Chapter 2
PATRICK
In the first-class lounge at Boston’s airport, Patrick Power was waiting for his flight to Dublin for his brother Seán’s wedding.
Time-wise, he couldn’t afford to take the whole week off because Johnny, his chef in Fitzgerald’s, was creating a new menu and meeting a farmer about his new herd of imported Dexters.
Paddy, his sommelier, had texted him about a consignment of very expensive Irish whiskey being stuck in customs. And then there was the new investor that Kerry-Anne wanted him to meet.
It was Wednesday and he’d be gone until Sunday.
He’d have to catch up with everything then.
Fitzgerald’s wasn’t just his business, it was his passion.
It had been named after his mother’s family, and was one of those sophisticated bars, with an Irish twist. Decent cocktails, low lighting and the best modern Irish menu including oysters and Guinness.
Irish without the blarney, in other words.
He thought about Kerry-Anne’s proposal the night before.
He couldn’t concentrate on it right now.
Perhaps she’d forget about it and they’d never speak of it again.
She was his business partner and friend, but nothing more, and she’d complicated it now.
A few days in Ireland might give him time to think.
He read Seán’s text again.
Niamh and I can’t wait to see you… as long as you don’t go on about how much better you were at hurling than me!
I need to impress my fiancée. Keep quiet about my inadequacies.
It’s going to be a small enough wedding.
Just a really nice hotel by the sea, bit of food, drink and other kind of wedding malarkey.
And by the way, Dad’s coming. Sorry. Niamh said we had to invite him. And he’s bringing Sandra.
Patrick had assumed their father wouldn’t be coming.
He and Seán felt the same about the man who’d left their mother and their farm and moved in with a woman he’d been having an affair with.
It was good riddance in lots of ways because he was a man with a short temper and a big mouth and had treated their mother and them with complete contempt.
At home, he was awful. But he was the town’s big man, couldn’t do enough for anyone, no favour too big.
He’d milked their neighbour’s cows for a whole month once, when Paddy-Joe was in hospital after a heart attack; he’d be the first one with his hand in his pocket for any kind of charity whip-round, the first to the bar to get the round.
But at home it was another story. Silent, moody, a man of few words.
Except when he exploded, which he often did, his unpredictable rages concentrated on his wife or on his two boys.
The brothers had relied on each other, more perhaps than other siblings.
So of course Patrick wouldn’t miss Seán’s big day, especially as he was to be best man and had the speech all written: a few stories, a few jokes, an emotional denouement and then a big laugh at the end.
He would make mention of Seán’s heavy metal band in school called The Mad Bullocks and how they had insisted on performing at the end of term in assembly but had been so loud it made everything in the school vibrate, including Mr Peacock, who vibrated all the way to the edge of the stage and fell off.
Another story was when Seán’s favourite cow, a beautiful soft-nosed girl called Linda, used to cry when the milking was over for the evening.
She’d hang back for Seán, her head squeezed under his arm.
They hated leaving all the cows, really, but Linda was particularly lovable.
Patrick wanted his speech to show that Seán was one of life’s good guys, so good that cows picked you out as special.
Seán was also away from the farm, now living in Dublin and working in computer engineering, lifting weights in a gym rather than bales of hay.
Their mother had stayed on in the farmhouse after they’d both left home for college, the house quiet without them, she always said, no more sports bags dumped in the hallway or the fridge packed with their favourite food.
‘I hardly know what to do with myself,’ she had said with a laugh to Patrick on one of his visits home. ‘I’ll have to get a hobby. Or a dog.’
Now he wished he hadn’t gone away and started a life in Boston he couldn’t finish.
But he’d run away, really, not from his mother, whom he loved.
Or from Seán, his little brother. No, Patrick had needed a life where he could be the man he wanted to be, not the son of Brian Power, not someone in the shadow of such a man.
Leaving Seán and his mum behind and making a life in Boston had been hard.
He’d made so few trips back home over the decade he’d lived in Boston, he felt further and further away from his childhood.
He missed Seán, obviously, and other friends, he missed Irish pubs and the craic, watching the hurling and the Gaelic football, he missed the landscape, the rain, the very air they breathed.
But he’d been determined to get away and he’d done it.
Fitzgerald’s always attracted an Irish crowd and Patrick would catch up with the news back home and how Cork were doing in the Championship.
Not that he wasn’t fully au fait, as he still listened to the matches on his phone or caught up with the news on the RTé app.
His staff were all Irish, on working visas, and they soon assimilated into American life, as he had, with one foot and half a heart back in Ireland.
His business partner, Kerry-Anne Daly, always said that he’d imported Ireland to Boston.
He’d only returned for weddings and funerals mainly.
