Chasing River: A Novel

“Have ya been sleeping?”

I flinch from my mother’s rough grip of my face. “I’m fine. Just a long night at work.”

She grabs my scuffed-up hand and then levels me with a stern look. “I see that, River. What happened?”

“I caught Benoit lifting a customer’s wallet.” I shrug. “So I told him not to.”

“That slimy little bastard,” Ma mutters. She brings Da in once a week, so she’s there enough to know the regulars. She’s always had a thing against Benoit that I didn’t understand, said he gave her the creeps.

“Is he going to remember?” Da sits in his seat at the kitchen table, his favorite mug in one hand full of beer, a bowl of stew and the Mirror in front of him.

“I’m guessing so.” Waking up with a black eye and a busted nose is always good for jogging the memory.

“And are the gardai going to be showing up at the doorstep for ya?”

I shake my head, though I can’t ignore the voice in my head that admits, Not for that.

He nods with approval. My father never had a problem teaching someone a lesson if he deserved it.

“Here.” I set the week’s register readings and other paperwork down next to him.

He sighs like he always does, as if it’s a great burden to count out how much money we’ve brought in. Delaney’s has kept all of us quite comfortable over the years. “Good week?”

“Busy week.” It’s always busy at Delaney’s. Through bad weather and bad times, we never lack drinking customers.

“Sit and eat.” Ma drops a bowl of her lamb stew on the table, and then her sturdy hands land on my back to push me into a chair.

I hiss when her palm presses against one of my wounds.

“What’s the matter, son?”

I shake my head, waiting for the pain to subside with gritted teeth. I’ve suddenly lost my appetite.

Marion Delaney isn’t one to take a brush-off, though. “River Fintan Delaney! What is wrong with your back?” Her stubby little fingers fly to my shirt, tugging at the collar.

I swat her hand away. “Ma! Come on!”

“He’s a grown man. Leave him be,” Da mutters, but with a sternness that prompts her to listen. She turns on her heels and marches to the stove in a huff.

Da and I share a look. The fact that I’m twenty-four years old means nothing to that woman. If it were up to her, she’d still be washing my knickers. I do miss her cooking, though, I’ll admit, as I shovel a spoonful of hearty stew into my mouth. No one makes it better. One day every year, on Delaney’s anniversary, she sits at the bar with a vat of it, ladling it into bowls for customers, for free. It’s the busiest day of the year for us, Rowen and me chasing away the greedy assholes who come back for a second helping.

“So, what’s that about?” Da juts his chin toward my back.

“Nothing.” I need to change the subject and fast. “How’s your leg?”

He shifts and grimaces in his chair, as if I’ve just reminded him. “Uncomfortable. It’s this bloody heat wave.”

Heat waves, cold fronts, damp weather . . . all of it seems to bother his leg. Twenty-seven years after the bombing in Belfast that left him with severe nerve damage, there isn’t a day when he doesn’t suffer. I sure don’t remember one, anyway. The doctors say there’s nothing they can do. Not even surgery is going to fix it. I think he’s been prescribed every painkiller under the sun.

“I’ll come back midweek if you want, when Rowen’s not in class. Saves you another trip in.”

“That’d be grand. I don’t want to go near Dublin right now with this sort of thing going on.” He taps the newspaper headline, the article about St. Stephen’s Green below it. “Tell me Aengus didn’t have anything to do with this.”

“Not that I know of.” I keep my eyes on my bowl and feel his heavy stare size me up. He’s no idiot. There’s a reason Aengus didn’t get out on license after just three years in Portlaoise, like his sentence offered. All he had to do was behave, but instead he fought and preached about the cause. The hearing committee denied his request, and he served out his entire sentence.

And then the day he got released, he skipped the supper that Ma had been preparing for two days and went to meet Jimmy. The metaphorical straw that broke our father’s back and severed all ties. Ma will still call him occasionally and mail him a birthday card, like she did every year while he was behind bars, but she’ll have to sign Da’s name for him.

