t be here for your namesake nephew’s christening, but it would please me so much if you would agree to be his godfather. And oh, how this little man reminds me of you! His hair is as dark as yours, although he has his father’s blue eyes, and dimples in both cheeks. No one whosees him fails to exclaim on those dimples. Al, as we have taken to calling him, is as noisy as you were as a young lad, Tommy, and I confess, some days he tries my patience, but then he smiles, and those dimples make me fall in love all over again. His big sister—JuJu, we call her—adores him, and she thinks he is her own little pet. How blessed we are—to have two healthy babies. God has certainly been good to us!
Maeve was makingnotes on her laptop computer when Therese returned with their drinks, which she set on the nightstand between their beds. She glanced pointedly at the laptop. “What’s that about?”
“Hmm?” Maeve quickly closed the document she’d opened.
“That.” Therese uncapped her Guinness and took a swig. “On your computer.”
“It’s nothing.” Maeve sipped her whiskey. She was definitely developing a taste for the stuff.
“Jesus H, Maeve!” Therese exclaimed. “Why can’t you just admit I’m right and say you think this story would make a great book? For that matter, why can’t you admit to me that you’ve been working on a novel for years?”
Maeve’s cheeks burned with embarrassment. “How the hell do you know about that? I haven’t told anyone. Not even Mom. Have you been snooping around in my stuff?”
“You left some manuscript pages in your bedroom at Mom’s. They were right there out in the open, so I didn’t need to go snooping. I thought maybe it was paperwork about the estate, so of course I started reading it. Anyway, who cares? Why does everything with you have to be some deep, dark secret? From the little I read, it’s not like you’re writing porn.”
Maeve let the whiskey trickle down the back of her throat, deliberately stalling while she tried to articulate the very complicated feelings she had about her work. She’d been attending writing conferences for years, always out of state where there was no chanceshe’d encounter anyone who knew her from her academic life, and always during semester breaks from her teaching job at the college.
Up until recently, when Kaitlyn had found her pages on the department printer, she’d never shared her work with anyone. The published authors she’d encountered at workshops always suggested that aspiring writers should join critique groups to gain insight and feedback on their work in progress, but Maeve had a horror of letting anyone see her amateurish scribblings.
Her novel was in its third draft now, and she couldn’t imagine sharing it—not with anyone. Certainly not with her big sister.
“It’s private,” she said finally. “I just… it feels like being naked in public. I hate being vulnerable, of anyone seeing how I think, how I write. You wouldn’t understand, Terri. I’m not like you. I don’t want to be the center of attention.”
Therese’s brow wrinkled as she considered what she’d just been told. It was late in the day, and the makeup she’d applied before their trip to Cobh was now smudged and smeared.
One of Maeve’s earliest memories was of sitting on the twin bed in their shared room, as a shy, tongue-tied book nerd, watching her thirteen-year-old big sister getting ready for school. Their uncle Keith gave them free rein to browse the makeup counter at the drugstore, gifting them the sample tubes of lipstick, opened jars of foundation, and palettes of crumbling eye shadows. The drawers in the desk in their bedroom that had become Therese’s makeup vanity were crammed with nearly dried-out Maybelline mascaras and bottles of Cover Girl foundation.
St. Mary’s had strict rules about makeup, meaning, it was basically forbidden, but Therese, of course, had flouted the rules, insisting to Sister Margaret that the makeup she wore to class was for whatever role she was rehearsing for in the class play. And Therese was, even then, as skilled at lying as she was at makeup application.
“You’re right. I don’t understand. Isn’t the point of writing a book having it published, so that people will read it? Like, pay to read it?”
“Eventually, yeah. But not now. It’s not ready. Right now, it sucks.”
“Obviously I’m no literary critic, but the pages I read didn’t suck. I actually liked the part I read. I wanted to know more. How long have you been working on this book, anyway?”
“Too long,” Maeve said reluctantly. “Maybe four years? But then when Mom got sick I got derailed. I haven’t really looked at my manuscript in months now. Not that it matters.”
“How can you say that? Of course it matters. You can’t just throw away all that work because your life had a little hiccup. Mom’s dead. I miss her too, something fierce, but now you can get back to writing again. Right?”
“Wrong. As soon as I get home from this junket, I’ve got to start job hunting.”
“And you weren’t even going to tell me. I had to find out by accident.”
“By accidentally snooping, you mean.”
“Can I help it if I have good eyesight? I’m your sister. Your only sibling. Why wouldn’t you tell me you’d lost your job?”
“I was ashamed, okay? I’ve never been fired from anything in my life. And now my whole career as a teacher, which is all I ever wanted to be, is gone. Poof! And saying it out loud to you somehow makes it worse.”
Therese flung her arms around her little sister. “Oh, honey. Ashamed to tellme? Are you kidding? I’ve been fired from just about every job I’ve ever had. Even our own uncle fired me from the drugstore soda fountain, in case you’ve forgotten.”
Maeve managed to wriggle out of her sister’s grasp. She reached for her whiskey and took a deep, soothing drink. “Well, yeah. You kept giving free ice-cream floats to any guy who flirted with you.”
“That’s not all I gave ’em,” Therese said, giving her a bawdy wink.
