His voice grew harsh. “Oh, I’ll remember him, all right. Good night, Lizzie.”
She quickly looked away and scooted past him. As she hit the stairs at a fast clip, she spoke over her shoulder. “Goodbye, Sean.”
Sean shut the door, crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the wall. As he thought about his arousal, he reminded himself that there was nothing mystical or unusual at work here. Lizzie was attractive. He was half-naked. They were alone. Do the math.
Except there was something else, wasn’t there?
He thought back to the past. Though his memories of his mother were indistinct, he recalled her as warm and kind, the quintessential maternal anchor. From what he’d learned about her, she’d come from a very good family who’d disowned her when she’d married a blue-collar Irish Catholic. Her parents had even refused to come to her memorial service.
Back when she’d still been around, their father had been relatively stable, but that had changed after she’d died when Sean was five. After they’d buried her, all hell had broken loose and hard drinking had moved into the apartment like a mean houseguest. Turned out Anne had been the glue that had held Eddie together. Without her, he’d spiraled fast, hit bottom hard and never resurfaced.
Sean stared at the Barcalounger.
Dimly, he heard the water come on downstairs and he imagined Lizzie brushing her teeth over a sink. When the whining rush was cut off, he saw her stripping off those jeans and sliding between clean white sheets.
She looked like the kind of woman who had sensible sheets.
She hadn’t been his father’s lover, he thought. The outrage on her face had been too spontaneous, the offense too quick. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t been stringing Eddie along for money.
God, one look into those green eyes and even Sean had been hypnotized.
Picturing her face, he was surprised that he wanted to believe she was a well of compassion and goodness. But the Mother Teresa routine was tough to buy. That talk about wanting to go to Manhattan, but needing to hold down two jobs to help out her fey, artistic mother? It was almost Dickensian.
He went back over to the couch and lay down. As he put his arm under his head, a small voice he didn’t trust told him he was reading her wrong. He ignored the whisper, chalking it up to the fact that he was off-kilter because he was back in his father’s place.
When his cell phone went off at 6:00 a.m., he was still awake, having watched the sun rise behind the veil of the old lace drapes.
Sitting up, he grabbed his BlackBerry and checked the number. “Billy.”
His brother’s low voice came through loud and clear. “I was crashed when you called and just woke up for practice. Are you okay—”
“He’s dead, Billy.” He didn’t need to use any better word than he… There was only one him among the three O’Banyon brothers.
As a long, slow exhale came over the phone, Sean wished he’d told Billy in person.
“When?” Billy asked.
“Last night. Heart attack.”
“You call Mac?”
“Yeah. But God knows when he’ll get the message.”
“Where are you?”
“Home frickin’ sweet home.”
There was a sharp inhale. “You shouldn’t be there. That’s not a good place.”
Sean looked around and couldn’t agree more. “Trust me, I’m leaving as soon as I can.”
“Is there anything I—”
“Nah. There’s not much to do. Finnegan’s will handle the cremation and he’ll be interred next to Mom. I’ll go back and forth until I’ve packed everything up here and put the house on the market. I mean, I don’t want to keep this place.”
“Neither do I. Mac’ll agree.”
In the long silence that followed, Sean knew he and his brother were remembering exactly the same kinds of things.
“I’m glad he’s gone,” Billy finally said.
“Me, too.”
After they hung up, Sean felt exhaustion settle on him like a suit of chain mail. Stretching out on the sofa, he closed his lids and gave up fighting the past, letting the memories fill the space behind his eyes. Though he was six foot four and worth about a billion dollars, in the dimness, on this couch, in the apartment that had been a hell for him and his brothers, he was as small as a child and just as powerless.
So he was not at all surprised when two hours later he woke up screaming and covered in sweat. The nightmare, the one he’d had for years, had come for another visit.
Jacking upright, he gasped and rubbed his face. The summer morning was bright and cheerful, the light barging into the living room through the windows like a four-year-old wanting to play.
Amid the lovely sunshine, he felt positively elderly.
In a desperate, misplaced bid to cleanse his mind, he took a shower. Didn’t help. No matter how hard he worked his body with soap, he couldn’t lose the head spins about the past. It felt as if he were trapped in a car on a closed track, going around and around without getting anywhere.
As he stepped out of the water and toweled off, he knew his best hope was that his mind would run out of gas. Soon.
Man, he couldn’t wait to get back to Manhattan tonight.
***
Chapter Four
Two days later, Lizzie lost her job at the Roxbury Community Heath Initiative.
It was the end of a long Friday and she was in the medical-records room when her boss came to find her. “Lizzie? You have a minute?”
She glanced up from the patient charts she was pulling. Dr. Denisha Roberts, the clinic’s director, was in the doorway looking exhausted. Which made sense. It was almost five in the afternoon and it had been a week full of challenges. As usual, finances were very tight and their waiting room busier than ever.
Lizzie frowned. “What’s wrong?”
“Can you come down to my office?”
Lizzie hugged the chart in her hands against her chest and followed Denisha to the back of the clinic. After they’d gone into the office and Lizzie was in a chair, the director took a deep breath, then shut the door.
“I don’t know how to say this so I’m just going to come right out with it.” Denisha sat on the edge of her desk, her dark eyes somber. “I’ve been informed that our funding from the state is going to be cut substantially for the upcoming year.”
“Oh, no…don’t tell me we’re closing. The community needs us.”
“We’ll have enough to stay open and I’m going to put some grant applications out there, which hopefully will generate some funds. But…I need to make some staffing changes.”
Lizzie closed her eyes. “Let me guess, first in, first out.”
“I’m so sorry, Lizzie. You make a tremendous contribution here, you really do, and I’m going to give you my highest recommendation. It’s just that with everyone else doing such a good job, seniority is the only thing I can base the choice on. And I have to make the cut now, before the funding shrinks, because we need that new X-ray machine.”
Lizzie smoothed her hand over the patient file in her arms. She knew exactly the person it detailed. Sixty-eight-year-old Adella Thomas, a grandmother of nine, who had bad asthma and a gospel voice that could charm the birds to the trees. Whenever one of Adella’s granddaughters brought her in for her checkups, she always sang for the staff as well as the patients in the waiting room.
“When’s my last day?” Lizzie asked.
“The end of this month. Labor Day weekend. And we’ll give you a month’s severance.” There was a hesitation. “We’re in real trouble, Lizzie. Please understand…this is killing me.”
She thought for a moment. “You know…I can line up moonlighting work easily enough. Why don’t we say a week from today so you can get me off the books? I’ll still have a month after that to find a day job.”
“That would be…the best thing you could do for us.” Denisha looked down at her hands then twisted her wedding band around and around. “I hate doing this. You can’t know how much we’ll miss you.”