“Sorry, Dad. I’ll start my chores,” Brian said, “forthwith.”
I almost knocked down Mary Catherine when I stepped back into the hall.
“Mr. Bennett. Mike, I mean. I’m so sorry,” she said frantically. “I was trying to get them into bed when Bridget needed my help. She told me …”
“Let me guess,” I said. “She had an arts-and-crafts project due for school.”
“How’d you know?”
“Okay, I forgot to tell you,” I said. “Bridget is clinically addicted to arts and crafts. We’ve been trying to wean her off glue, sparkles, and beads for years now, but nothing seems to work. If you let her, she will destroy the earth in her unquenchable desire to make key chains and ankle bracelets and wall hangings. I’ve gone to work with sparkles on my face and clothes from her confounded glitter paint so many times, the guys in my squad thought I was in a glam band. She knows you’re new, so she took advantage. Arts and crafts are severely restricted to weekends.”
“I didn’t know,” Mary Catherine said sadly. “I should have done a better job.”
“Good God,” I said. “You’re still alive and still here? You should try out for the Navy SEALs.”
Chapter 47
AFTER I RELIEVED Mary Catherine of command and ordered her upstairs to bed, I found a priest in my kitchen.
The squat white-haired man in black was holding a steaming iron ready as my seven-year-old Bridget put the finishing touches on a pink-and-white plastic-bead pony that covered the entire top of our kitchen island.
“Well, if it isn’t Father Shame-less, I mean, Seamus,” I said.
Nope, it wasn’t Halloween. My grandfather Seamus was a priest. After Seamus’s wife died, he decided to sell the Hell’s Kitchen gin mill he’d owned for thirty years and become a man of the cloth. Lucky for him, vocations to the priesthood were at an all-time low, so he was accepted. “Gone straight from hell to heaven,” as he liked to say.
He now lived in the Holy Name rectory around the block, and if he wasn’t attending to parish business—which he was very good at—he was sticking his nose into mine. Because Seamus wasn’t content to merely spoil my children. If he wasn’t actually devilishly encouraging mischief, priest or not, he felt he was slacking off.
Even Bridget’s freckles seemed to drain of their color when she saw me standing there.
“Goodnightdadgoingtobediloveyou,” she somehow managed to get out before sliding off the stool she was kneeling on and disappearing. Fiona, holding Socky under her arms, shot out from the other side of the island and managed to exit a step behind her twin.
“Having a senior moment, Monsignor? Forget how to read a clock? Or did you forget it’s a school night?”
“Did you not take a look at this fine steed here?” Seamus said, passing the iron back and forth over the plastic to melt the collection of beads together. It was nearly the size of a real horse. Too bad there wasn’t a barn in the apartment to keep it in.
“That girl is pure artist,” Seamus said. “And like they say, it takes more than books to inspire creativity.”
“Thanks for that little nugget of wisdom there, Seamus, but if these kids don’t get their sleep and stick to their schedules, we’re all doomed.”
Seamus unplugged the iron, propped it up on the butcher block loudly, and squinted at me. “If that’s the case, why bring someone new into the house now?” he said. “That Mary Catherine tells me she’s from Tipperary. There’s a queer breed come from Tipperary. All the wind off the North Atlantic isn’t good for the mind. If you ask me, I don’t like the looks of her or the situation. Young, single woman in a house with a married man.”
That was it. I snapped. I snatched up the plastic pony. Seamus ducked as I Frisbeed it across the kitchen and knocked the chore chart off the fridge.
“Where do you want me to file your concern, Gramps?” I yelled. “To my wife on her deathbed, or maybe to the thirty-three celebrities in St. Paddy’s with guns to their heads?”
Seamus came around the kitchen island and put his hand on my shoulder.
“I just thought I was the one who was going to help you,” he said in one of the most tired voices I had ever heard him use.
I understood now. Why he was being such a pain in the butt about Mary Catherine. He thought he was being replaced, pushed out of our family picture.
“Seamus,” I said, “if I had a staff of twenty, I would still need your help. You know that. There’ll always be a place for you here. I need you to help us by helping Mary Catherine. You think you could do that?”
Seamus’s mouth pursed as he thought about it.
“I’ll try,” he said with a melodramatic, agonized exhalation.
I stepped across the kitchen and picked up the chore chart. When I lifted the plastic pony, I noticed that it was missing its tail.