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