You'll Always Have Tara Read online

  “Good Morning, Mrs. McGregor,” I say, perching on a wooden stool. “You’re making your famous lamb stew, aren’t you? I would know that scent anywhere.” I close my eyes and inhale. “Mmmm. You should bottle it and sell it as an air freshener.”

  She chuckles.

  “Go on with ya, then.”

  “I am serious,” I say, opening my eyes. “A pot of your lamb stew simmering on the stove is one of the best scents in the world. It makes me feel warm inside before I have even taken a bite.”

  “What a grand t’ing to say, luv.” Mrs. McGregor smiles at me. “It does me old heart good to hear ya say such a lovely t’ing about me cookin’.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Now, are ya hungry? Will ya be wantin’ a full breakfast, then? Rashers, black pudding, eggs, veg, and potatoes or just oatmeal?”

  “What I want and what I should have are two very different things, Mrs. McGregor,” I say, patting my stomach. “I want the works, but since I wasn’t able to fit my treadmill in my suitcase, I will stick with the oatmeal and a pot of Barry’s.”

  “What do ya need an exercise machine for when ya have hills to climb and miles of beaches to walk?” She stops kneading the bread dough, wipes her hands off on her apron, and walks over to the window, pulling the lace curtains back. “Have the full breakfast, why don’t ya, then go hike the pilgrim trail.”

  “Keep talking, Mrs. McGregor, and you just might persuade me.”

  “Ya know what I always say, don’t ya? Eat breakfast like a queen, lunch like a princess, and dinner—”

  “—like a pauper,” I say, laughing. “You have mystical powers of persuasion. Aunt Pattycake always said you descended from druids.”

  “Herself liked to tell guests me ancestors were the Bandrúi, the druid women who lived thousands of years ago”—Mrs. McGregor chuckles and shakes her head—“she had a load of blarney in her, that one.”

  We slip into a companionable silence as Mrs. McGregor prepares my breakfast and I set a place at the old wooden work island in the middle of the kitchen.

  “Would you like me to finish kneading your dough?”

  “T’at would be grand,” Mrs. McGregor says. “T’anks a million.”

  I wash my hands and dry them on a dishtowel, then begin kneading the dough that will eventually form a loaf of brown bread. I push the dough down and out, stretching it flat with the heels of my hands, until it is smooth, then I form it into a boule.

  “Don’t forget to cross the top”—Mrs. McGregor hands me a sharp knife for slashing the dough—“or the devil and the wee fairies will be trapped inside.”

  I slash a big X in the dough and cover it with a large copper bowl and then sit back down on my stool to wait for my breakfast.

  “Did Sin eat already?” I ask.

  “Who? I don’t know anyone by that name.” Mrs. McGregor made her feelings about Rhys’s new name known during dinner yesterday. She told him she thought it was blasphemous and warned him to stop knocking on the devil’s door or he would be invited in. Then, she made the sign of the cross and left Sin sitting there laughing. “Do ya mean Rhys?”

  “Yes,” I say, flushing.

  “He drove out of here in that fancy car of his early this morning, in a rush to his funeral, that one.” She carries a plate laden with fried eggs, potatoes, sausages, and tomatoes and sets it down in front of me. “Here ya are, my dear. Don’t ya know a full Irish breakfast is the cure for jetlag?”

  “I thought it was the cure for a hangover?”

  “That too.”

  I laugh. “Would you keep me company, Mrs. McGregor, please?”

  “Ah, sure,” she says, sitting across from me. “I could go for a cuppa.”

  I pour her a cup of strong Irish tea, set the cup on a saucer, and slide it across the island to her.

  “Thanks, luv.”

  I inhale the curlicues of steam twisting up from the plate, savoring the scent of fresh sausage, before cutting my egg in half and forking it into my mouth.

  “Herself told me about your important television job. Proud of ya, she was.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure.”

  I know my aunt was proud of me, but it feels good to hear it again. A part of me needs to hear it again, the part of me that is still a chubby little girl who feels like she doesn’t fit in at home or at school. Doesn’t every person have a fat/skinny/lonely/shy child living inside of them?

