“I have my sources,” Mary Catherine said with a smile.
Donnell was nowhere to be found when she returned to the kitchen.
“Where is he?” she asked her other cousin Pete, the chef, who tossed a thumb toward the back door.
“Romance in front and now in the back of the house, too, I see,” Mary Catherine cried in mock shock as she busted Donnell canoodling his girlfriend against the side of her car. “Back to work. You can snog on your own time.”
“Are all you Yanks such slave drivers?” Donnell said as he walked past.
“No, you lazy Paddy. Just me,” Mary Catherine said, whipping him in the butt with a towel.
She grabbed a rack of hot glasses from the machine in the corner of the kitchen and brought them in through the swinging door into the hotel bar.
There were a lot of large and loud red-faced men at the bar and even more in the adjoining banquet space. A three-piece rock band was playing in the party room, and everyone was singing the old Squeeze hit “Tempted” at the top of their lungs and drinking Guinness and Harp Lager as fast as she and the bartender, Kevin, could change taps on the basement kegs.
An Australian-rules football club, mostly firemen and cops from Sydney, was in town to play the local Limerick club at various forms of football, and the place was packed. She smiled at the young and happy drunk men who’d been there for the last three days. She really liked the mostly good-natured Ozzies, but if she heard another one ask her what a nice girl like her was doing in a place like this, she was going to start screaming.
The best news of all was that the hotel’s potential buyer, Mr. Fuhrman, a tall, dour German, had come by in the midst of all the merriment about an hour before. He had suddenly seemed pretty merry himself when he saw the place packed to capacity and all the money flying into the till.
“I’m going to make a phone call to the broker on Monday,” Mr. Fuhrman had assured her before he left. “And I think you’re going to like what you hear.”
“Hey, Mary Catherine. Did you see this?” said Kevin, suddenly pointing up at the TV.
She looked up. The BBC was on. Behind a sleek glass anchor desk sat a sharp-faced blonde wearing a deadly serious expression.
Then Mary read the graphic on the screen beneath the anchorwoman, and the glasses in the racks rattled loudly as she set them down heavily on the bar.
NEW YORK ATTACKED! it said.
“Turn it up, Kevin,” she said as the image on the TV changed to a shot of the stranded Roosevelt Island tram.
“FBI sources have confirmed that this is yet another attack seemingly carried out by terrorists,” said the British anchor.
Another attack! What?
She flew behind the bar and grabbed her bag and dug out her cell phone. It almost slipped out of her hand, and she had to take a deep breath before she managed to focus enough to find the speed dial for the apartment. She bit her lower lip as she waited, listening to silence.
“C’mon,” she said, waiting on the connection. “Pick up, Michael. C’mon, pick up!”
Chapter 37
That night at a quarter after seven, cranky, definitely drained, and yet at the same time extremely grateful just to be here, I stepped off my elevator and finally made glorious contact with the loose brass knob of my apartment’s front door.
Sometimes bad days at work depressed me and stayed with me, but this was one of the days that made me happy just for the fact that it was over and I’d gotten through it in one piece.
I was locking the apartment door behind me when a horrendous crunching sound ripped out from the vicinity of the kitchen.
I peeked inside and saw Martin, with his back to me, throwing a bunch of carrots into a blender. He seems to be in one piece, I thought. The same busy, assured, positive, energetic person who’d come to work this morning. First days were tough. Especially ones that involved taking care of double-digit kids. But it was looking like it had gone well enough. Excellent, I thought. So far, so good.
Instead of interrupting him, I peeked into the living room.
Uh-oh. Maybe not so good, I thought when I saw the kids.
All the boys were there except Brian. They were lying all over the place. Eddie was passed out on the ottoman. Ricky was on the carpet, red-faced and staring, dazed, up at the ceiling. Trent, huffing and puffing, was sprawled facedown on the couch.
Seamus, who was on the end of the couch, thumbing through the Irish Voice newspaper, rolled his eyes at me.
“What’s wrong with them, Father?” I said.