Saint and Scholar (5 page)

She’d loved her dad as much as any teenager who’s learning to push boundaries and make mistakes could love her father, but she didn’t know enough about him. He was a mystery, just “Daddy.” If tasked with writing his life story, she could transcribe everything she knew about him in a double-spaced, one-page document. Initially, she hadn’t thought that unusual, but in the years since his death, the imbalance of knowledge became increasingly clear. She’d spent summers with her mother’s sprawling family and could write a tome about their less than illustrious origins. Hell, she could fill a notebook with just what she knew about Mom. But Daddy? The old photographs of him from his youth she pored over seemed to raise more questions about the kind, hardworking electrician than they answered.

With the assistance of online databases and census records, she had managed to trace his lineage back to around eighteen hundred, and there she got stuck. Either the family had moved and she didn’t know from where, or there was a name or spelling change she couldn’t track.

Mom returned to the kitchen with a folder filled with loose, yellowing pages. “Your great-great-aunt Minnie gave those to your dad many years ago when we were in Virginia for a family reunion. You were probably too young to remember, but there’s a picture.” She slid a Polaroid across the table of a young girl on an elderly woman’s lap outdoors near some picnic tables. Written in slanted script was
Adam’s Carla, age three.

“I didn’t remember I had it until Chet was cleaning out some stuff to make room for his weights…”

Carla stifled a groan.

Mom shrugged and adjusted her glasses on her nose again. “Your great-great-aunt Minnie, who’s holding you in that picture, told him he could use it to apply for S.A.R. membership, but he never did. Adam wasn’t a big joiner.” She leaned over the table next to Carla and peered down at the packet. “I guess that means you’re eligible for D.A.R membership. It’s all laid out. Minnie had already done the tree up to…”

Carla used her finger to trace up the brackets on the yellowed pedigree. “Right up until around seventeen fifty-five. This man, Phillip Callaghan, must have been the first in the country. He ended up fighting in the war somehow. I wonder where he came from.”

“Well, Ireland obviously. All of the Gills and Millers and them were from those Scot-Irish pockets out in the mountains. All of Adam’s mother’s people were from Boston. That’s where I met him, remember? He was up there visiting every summer. They’d only come over in the last century or so.”

“Yeah, I know that part, but how’d Phillip get here? He was first. I want to know about him.”

Mom shrugged and returned to her own seat to finish her chicken. “Hell, Carla, I don’t know. It’s
Adam
’s family. I can tell you how the Manfredis and Rizzos got here, but I don’t know nothing about those Irish folks.”

“Damn it,” Carla muttered. Irish folks. She thought of Grant and those bright eyes and that brogue, and had to pick up the file folder to fan herself. That melting sensation had returned.

Mom reached across the table and tapped Carla’s hand. “Hey, I’m sure your brothers would like to know, too, so you should find out.” She got up and cleared her dishes off the placemat. “Chet’s going to be home early tonight and we planned to watch a movie. Why don’t you stay and I’ll pop some popcorn? And we can have some dessert. I made your Nona’s cheesecake.”

Carla studied her mother’s eager expression and chose her words carefully. She didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “I actually have to leave soon. I have a drawing I want to finish. There’s a show I want to submit it to.” It wasn’t a lie. She had decided
right then
to enter the juried exhibition. More likely, though, her plans for the evening would involve getting in her car and making an appearance at her favorite beauty supply store. She was out of blue eyeliner. Her Nona’s cheesecake sounded
divine
, however. Nona used a different candy bar in the filling every time. Maybe she’d take a slice to go.

“Oh! Well, next time, maybe? Just tell us what you want to watch and we’ll get it from the DVD machine.”

“Um…okay, Mom.” Carla scraped the dregs of her dinner into the compost bucket, stacked her dishes neatly in the sink, gathered up her new pile of research and gave her mother a hug and a kiss. “Be careful at work,” she said, opening the refrigerator and grabbing the pie pan when Mom turned her back to scrape her own dish clean.

Mom turned and flicked a hand at Carla dismissively. “Oh, I don’t do anything but sit behind a desk taking reports nowadays. Not all that harrowing.”

Carla paused at the screen door, studying her mother. Was she sad about only doing deskwork now?
No
, she wasn’t. To Mom, being a police officer was a job, not a career.

Lately Carla’d been feeling much the same way about her own gigs. Were they basically interchangeable with any other thing? Were they just distractions much like cleaning offices had been when she was a teen? Seemed like something she needed to work out.

* * * *

“Well, well, look what the cat dragged in.”

“Oh, feck it all to hell,” Curt mumbled through clenched teeth before knocking back his first drink of the evening. “Don’t turn around, Grant. Barracuda approaching.”

Grant closed his eyes and grimaced. “Tell me it’s not.” Of course it was. He knew that nasally singsong voice anywhere. He’d woken up countless mornings with the sound of it in his ear.

“Of course it is,” Seth said, his cheeks already burning red from the vodka he’d imbibed before Grant could even pick him up. “Lucky fucking Irishman
you
are.”

Yeah. Lucky.

“What’s that about being lucky?” the woman asked. Grant felt the press of unnaturally firm, high breasts against his back even before his nostrils registered the familiar, cloying scent of clemantis-scented perfume. He blew out a shuddering breath as sticky gloss-coated lips touched one of his cheeks and then the other.

“Hello, Seska–I mean,
Francesca
.”

Curt winced.
He
had been the one to start calling her Seska after the traitorous Cardassian spy in the
Star Trek:
Voyager
franchise. The name had fit, so it stuck.