  “Are ya going to miss being on the television?”

  Will I miss being on TV? Will I miss waking up before the sun to film cooking segments with other chefs? Will I miss standing in ninety-degree heat and being bled dry by mosquitos while I interview the president of the Carolina Women’s League about their jam festival?

  “No, ma’am,” I say, dabbing my lips with a napkin. “I never felt fulfilled in that job. I never felt like it was my calling.”

  “What will you do with your days?”

  Mrs. McGregor has spent her whole life within a fifteen-mile radius of Tásúildun. Her parents worked at the castle, her husband worked at the castle until he died. How can I explain to a woman who has such deep roots what it feels like to be suddenly rootless?

  “I don’t know. I feel adrift.”

  “What does your heart want to do? Answer with your heart, child, not your head.”

  “I would like to bake,” I instinctively answer. “Maybe even write a cookbook or start a blog about baking. I am tired of talking about food and tasting other people’s food, I want to get in the kitchen and create, lose myself in the art of it. Baking makes me happy because I take pleasure in knowing what I am creating will bring joy to others. There is too much pain and suffering in this world. I just want to spread joy, one cookie at a time. Does that sound silly?”

  “I have been cooking and baking for other people most of my life. I wouldn’t be in this kitchen if it didn’t fill me with joy.” She takes a sip of her tea. “You’re welcome to join me here anytime ya want.”

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “Tásúildun is yours now, Tara, love.” She smiles sadly over the rim of her teacup. “Besides, I welcome the company. I’ve been a wee bit lonely since . . .”

  “Thank you.”

  I gather our dishes and rinse them in the sink.

  “Thank you for a delicious breakfast,” I say, giving her a hug. “It’s just what I needed.”

  “Where are ya off to then?”

  “I thought I would work up a glow on Donegal’s treadmill,” I say, walking toward the door. “I am going to take a hike.”

  Mrs. McGregor frowns.

  “In this weather?”

  I open the door and look up at the blue sky. There are only a few, wispy clouds ringing the top of the distant hills.

  “What do you mean? It’s beautiful.”

  “Mark me words, it’s going to rain.”

  “I won’t be gone long.”

  “Here, take a brolly,” she says, pulling an umbrella off a wooden hook on the back of the door. “It will be lashing outside before you get back or me bones are lying.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  I’ve barely made it to the first standing stone before I have to stop to retie my bootlaces. The toes of my boots are scuffed and the tongues are limp and floppy. My battered old Doc Martens have seen better days.

  Lawd, how my daddy hated these boots. He said I was too pretty to wear combat boots, but I kept on wearing them. I was smack dab in the middle of my rebellious phase, going to school in Austin, and hiding my Southern deb roots beneath layers of grungy denim, tattered flannel, and irreverent tees. The grungy rebel was soon replaced by the cowgirl rebel. By the time I graduated from the culinary institute and returned to Charleston, I was back to being the rebel deb, a Southern girl fighting against a well-established, genteel system. When I got the job at WCSC, I packed away my chunky-soled boots and grungy jeans and filled my closet with Charleston-appropriate attire. In that way, I seem to have trave
led full circle.

  I finish tying my boots and continue climbing, skirting around the thorny furze, until I reach the first stone, the one visible from my bedroom window. My boots sink in the spongy, wet ground. Water seeps in through the laces. I make a mental note to stop in at Finnegan’s, a pub/general store in the village, to see if they sell rain boots.

  I keep climbing until I reach the sixth stone on the trail, the most elaborately carved of all the stones. Sitting on a flat boulder across from the stone, I close my eyes and say a little prayer for Daddy and Aunt Patricia. I am about to ask God to help me find my purpose and my place when I hear someone approaching.

  “The stones can’t bring ya another tiara, banphrionsa.”

  Mother Mary and Baby Jesus! Aidan Gallagher is not standing in front of me. He is not taunting me as I pray. I open my eyes and there he is, towering over me, a rucksack on his back, that half-grin, half-sneer on his handsome face. Ailean is standing beside him, great tongue lolling out of his mouth.

