Chapter 26 Brady
I had been threatening Boston for months, and with the premiere still three weeks out, I called in the debt.
Damian's relationship with airline boarding procedures was openly adversarial, the way some men feud with a neighbor's hedge.
"They called Group Four," he said, half-rising.
"We're Group Six," I said, pulling him back down by the sleeve.
"They're already lining up. The overhead bins are finite, Brady. It's a resource war and you're losing it on principle."
"I'm winning it on dignity."
Thomas was asleep before we pushed back from the gate and stayed asleep through the beverage cart, a man at peace in a metal tube.
Maren wore the hat and the sunglasses, the bookshop rig.
She got recognized anyway by a flight attendant who clocked her, said nothing, and slipped her an extra packet of cookies.
Then we were standing on the sidewalk in front of the triple-decker I grew up in, and my mother was already on the porch.
My mother Aileen was my whole operating system with thirty more years of patches installed. She came down the steps and hugged Maren first, out of order, on purpose.
"Finally," she said into Maren's shoulder, "this one has done something right."
"I'm right here, Ma," I said.
"I know, love. I was talking about you."
Inside, the house smelled like roses. And within about ten minutes, my mother had ragebaited Damian about his beard and his posture, and I got to watch the immovable object meet the original unstoppable force.
"The beard ages you," Aileen said. "Sit up. And don't tell me you're one of these cilantro-is-soap people, I won't have it at my table."
"It's genetic," Damian said. "The soap thing. There's a documented allele."
"There's a documented chair," my mother said. "Sit up in it."
And Damian, who had spent years being the wall I threw myself against, sat up straighter and almost smiled, surrendering to her like a man relieved to finally lose.
Thomas got a swat to the sternum identical to the one his mother gives him, and I said it out loud, because someone had to.
"They teach each other that," I said. "There's an annual convention for mothers of difficult sons."
"Ow," Thomas said. "What was that for?"
"For everything you haven't told me yet," my mother said, which was also exactly what Eleanor says, so the convention theory holds.
The stew got made as a four-person operation under her command, and she ran the vetting the way Eleanor ran it, by putting Maren to work and watching how she worked.
"Shell those," Aileen said, handing Maren a bowl. "And tell me, while you're at it, whether my son is eating properly or just cooking for everyone else and forgetting himself?"
"He forgets himself," Maren said, shelling. "Constantly. He plated everyone first at dinner for a week before I noticed he wasn't sitting down."
"Mm." My mother stirred. "That's his sister in him. Niamh did that. Fed the room and ate standing at the counter."
She said the name like it was allowed. She always has. That's the thing about my mother. She decided years ago that grief would not also get to take the saying of the name, and she made that decision out loud, in this kitchen, and never went back on it.
The stairwell wall was photographs, and the photographs didn’t skip my sister.
Niamh at six on the beach at Revere, sunburned and triumphant. Niamh at fifteen in a school play, holding a cardboard sword. Niamh at nineteen, the last one, laughing at whoever held the camera.
My mother walked Maren up the stairs and told the story behind each frame, and I stood at the bottom with my throat doing something, and I let her do the thing I have never once managed, which is talk about my sister in daylight without my voice going to pieces.
"This one," I heard Aileen say, "she'd just told me she wanted to teach the little ones. Five-year-olds. She said the big kids were already ruined."
Maren laughed, and it carried down the stairwell, and for a second the house sounded the way it used to.
We went to the cemetery on the second morning, all five of us. I’ve made that walk a hundred times. I had never once made it with this many people behind me.
At the headstone I did the thing Damian taught me in Riverside without ever calling it teaching. I crouched down and I introduced her.
"Niamh," I said. "This is Maren. You'd have liked her. She's loud like you, and she's funny, and she keeps me honest." My eyes were already going. "I told you about the men, the house, the dog. The whole ridiculous family I fell into."
I touched the top of the stone. "I kept the vow, sis. I've been keeping it. Imperfectly, but keeping it."
And then it was my mother who finally said the thing.
Thomas had said it on the patio and I couldn't hear it from him, because he was inside the vow with me.
Maren had said it in the dark, and it almost stuck.
But it was mom, with her hand flat on my chest, the way you'd check a man for a heartbeat, who made it land.
"Brady McKenna," she said. "Look at me. What happened to your sister was done by one man, and it belongs to one man. His name is not yours. You were a great brother. You were not a failure. And I'm her mother, so I get the final ruling on this, and the ruling is in."
I cried in the cemetery with my mother's hand on my chest and my family standing around me, and something I had been carrying for seven years finally set itself down on the grass and stayed there.
Damian put a hand on my shoulder. Thomas stood close on the other side. Maren slid her hand into mine. Nobody told me to stop. The McKennas don't do that. We let a man finish.
Before we flew out, my mother pulled Maren into the kitchen alone, and I eavesdropped shamelessly from the hallway and got caught immediately, because I am not a subtle man.
"Brady, get away from the door," my mother said, without turning around.
"I'm just passing through."
"You've passed through four times. Go sit down."
I went. But I heard the important part anyway, because the house carries sound, it always has.
"This was Niamh's," my mother said, and I knew without seeing that she'd pressed the claddagh into Maren's hand, the worn-soft one, the heart and the hands and the crown.
"Aileen, I can't."
"I'm not giving it to you," my mother said. "I'm giving it to the house. And when the time is right, Brady will know what it's for."
On the flight home I held Maren's hand over the armrest, and for once in my loud life I had nothing to say.
I just sat there, the lightest I'd been in years.
Thomas slept and Damian fought the overhead bins with his eyes.
The woman beside me turned the claddagh over once in her fingers and put it somewhere safe.