“Is he around the house much?”

“He isn’t.”

“Any prospective buyers?”

“Not yet, but it’s only been on the market for two weeks. We should get an offer soon.”

Da nods slowly, a mixture of resolution and sadness in his eyes. He grew up in that house. Even after he and Ma married and they moved to Dundalk in County Louth, he spent a lot of nights there, avoiding the commute home while running the pub with Granddad and Uncle Samuel, God rest their souls. “It’s about time you and Rowen cut all ties to him. He’ll never be anything but trouble to this family. I wish Ma never put his name on the deed. The bastard doesn’t deserve any of me family’s money.”

It’s unsettling, seeing the two of them so deeply at odds. It didn’t used to be like that. Aengus is a mini Seamus Delaney in so many ways. They even share the same copper-top hair. When Da and granddad would sit around the woodstove and go off about all the years of persecution our people suffered at the hands of the English, how those bloody Protestants should have just packed up their things and left Ireland the hell alone, it was Aengus who’d sit cross-legged on the floor in front of them. Sure, Rowen and I were there, too, but Aengus lapped up every word. Da and Granddad had a way of telling a story that made you want to listen. By the age of ten, I knew more about our country’s history than many grown people know today.

I wasn’t even alive when my dad got hurt. Aengus was only two. Da figured he’d bring him to the funeral of the three IRA volunteers who died in what the media later dubbed the Gibraltar killings. Da had known one of them from childhood and wanted to pay his respects. When the Ulster Defense Association bomber showed up with grenades, Da managed to cover Aengus, protecting him from harm and taking the brunt of it. Sixty people were injured that day, and three died.

I can’t say how much that experience impacted Aengus, if at all, given that he was so young. He certainly heard about it in later years, and just the knowledge that he was almost blown up by the UDA nurtured his resentment of all things English, Protestant, and police. Which is why I’m still shocked that he would have anything to do with what happened at the Green.

It sure put a fire in Da, though. Ma said that his hatred flared in the early days, likely fueled by the incessant pain in his leg. But that fire and the desire for vengeance that he spoke of dulled quickly. By the time the Provisional IRA declared a ceasefire in the late ’90s, he fully supported the end of the violence. He’d been living with his injuries for almost a decade, running the pub when most days he’d rather drink until the pain went away. “The people of Northern Ireland have spoken,” he had said. “It’s what they want, so let them be.”

The dissident republican groups that cropped up after the ceasefire? He abhors them, and lets it be known every chance he gets.

“This here? These so-called IRA?” He waves the paper and then tosses it. “Something needs to be done about this. These terrorists calling themselves republicans fighting for the good of Ireland! That’s absolute shite! They don’t even understand what those words mean. They’re about extortion and drugs. They’re tainting the memory of noble, strong men. They’re tainting the name of what those men fought for. They don’t know a bleeding thing about real suffering, and real purpose.”

“Don’t get all worked up, Seamus, or I’m going to stop bringing the papers home to you. It’s not good for your blood pressure,” Ma scolds. Aengus isn’t good for his blood pressure, either. That’s another reason I’m skirting the issue now. If he knew what really happened, he’d hunt Aengus down and beat him over the head with his cane. If he didn’t die of a heart attack first.

Ma starts rambling, “Did you know I had to go to Limericks and drag your Da out by the ear yesterday when he didn’t arrive for supper? All those old fellas going on about that mess down in Dublin.”

I know exactly what she means. Dundalk, County Louth is known for an abundance of staunch Irish republican supporters, many of whom marched with the Provisional IRA back in its day. Now Da and his friends mainly sit around the pub with their pints, bitching about England and government and the policing system. Some of them have gotten into the political side of it, and occasionally they’ll load up into a van and join a protest that the 32CSM is supporting. Not Da, though. He’s had enough of all of that.