  “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to interrupt someone when they’re praying, you arrogant—”

  “You’re right,” he says, the grin-sneer sliding from his face. “Sorry.”

  He sits down beside me and the scent of apples fills the air around us. Apples and heated skin, clean and manly. I don’t know what to say or how to feel about Aidan. He confuses me as much as his half-grin, half-sneer. Ailean flops on his side at Aidan’s feet.

  “Tara,” he says, my name rolling of his tongue. “I am sorry, truly. Will ya forgive me?”

  I look at him, see the sincerity shining in his blue eyes, and all the breath leaves my body. All I can do is nod my head.

  We sit together, staring at the stone. I can hear him breathing, feel the heat from his arm warming my arm. I remember the way things used to be between us. So easy, like we were two peas sitting contentedly in a pod.

  I look at him. “Aidan?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did Mrs. McGregor mean when she said my aunt was away with the fairies?”

  He smiles and for a second the intense, gruff man fades away and the warm, lighthearted boy is sitting beside me.

  “Some people believe the voices of the dead can be heard at night laughing with the fairies. They fall silent a year after their death, when they move onto the next world.”

  “That’s a lovely thought, isn’t it? That our loved ones remain, unseen, laughing with the fairies. Do you think the dead stay behind for a while?”

  Like the steady beat of timpani mallets on a kettledrum, the sound of rolling thunder can be heard in the distance.

  “Are you asking if I believe in ghosts, Tara?”

  “Yes.”

  Something about his gaze changes. He is staring at me, but I have the strange feeling he doesn’t see me.

  “I think some souls stay behind because they feel they didn’t finish what they were meant to do. Others stay to torture those who remain.”

  He has a haunted, faraway look in his eyes, a forlorn, lost sort of look that makes me want to grab his hand and to pull him back to me. I consider telling him he sounds like an Emo girl, but I don’t think it is the right moment to tease him.

  “That’s dark, Aidan.”

  “Is it?”

  “Very.”

  “Death is dark, isn’t it?” He shifts his gaze from my face to a place on the horizon where the dark sky is being fractured by bolts of lightning. “Death is the dark cloud that rolls across our skies and robs us of light. It is massively brutal, and, often, massively unfair.”

  I study his profile, the muscle working along his jawline, the way this light gives his beard a reddish cast, the jagged scar behind his ear, like a lightning bolt fracturing his smooth skin. In my mind, I see myself reaching out, tracing the puckered line with my fingertip, touching him in the easy, intimate way a woman might touch her lover.

  A lover? The fairies must be playing tricks on me. “Aidan?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Do you still believe in fairies?”

  When we were children, Aidan told me the most fantastic stories about fairies, ancient fairies who lived in grand forts beneath the piles of stones found in the hills around Donegal, soldier fairies who fought a magnificent battle near Ulster, wicked fairies who snatch human babies and take their places here on earth.

  He turns his strange, vacant gaze back, fixing it on me. I smile and wait for him to return from his distant place. It is like standing outside an empty house at night, staring at the darkened windows, wondering what lurks behind them, then someone lights a candle inside and the windows glow with life and warmth. Slowly, the darkness behind Aidan’s gaze recedes and the warmth and spark of life in his sea blue eyes returns.

  “If you’re Irish, there’s only one answer to that question,” he says. “Besides, if Mrs. McGregor thought I stopped believing in the fey folk, she would knack me bollocks in. Why?”

  “I was just wondering. You used to tell me the best fairy stories. I loved listening to your stories.”

  He smiles so softly, so sweetly, I almost forget he has grown into a massive snarling, tattooed beast of a man.

  “Ya liked stories about selkies best.”

  “Selkie stories are the best,” I say, laughing. “Remember how I used to look for selkie skins whenever we walked on the beach?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I remember.”

  “Now that I think of it, most of your stories involved mythological creatures who would transform themselves into beautiful women so they could seduce men.” I narrow my gaze on him. “A little pervy.”

  He laughs.

  “Puberty can make a fella a wee bit pervy, can’t it?”

