Smoked (The Invincibles 5)

“Did we ever talk?” I asked out loud, staring at her name etched into the stone. “Why can’t I remember us having conversations?”

What no one seemed to know, or was willing to talk about, was who had gotten my mother pregnant. Was it another memory unwilling to reveal itself to me, or had it always been kept from me?

“Who was he, Ma?” I looked up at a man who could be about her age, walking down the sidewalk. He kept going without looking in my direction. “Was it him?” I asked, pointing toward the road. I lowered my head and cried, feeling the pain of missing her for the first time since I set foot in Waterford several days ago.

When I looked up again a few minutes later, I saw an older man rest a bouquet of flowers near a stone a few graves over.

“Sorry to disturb, lass,” he said.

“You’re not.” I got up, brushed off my backside, and walked over to him. “Was she your wife?” I asked.

“Aye. Some sixty years.”

I noticed the date of her death was only a little over a year ago. “You must miss her terribly.”

“Aye,” he repeated, looking down at the etched stone like I had at my mother’s. “You’re Siobhan,” he said.

“I am. Do I know you?”

“It hasn’t been that many years, lass.”

“You’re probably not going to believe this, but I have amnesia.”

“You remember your name. That’s a good sign.”

I laughed. “It is that.”

“You and your dear mother lived just down the road from my Janie and me.”

“Did we? My apologies, Mr. O’Brien,” I said, glancing at the gravestone.

He shook his head. “I’ve always been Uncle Gene to you.”

“Now I feel really terrible.”

He smiled and patted my hand when I rested it on his arm. “Don’t you dare, my girl.”

I pointed toward my mother’s grave. “I’ll just leave you to your privacy, then.”

“On my way home now, anyway. How long are you in town?”

“That’s a bit up in the air at the moment.”

“I hope to run into you again. Are you staying in the neighborhood?”

“At the Tower Inn.”

He raised a brow.

“I know, it’s a bit swanky.”

“I heard you did well for yourself. Followed in your father’s footsteps. He’d be proud.”

I felt dizzy and reached out to steady myself. The man caught my arm. “You okay, lass?”

“Did you say, my father?”

“Aye.” He led me over to a bench. “You best sit. You look as though you’ve seen the ghost of my sweet Janie.”