The worst, obviously, being his mother’s last year, where he and Seán shook hands with practically everyone from the town and county.
Their mother had been a teacher and knew generations of Midleton families and the queue had snaked out of the church.
The priest had said to him and Seán, ‘The queue is so long it could be seen from space.’ Father Peter had paused. ‘Or from heaven.’
God knows how he and Seán hadn’t rolled their eyes or made some joke which they normally would, but their mother’s funeral was a sobering occasion and, standing shoulder to shoulder with his brother, Patrick had felt so many emotions he’d no idea which one to focus on.
Yet all Patrick could think about was getting on his flight from Cork back to Boston.
Back at the house, he and Seán made tea and ham sandwiches, and they smiled and chatted about Cork getting to the final and the story which was in the papers that weekend about the man who was caught on the motorway doing 120kph on his John Deere tractor.
He remembered catching up with old school friends, thanking them for coming.
‘Mind yourself now,’ he said, as he waved them off at the end of the night, fuelled by cups of tea and a feeling of complete invulnerability.
This is who I want to be, he’d thought. Not sad or crying, not the boy I was, scared of his own father, too shy to speak in school.
I’m back from Boston, back among my own. Mam, you’d be proud of me.
Their father hadn’t come to the funeral, thankfully.
Patrick had kept half an eye on the door of the church, expecting to see his face.
And hers, probably. He’d bumped into his father’s partner, Sandra, in Midleton a couple of years earlier, his last trip back to the small town for Seán’s graduation.
He’d ducked into Deasy’s and browsed the magazines, hoping she’d be gone. But she’d followed him in.
‘I thought it was you, Patrick.’ There was a desperate look in her eyes, reminding him of their old collie, Jimbo.
Patrick had managed a smile. ‘How’s yourself, Sandra?’
‘Grand now, Patrick. And you and Seán? All well?’
‘Ah, you know yourself…’ He didn’t want to give anything away. Nothing about him and Seán. He hesitated, hoping she would finish up and leave him alone.
‘And your mother, Patrick? I heard she wasn’t well?’
Why did she have to ask about his mother?
Even if she was well, which she wasn’t, he wouldn’t have known how to answer.
In Boston, he didn’t behave like this, hiding in newsagents, avoiding people.
In Fitzgerald’s he strolled around, greeting people, finding the best table for guests, making sure the staff were happy and able to do their job, the glasses gleaming, the white tablecloths the brightest and the stiffest Irish linen.
He always wore a suit, grasping hands, a word here, a joke there.
A master of his own universe. And then in the kitchen, checking on Johnny, the chef that he’d brought over from Ireland having once tasted his scallops and black pudding in a little restaurant he’d been running in Bundoran.
It was like he’d created the perfect world, there were never raised voices, nothing like the chaos of his childhood. Nothing like his father.
The following day, just as he was about to head back to the airport for the Boston flight, Seán had turned to him. ‘You all right?’
‘Of course!’ He gave Seán a small slap on his chest with the back of his hand. ‘You?’
Seán nodded, slowly. ‘Grand.’ He’d paused. ‘It’ll be hard without her, though, won’t it?’ His voice had cracked and Patrick needed Seán to understand they weren’t going to crumble. If he wasn’t going to be around, he needed Seán to be okay.
‘She’d want us to crack on with things,’ he’d said.
‘We’re going to be okay, Seán. We really are.
’ He looked at his brother right in his blue eyes, the ones he’d inherited from their mother and she from her father, Jimmy Fitzgerald.
A dairy farmer himself, son of one and on it went, each generation gathering more cows.
Until they got to Patrick and Seán and the farming line ended with them.
He drove to the airport and cleared customs, and as he sat down on the flight, he felt his hands begin to shake.
The shock of the funeral, the adrenaline of the last days, weeks and months, his grief beginning to seep into all the little crevices of his being.
For feck’s sake. He reached his hand to the small bell above his head, and pulled it.
‘A double whiskey,’ he said, smiling at the steward. ‘No ice, please.’
He swigged back the whiskey, ordered one more, and fixed his eyes on some godawful film for the rest of the flight, willing himself gone from Ireland and wishing himself free of everything that had gone on before.
Vulnerability, cracking up, breaking down was not an option.
Never had been and never would be. He’d learned the lesson well from facing down his father for all those years and he was not about to start now.
But there was one person he wanted to talk to, someone he used to know, someone he didn’t think about as much as he used to.
She’d understand, he thought. She’d lost her own mother.
But Rosie was years before and they hadn’t spoken for so long.
They were strangers now. That was then. And today, back in Boston, heading back to Ireland, this time for Seán’s wedding, he felt nervous again.