The Gallaghers of Ardmore Trilogy

family on its ear—before she’d finally walked down the aisle the previous autumn.
    Not that she hadn’t looked lovely, Brenna thought as she hung her cap on the closet hook. All glowing and fresh in her billowy white dress and the lace veil their own mother had worn on her wedding day. Happiness had been like sunbeams, all but shining from her fingertips, and seeing that wash of love over her sister had made Brenna stop, for a short while, feeling like ten times a fool in her own fussy blue maid of honor gown.
    Now if she herself ever took the plunge—and since she wanted children, what else could she do but marry eventually—simplicity would be the order of the day.
    A church wedding would be fine, as she imagined her mother’s heart, and her father’s as well, would be set on that for all their daughters. But she’d be damned if she would spend months looking at dresses and searching through catalogs and discussing the pros and cons of roses over tulips or some such.
    She’d wear her mother’s dress and veil, and maybe carry yellow daisies, as she had a fondness for them. And she’d walk down the aisle on her father’s arm to the sound of pipes rather than a fusty old organ. And after, they’d have a party right here at the house. A big, noisy ceili where everyone could loosen their ties and relax.
    And what, she thought, shaking her head outside the door of the room that her youngest sisters, Mary Kate and Alice Mae, shared, was she doing dreaming of such things now?
    She slipped into the room, stood in the candy-coated, female scent of it while her eyes adjusted, then picked her way over to the lump on the bed nearest the back window.
    “Mary Kate, are you awake?”
    “She is.” Alice Mae’s silhouette of a head and shoulders surrounded by a mass of wild curls popped up. “And I’m to tell you that she hates you like poison, always will until the day she departs this earth, and she’s not speaking to you.”
    “Go back to sleep.”
    “How can I manage that, with herself there coming in and burning my ears off with abuse of you? Did you really shove her out the kitchen at Gallagher’s, then curse at her?”
    “I did not.”
    “She did,” Mary Kate corrected in a stiff and formal voice. “And you’ll kindly tell her, Alice Mae, to remove her skinny ass from my bedroom.”
    “She says you’re to remove—”
    “I heard her, for Christ’s sake. And I’m not going.”
    “Well, then, if she’s not going, I am.” Mary Kate started to get up, but found herself pinned.
    At the sound of muffled curses and struggle, Alice Mae eagerly switched on her bedside lamp to watch the show. “Ah, you’ll never best her, Katie, for you fight like a girl. Did you never listen to anything she taught us?”
    “Just hold still, you goose brain. How the hell can I apologize when you’re trying to bite me hand off?”
    “I don’t want your flaming apology.”
    “Well, you’re getting it, if I have to ram it down your throat.” Annoyed and at her wits’ end, Brenna did the simple thing. She sat on her sister.
    “Brenna’s been crying.” Alice Mae, with the softest heart in Ireland, climbed out of bed to pad over to her sister. “There now.” Gently, she kissed both Brenna’s cheeks. “It can’t be as bad as all that, darling.”
    “Little mother,” Brenna murmured, and nearly started crying again. Her baby sister wasn’t a baby any longer, but a slim and pretty girl on the verge of womanhood. And that, Brenna thought with a sigh, was a worry for another day. “Go back to bed, sweetheart. Your feet’ll get cold.”
    “I’ll sit here.” She slid onto the bed, and plopped on Mary Kate’s legs. “And help you hold her down. If it was enough to make you cry, she should at least have the courtesy to listen to you.”
    “Well, she made me cry,” Mary Kate protested.
    “Yours were temper tears,” Alice Mae said primly, using one of their mother’s expressions.
    “Part of mine were, too, I suppose.” With a sigh, Brenna snugged an arm around Alice Mae’s shoulders. “She had a right to be angry with me. I behaved badly. I’m so sorry, Katie, for the way I acted, and the things I said.”
    “You are?”
    “Truly.” Tears swam up again, into her throat, into her eyes. “I just love you.”
    “I love you, too.” Mary Kate sobbed it out. “I’m sorry, too. I said awful things to you. I didn’t mean them.”
    “Doesn’t matter.” She shifted so that Mary Kate could