The Gallaghers of Ardmore Trilogy

Ireland’s independence. Elsewhere, for that matter, at any time you can pick. Men go to battle, and women wait and weep.”
    He laid a bony hand on the head of one of the children who sat at his side. “The Irish know it comes ’round again. And so do the old. I’m both old and Irish.”
    “You said you knew my grandfather.”
    “I did.” Riley sat back with his tea, crossed his thin legs at the ankles. “Dennis, now, he was a brawnier type than his brother, and more apt to look a mile down the road instead of where he was standing. A discontented sort was Dennis Magee, if you don’t mind me saying. Ardmore wasn’t the place for him, and he shook off the sand of it as soon as he was able. Did he, I wonder, find what he was looking for there, and contentment with it?”
    “I don’t know,” Trevor answered frankly. “I wouldn’t say he was a particularly happy man.”
    “I’m sorry for that, for it’s often hard for those around the unhappy to be happy themselves. His bride, as I recall, was a quiet-mannered lass. She was Mary Clooney, whose family farmed in Old Parish, and one of a family of ten, if my memory can be trusted.”
    “It seems sharp enough to me.”
    Riley cackled. “Oh, the brain’s stayed with me well enough. Just takes the body a mite longer to get up and running these days.” The boy wanted to know what had been and where he’d come from, Riley decided. And why shouldn’t he? “I’ll tell you, the babe, the boy who grew to be your father, was a handsome one. Many’s the time I saw him toddling along the roads holding his ma’s hand.”
    “And his father’s?”
    “Well, perhaps not so often, but now and again. Dennis was after making a living and putting by for his journey to America. I hope they had a good life there.”
    “They did. My grandfather wanted to build, and that’s what he did.”
    “Then that was enough for him. I remember your father, the younger Dennis, coming back here when he was old enough to have grown a few whiskers.” Riley paused to pour himself more tea from his thermos. “He seemed to’ve grown fine, had a pleasing way about him, and set some of the local lasses fluttering.” He winked.“As you’ve done yourself. Still, he didn’t choose, at that time, to leave anything behind him here but the memory. You’ve chosen different.”
    Riley gestured toward the construction with his cup. “Building something here’s what you’re about, isn’t it?”
    “It seems to be, at the moment.”
    “Well, Johnnie, he wanted nothing more than a cottage and his girl, but the war took him. His mother died not five years after, heartbroken. It’s a hard thing, don’t you think, for a man to live always in the shadow of a dead brother?”
    Trevor glanced up again, met the faded and shrewd eyes. Clever old man, he thought, and supposed if you lived past the century mark, you had to be clever. “I imagine it is, even if you go three thousand miles to escape it.”
    “That’s the truth. Better by far to stand and build your own.” He nodded, this time with a kind of approval. “Well, as I said, you’ve the look of him, long-dead John Magee, in the bones of your face and around the eyes. Once they landed on Maude Fitzgerald, she was his heart. Do you believe in romance and ever after, young Magee?”
    Trevor glanced away, up toward Darcy’s window, then back again. “For some.”
    “You have to believe in it to get it.” Riley winked and passed his cup to Trevor. “What’s built isn’t always of wood and stone, and still it lasts.” Reaching out, he once again laid one of his gnarled hands on the head of the child nearest his chair. “Ever after.”
    “Some of us do better with wood and stone,” Trevor commented, then absently drank the tea. He lost his breath, his vision blurred. “Jesus,” he managed as the heavy lacing of whiskey scored his throat.
    Riley laughed so hard he fell to wheezing, and his wrinkled face went pink with humor. “There now, lad, what’s a cup of tea without a shot of the Irish in it, I’d like to know? Never say they’ve diluted your blood so over there in Amerikay you can’t handle your own.”
    “I don’t usually handle it at eleven in the morning.”
    “What’s the clock got to do with a bloody thing?”
    The man, Trevor thought, seemed old as Moses and had been steadily sipping the spiked tea for an hour. Compelled to save face, Trevor downed the rest of the cup and was rewarded by a wide,