  My cheeks flush with heat. The world is one jacked-up, crazy-ass place, isn’t it? A few weeks ago, I was standing in the moonlight with my childhood sweetheart, listening to him tell me he was marrying another woman and now I am sitting by a sacred stone, talking about pubescent desires with Aidan Gallagher.

  “What are ya thinking?”

  “I am wondering if any of your stories involve mythological creatures who transform themselves into mortal men so they can seduce women?”

  He laughs.

  “Now who’s pervy?”

  My cheeks flush with a new wave of heat. I look away, squinting at the distant charcoal smudged sky.

  “Maybe we should go,” I say. “It looks like a storm is coming this way.”

  “Nice try, banph . . . but you’re not getting off that easy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ya asked me about the gánconâgh, didn’t ya?”

  I frown.

  “Gánconâgh comes from the Gaelic word gean-canagh, which mean love talker,” he says, his voice low. “He arrives just before a storm, appearing with a cloak of mist swirling around him. The birds stop singing and the cattle stop lowing as he roams through valleys and glens, looking for shepherdesses and milkmaids to seduce. When he finds a maiden, alone and unsuspecting, he whispers words of love in her ear, wooing her with his voice, until she yields her body and soul to him.”

  The air around us feels charged with unseen currents, as if our slightest movement will result in a skin-tingling jolt of static electricity.

  “Why did ya want to know about the gánconâgh?”

  Because I think you are one of the dark fairies you used to tell me about, a creature who has donned the visage of a mortal man in hopes of seducing a woman. You’re certainly seducing me.

  “It’s starting to drizzle.” I wipe a raindrop off my cheek. “If we don’t hurry we are going to get wet.”

  A slow, naughty smile spreads across his face.

  “You’re not afraid to get a wee bit wet, are ya?”

  I stand up quickly, but Aidan grabs my hand.

  “Come on,” he says, pulling me up the hill. “I know a place we can go until the storm passes.”

  Aidan leads me over the hill to a small stone cottage with painted shutters. The red paint i
s faded and chipped and a few of the windows are missing panes, but the thatched roof looks as if it was recently rethatched. The rain is coming down, steady and hard, when he batters his shoulder against the old wooden door. The wood creaks and the door swings open. We hurry inside. The inside is surprisingly tidy, with an uneven flagstone floor and a large fireplace.

  “What is this place?” I ask, stomping my feet.

  “A derelict shepherd’s cottage.”

  “So, a shepherd used to live here?”

  “Or a shepherdess,” he says, winking.

  My body begins to tingle again. I untie my sweater from around my waist and pull it over my head, shivering from the cold rain, but also eager to put another layer between me and the dark fairy.

  Aidan shrugs out of his rucksack, unzips one of the compartments, and removes a thin green field blanket, rolled up tight. He sets his rucksack down on the ground and spreads the blanket out beside it, inviting me to sit. I sit on one corner of the blanket and fiddle with the strap of Mrs. McGregor’s umbrella, suddenly shy.

  Aidan pulls two dark bottles out of his rucksack and hands one of them to me. “Have a drink, we’re going to be here awhile.”

  I take the bottle and look at the woman on the label, a beautiful woman with long red hair floating around her head, a tattered silver shroud hanging off one of her slender shoulders, and a scythe in her skeletal hand. Her mouth is open, as if she’s about to scream.

  “What is Ban . . .” I struggle with the strange word printed on the label.

  “Bánánach Brew,” Aidan says. “It’s a craft cider.”

  “Cider? You filled your rucksack with hard cider?” I laugh. “Silly me. I only brought a sweater and an umbrella on my hike.”

  I twist the cap off my bottle and take a sip. The flavor of crisp, tangy apples fills my mouth.

  “Mmm, this is good.”

  “Ya like it, then?”

  Aidan watches me carefully as I take another sip. I hold the cider in my mouth, on my tongue, before swallowing, so I can savor the flavors. The cider packs a tart, powerful punch, but then mellows, leaving a sweet, apple-y aftertaste.

  “It’s like taking a sip of expensive champagne and then biting into a candy apple. It’s good,” I say, looking at the label again. “Very good.”