Mostly, they’re devising plots to deliver righteous punishment to all these bleeding gangs who they blame the gardai for having allowed to thrive in recent years. Quick and justified punishment. Of course, it’s all just chatter. But when that chatter turns to the splinter cells that have cropped up—terrorists and gangs using the notoriety and fear of the IRA name to extort money and deal drugs—the shouting starts.

“A bullet in the head, that’s what these bastards need!” Da slams his fist on the table, rattling the dishes.

“Seamus,” Ma warns, her voice sharp.

He takes a moment to calm down and then finally sighs. “At least no one got hurt.”

A twinge of discomfort tugs at my back. I beg to differ.

Ma clasps her hand together and begins clucking like a hen. “And that poor American girl. Imagine visiting Dublin and almost dying over something so foolish!”

I wonder what Ma would say if she knew that American girl’s last name is Welles? As a woman who lost many ancestors in the Great Famine, and whose own family was terrorized by the UDA as a Catholic girl visiting her relatives near Belfast, Ma has never had a lot of love or sympathy for anyone bearing ties to England, even though a few of her distant cousins now live in Bath. She’ll die before she visits them there, on principle.

Probably nothing cruel. Ma may be singularly focused and a master at holding a grudge, but she’s not hateful toward innocent people.

“That would have been bad,” I agree, keeping my eyes on my bowl, still thinking about those few minutes with Amber today, by the memorial. She didn’t notice me coming up from behind, as she peered so intently into the face of one of the statues. So I hung back, studying her for a good, long minute. Taking in those legs, bared in a pair of jean shorts that hugged her body just right. Her thighs are strong and sculpted like an athlete’s, her skin tanned and smooth. She was wearing a simple white T-shirt today, but she filled it out with a perfect pair of tits. And that hair . . . I wanted to weave my fingers through it.

She’s a smart one, her eyes zeroing in on the knuckles I used to get the money back from Benoit and putting the pieces together. I saw the recognition in them, and I was sure I saw disappointment follow. She glimpsed the true me, while I glimpsed how she felt about that.

And it bothered me. For a moment there I regretted my actions and wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have pummeled him, especially after he emptied his wallet of all the money he stole. Not because I think he didn’t deserve it.

But because the way she looked at me today, and yesterday at the bar, as if I can do no wrong . . . She obviously sees me in a better light than I actually warrant, and I like the feel of that light.

I was so surprised—and relieved—when she threw her arms around me. I lost a few breaths, just appreciating the feel and smell of her, in a way I definitely didn’t in the Green. I almost kissed her. I was so close to her neck, so close to just turning in farther. But I held back because, while she may look at me like I’m some sort of angel, I don’t want to assume that it’s more. Worse, I don’t want her to think I expect anything in exchange for what I did.

So I stopped myself. And I cursed myself for not growing a pair the entire drive here.

“Her family must be worried sick about her.” Ma’s prattling voice cuts into my thoughts.

“Probably.” Good question. I never even asked. I was too busy trying not to stare at those legs of hers. She must know they’re something to look at. She keeps wearing those little shorts.

“What’s that smile about now?” Ma chirps, the heavy creases in her face folding with her frown.

“The stew. It’s delicious,” I lie, soaking a crust of bread in the gravy and taking a bite.

It was a split-second decision, as I was climbing out of my car to go meet her, to keep the list. And another split-second decision to hint to her that I’ve seen it. I figure it gives her an excuse to come back to Delaney’s, if she wants one. And if she does, then she’s definitely chasing me.

A prospect that has me beaming inside.

“You’re such a good son, River.” Ma musses my hair up. “When are you going to find a nice Irish Catholic girl to marry?”

I wonder if Amber’s Protestant.

“When I’m thirty and she’s old enough to work in the pub and get knocked up.” I wink at Da and he roars with laughter. He and Ma are twelve years apart in age. She applied for a waitressing job at Delaney’s on her eighteenth birthday and he married her four months later. Aengus was born seven months after that.

“Six more years for grandbabies! Oh, River . . .” She clucks her disapproval.

I just grin wider at her and shrug my shoulders.

“These boys exasperate me some days.”