Of Irish Blood by Mary Pat Kelly Page B

of you. Mike waited until Henrietta’s boys were working and all of you settled and, well, I’ve loved him for the longest time. We write to each other. He’s been worried about your sister Henrietta’s reaction but really, if we want a family we can’t wait any longer.”
    “You can’t,” I say. At least one of the Trio with children. How I’ll love Mike and Mame’s babies!
    Mike and Mame. Perfect. Mam would have been over the moon. I wonder, did Our Lady of Perpetual Help get mixed up and think this was my special intention? Fair play to her. But Mike and Mame McCabe moving into a house … Our Lady better start dumping grace on my sister Henrietta. All hell is about to break loose.
    *   *   *
    “Dolly wants to come to the wedding,” Tim tells me as we get dressed one evening a week before Mame and Mike are to be married, on November 11th at St. Agnes Church in Brighton Park. If only Mam were here to see them wed, I think, still aching for her nearly nine years after her death.
    I designed a dress for Mame, and Rose came back to the studio to run it up on the sewing machine.
    Henrietta shouted and roared about the place for weeks after Mike told her he and Mame were to marry. She said she would not come to the wedding. “Never!”
    Mike looked up from reading his newspaper to say, “All right, Henrietta. We’ll miss you, but do what you must.”
    After days and days of silence she announced at breakfast, “I’m coming for Mam’s sake. Though what she’d say about your breaking the promise you gave her on her deathbed, I can’t say.”
    Henrietta remembered whole conversations with Mam that none of us had ever heard. Still hard to think about those last, sad days. Mam had said “Be good, Nonie,” to me. Ah, well, Mam, I tried. We’d all heard her call for my da at the end, but no messages to Henrietta that anyone else remembered.
    “Mike, how can you leave us to eviction or worse?” Henrietta asked him—a sob in her voice.
    “I paid the rent for the next year, Henrietta. There are four people working in this house and more now that your boys have jobs.”
    Generous when Mike will have his own family to support, please God. But through all Henrietta’s raving, Mike stands firm. Surprising really, but he waited so long for Mame, writing letters to her for years, as I found out. And saying nothing to me, either one of them.
    “You would have told Henrietta,” Mame said to me.
    “I would not,” I started, but stopped. She was right. I probably would have thrown it at Henrietta during one of the arguments that flared up out of nothing, leaving me guilty and saying, “Sorry.” If Henrietta ever found out about Tim McShane … And if Dolly and Tim were at the wedding … Henrietta’s not stupid. Always ready to believe the worst about people, and too often right.
    “Jesus, Tim, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I say to him.
    “Dolly gets these notions, Nora. She says you’re like a sister to her and she’s always admired Mike Kelly, and your cousin Ed is a good man to know.”
    I do like Dolly even though I’m betraying her every Tuesday and Thursday and sometimes on the weekends.
    “She just bought herself a diamond necklace for ten thousand dollars and wants to wear it. She’s taking out mortgages on property all over the place. But when I told her we needed a new car, she wouldn’t discuss it!”
    For all Tim’s bluster, Dolly rules the roost. When she’d decided to sell all of her horses after Brighton Park closed, nothing he could do but say, “All right, Dolly.”
    She finally agreed to set him at Arlington Racetrack, but its more expensive there, and not as easy to “help” one horse win or slow down another. Racetrack officials watching. So Dolly bought Tim a share in Jake Logan’s casino to keep him occupied. Now he spent his nights there, swanning around, and gambling with her money—which Dolly doesn’t know.
    “Be careful, Tim,” I said and told him