Page 1 of What Love Can Do

One

Well, that’s it then. I called Dad when I heard the news that Mom passed. I told him I wanted to come home and see him and my sisters, and what did he say? “We don’t have a daughter named Maggie. You must have the wrong number.” Click, he hung up on me. Some family, huh? So I guess I won’t be needing you anymore, Diary. I have a life now and a beautiful baby boy, and more than enough to keep me busy. Besides, looking through these pages hurts so very much.

So long from Dublin,

M.

Quinn O’Neill stared at the journal entry dated December 1989. He’d been a year old when it was written, and in the time since, “M,” his mam, had given him four brothers and enough love to last a lifetime. It had to last a lifetime now that Mam, like his father, was gone from this earth.

With a weary sigh, Quinn leaned back against the closet door of his mam’s bedroom. He’d been sitting on the floor, going through the old leather trunk he’d found inside.

The trunk that held the secrets of Mam’s past.

Just an hour ago, he’d been sitting in the living room, studying his four brothers’ waiting expressions, the range of green to blue eyes. They’d gotten them all—Brady had Mam’s blue, Conor had Mamó’s green, even Dad’s brown went to Quinn and the twins—an assortment of the O’Neill Clan. In all their eyes, Quinn had seen grief mixed with indecision. Their mam hadn’t left instructions for after she was gone, yet as always his brothers looked to him for guidance.

The gravity of that weighed on him like ten pints of the black stuff.

First their dad had died of a heart attack two years ago, just months after the family restaurant, The Cranky Yankee, was severely damaged in a kitchen fire. Quinn had been twenty six at the time and still playing pro rugby, but once Dad died, Mam needed a new man of the house to help with the restaurant and his brothers, so Quinn had quit the team and stepped up.

Then, five days ago—Mam. Only fifty years old. Brain aneurysm. Now, their matriarch was gone. Only five of them left, and Quinn head of household. It had been a lot for him to take in.

He’d entered Mam’s bedroom hoping to find answers. Now he had them, and eventually he had to join his brothers and tell them what he’d learned.

Many bedtimes ago, Mam had lulled him to sleep with stories of a faraway place where the grapes turned to gold, but Quinn had always just assumed she was making the tales up. Now he knew it was a real place.

Rummaging through the trunk, he plucked one photo out. It was of young Maggie O’Neill, definitely before the O’Neill, wearing cornflower blue bell bottoms. She sat on the edge of a rickety bridge with her legs dangling over a narrow creek, holding onto the railing. In her hair were flower barrettes, and on her face was that same, cheeky smile he’d recognize anywhere.

“Hello, Mam,” he greeted her, smiling. It was amazing to see her looking so young.

On the back, she’d written, Forestville, 1980.

Forestville. That’s where Mam was from, only she’d never told them that because memories of her birthplace had brought her pain. No wonder given her father had disowned her after she’d met Grant O’Neill, Quinn’s father, broken her engagement to a local man named Ken Parker, and left Green Valley to make a home in Ireland. From that day forward, she’d had to leave her beloved family and home behind, as well as all her childhood dreams. In the diary, young Maggie had rambled on about either a flower shop, or a surf shop, or a bed-and-breakfast, and other big dreams. She said she didn’t care what she did for a career, as long as she was the best.

Quinn’s heart hurt, truly ached.

As long as he could remember, she and Dad had managed The Cranky Yankee. She’d done the accounting, paid the bills, and everything else that came with running the back office. A far cry from a surf or flower shop.

He picked up the photo of Mam and Dad as a young couple, touching heads at a pub, two frothy beers between them. On the back—our first date, Mulligan’s Tavern.

Quinn had heard of the place. Dad’s mate from college, Paul something, had left for America, and Dad and a few other friends visited him one summer to help him get Mulligan’s up and running. It was the only time Dad had been out of Ireland. Just that one summer in 1986 when he met Maggie. He always said he’d never forget it—she’d strolled right in and said she’d never had a Guinness but always wanted to try one, and no less than ten blokes burst off their stools to offer her one.

“She was a fine bit of stuff,” his dad had laughed.

Ten blokes. But she had chosen his dad, because he’d made her laugh like no man ever had before. Take that, old man Phillips.

It’d been the right decision. As much as Dad had loved the restaurant, he’d loved Mam far more, and they’d had a good relationship, one that had resulted in Quinn and his brothers. But Quinn couldn’t help but feel heaviness in his chest, like Mam had missed out on lost opportunities, like maybe she should’ve tried to talk things through with her old man. It made him wonder. Had he, and Dad, and his brothers been worth the pain of losing her other family?

Family is king.

That was what Mam had always said. Quinn couldn’t imagine leaving his family behind for anything in the world. They were everything to him.

He studied the remaining contents of the trunk: papers, more photos, some stuck together, a few pieces of jewelry, a dried-up flower at the bottom, and loads of folded-up letters, some still in their envelopes, some covered in blue or black ink. A fire ignited inside his chest, as he sifted through the photos at rapid speed—image after image of a small town, photo after photo of a place called Phillips Vineyard & Winery, of his mam posing before rows and rows of fields.

It would take a whole day for Quinn to browse through the entire box, which he fully intended to do. As his brothers watched the game, he snuck out unnoticed and carried the small trunk to his room. Only his middle brother Con watched him slide like a ghost through the living room all the way to the staircase. What’ve you got there? his eyes seemed to ask.

Nothing you need to know about, little brother. Not yet.

Once upstairs, Quinn could breathe again, and he entered his old room, sat on his made bed against his football pillow, and laid the journal open on his lap. He flipped back to the page he’d read earlier, the one that told him what he and his brothers had to do next.

---