The Gallaghers of Ardmore Trilogy

know I’m not getting on an airplane unless somebody holds a gun to my head. Your folks are having breakfast. They’re going to be thrilled to hear from you. Just hold on a minute. You take care of yourself, Mister Trevor, and come back soon.”
    “I will. Thanks.”
    He waited, enjoying the picture of the rail-thin black woman in her ruthlessly starched apron hurrying over the rich white marble floor, past the art, the antiques, the flowers, to the back of the elegant brownstone. She wouldn’t use the intercom to announce his call. Such family dealings could only be delivered in person.
    The kitchen would smell of coffee, fresh bread, and the violets his mother was most fond of. His father would have the paper open to the financial section. His mother would be reading the editorials and getting worked up about the state of the world and narrow minds.
    There would be none of that uneasy quiet, that underthe-polish tension that had lived in his grandparents’ home. Somehow his father had escaped that, just as his own father had escaped Ardmore. But the younger Dennis had indeed stood and built his own.
    “Trev! Baby, how are you?”
    “I’m good. Nearly as good as you sound. I thought I’d catch you and Dad at breakfast.”
    “Creatures of habit. But this is an even lovelier way to start the day. Tell me what you see.”
    It was an old request, an old habit. Automatically he rose to go to the window. “The cottage has a front garden. An amazing one for such a small place. Whoever designed it knew just what they wanted. It’s like a . . . a witch’s garden. One of the good witches who helps maidens break evil spells. The flowers tumble together, color, shape, and scent. Beyond it are hedges of wild fuchsia, deep red on green and taller than I am. The road they line is narrow as a ditch and full of ruts. Your teeth rattle if you go over thirty. Then the hills slope down, impossibly green, toward the village. There are rooftops and white cottages and tidy streets. The church steeple, and well off is a round tower I have to visit. It’s all edged by the sea. It’s sunny today, so the light flashes off the blue. It’s really very beautiful.”
    “Yes, it is. You sound happy.”
    “Why wouldn’t I be?”
    “You haven’t been, not really, for too long. Now I’ll let you talk to your father, who’s rolling his eyes at me, as I imagine you have business to discuss.”
    “Mom.” There was so much, so much that his morning conversation with an old man and his horde of progeny had set to swirling inside him. He said what he felt the most. “I miss you.”
    “Oh. Oh, now look what you’ve done.” She sniffled. “You can just talk to your father while I cry a little.”
    “Well, you got her mind off the editorial on handguns.” Dennis Magee’s voice boomed over the wire. “How’s the job going?”
    “On schedule, on budget.”
    “Good to hear. Going to keep it there?”
    “Close to there, anyway. You, Mom, Doro, and her family better keep a week next summer open. The Magees should all be here for the first show.”
    “Back to Ardmore. I have to say, I never figured on it. From the reports, it hasn’t changed much.”
    “It’s not meant to. I’ll send you a written update on the project, but that’s not why I called. Dad, did you ever visit Faerie Hill Cottage?”
    There was a pause, a sigh. “Yes. I had some curiosity about the woman who’d been engaged to my uncle. Maybe because my father so rarely spoke of him.”
    “What did you find out?”
    “That John Magee died a hero before he ever had the chance to live.”
    “And Grandfather resented that.”
    “That’s a hard way to put it, Trev.”
    “He was a hard man.”
    “What he felt about his brother, his family, he kept to himself. I never tried to get through. What was the point? I knew I would never get through to him about what he felt about anything, much less what he’d left behind in Ireland.”
    “Sorry.” He could hear it, that weariness, that vague tone of frustration in his father’s voice. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
    “No, that’s foolish. It would be on your mind. You’re there. I think—looking back, I think he was determined to be an American, to raise me as an American. Here is where he wanted to make his mark. In New York he could be his own man. He was his own man.”
    A cold, hard man who paid more attention to his ledgers than his family. But Trevor saw no point in saying so when his