Grant turned in his chair to look up at his ex, who’d straightened up to her full height and then some. She was nearly six feet tall even without the three-inch heels. As he was right at six feet himself, when they were together she towered over him by a bit when in her favorite shoes. He wasn’t particularly self-conscious about his height since it beat the average, but Francesca always got a perverse glee from being dominant in that one thing.

Francesca was the absolute last person Grant wanted to run into before leaving town. With some effort, he’d managed to avoid her on campus for several years, so his luck must have really just run out there in the club.

“Long time no see,” she sang. Well, of course it had been a long time. They’d had a bad breakup. She tossed her long dark hair from one shoulder to the other while jutting out her chest.

He felt his gut clench in disgust. She’d had more work done. She’d always been small up top and was still fairly narrow, with the exception of the new balloons on her chest. In that tube dress she looked something like a D-list porno star, all bones and silicone. At that moment he was
very
glad she’d dumped him.

She pulled out the empty chair at the table and perched on the edge of it, looking at each man in turn with a brazen smile, then she let her gaze linger on Grant. “So, how the hell are you, Grant?” she asked. “You look luscious as usual. Been kicking the ball around again? Or maybe you’re doing that CrossFit thing so many of you athletic types are going gaga over?”

Nope, that had been
Seth’s
thing. Seth had dragged both Grant
and
Curt to the grueling workouts only for both Irishmen to sneak out during the jumping rope. They’d spent the rest of the hour at a bar.

“I’m fine.” He straightened up and pulled his hand back from the table when he saw Francesca extending her paw toward it. “I’m moving back to Ireland.”

Francesca showed no emotion about the snub of her hand, but stuck out her bottom lip in a pout over the announcement. “Oh, that’s no fun!”

He turned his head and rolled his eyes. For a woman who had a doctorate in folklore, she had certainly become frivolous since they’d split up. Working in the film industry as a consultant probably had something to do with that change.

She propped her elbows up on the table’s edge and leaned in to put her cavernous cleavage on display. “Well, when are you leaving, sweetheart? Maybe we can hook up before you go.” That last bit came with a wink.

Curt mumbled, “Blech.”

Grant smiled as kindly as he could manage. “I’m leaving Monday, actually.”

Francesca’s painted-on brows shot up. “That soon? Well, I’m in town until Tuesday.” Her lips peeled back into a sharklike grin. Curt put his hand over his mouth and made a gagging noise. Francesca acted as if she did not hear.

“He has a girlfriend. She wouldn’t like it,” Seth said.

Francesca cocked her head to the side and squinted at Seth. “Really. He has a girlfriend and she’s letting him hang out with you two?” She scoffed. “Don’t make me laugh. No woman is that stupid.”

Grant tried to smooth his expression to one of absolute blankness, but he feared the twitching of his cheek would give away his feeling of absolute
oh shit
.

“Yeah, yeah, he does,” Curt said as he accepted a round of shots and three beers from the waitress at his side.

Grant refused his when offered.

Curt shrugged.

“Who is she?”

“Mrow!” Curt pulled his lips back from his teeth and hissed, making a little scratching motion in the air like an agitated cat.

“Stop goading her,” Grant said. He wished he had cut the guy off from the bar an hour before. Curt had the social graces of a hungry alligator.

“The one. You know, the one,” Seth said, draining the shot, then immediately chasing it down with lager.

“
What
one? What are you babbling about?” She twirled a length of her pitch-black hair around her fingers.

“Whew!” Curt yelled after drinking his shot. He shook himself as if he felt a chill, and pounded the tabletop with his fists. “That’s good stuff. You know, Seska. The
girl
. The one you thought he was screwing but he wasn’t? Well, he is now. Can’t say I blame him.”

“Oh, shit, Curt.” Grant buried his face in the nest of his arms atop the table.

“You’re lying,” Francesca said. “You’re just trying to amp me up.”

“Oh, that’s rich, coming from the Whore of the Baskervilles,” Curt said.

Grant moaned wordlessly into the table. Those three would be at it all night if he didn’t intercede soon. Their last encounter, only three years before, had been the stuff rock ballads were made of. Grant and Francesca had been broken up for more than a year, but she still went around telling everyone what he’d supposedly done to her as if it was some sort of fresh burn. The night of the near fracas, Grant, Curt and Seth were at an event for international students and rather plastered. Francesca stormed into the venue in hysterics and started shrieking her usual accusations about Grant cheating. Grant didn’t deny it, so she stood there screaming at him until Curt and Seth got sick of hearing her voice.

“I’m going to ignore that comment because you are obviously drunk.”

“Whatever. Go away, Seska.”

“Fran-chess-ka. Francesca. Say it. You’re so drunk you can’t even say my name right.”

“Fuck off,” Seth said. “You just cause trouble.”

“Finish your freakin’ dissertation and go back to Russia!”

“Go back to hell.”

Grant sat up and pounded the tabletop. The three louts around him startled. “Hey, you know what, Fran? I’m going to go order a very complicated drink. When I come back, please be gone. That’s the long and short of it, okay?”

“I–”

Grant held up his hand to stave off her interruption. “You’re not going home with me. We broke up for a reason. Probably the
wrong
one, but we’ll let it stand, yeah?”

He stood and slammed his chair underneath the table, sobering Seth, Curt and Francesca up a bit. He walked toward the bar growling softly and grinding his teeth.

What an
awful
coincidence. Almost eight years past, he had made the amateur mistake of confiding in Curt and Seth about the crush he had on a lovely young woman in his class. Of course he hadn’t acted on it. He was on and off with Francesca at the time and he wouldn’t have risked losing his job over a flirtation. For the next several years, every time Curt or Seth saw Carla on campus, they’d report back to him–telling him who she was speaking to, what she was wearing… It started as a tease, but later turned into this matter-of-fact thing: “I saw your girl today.”