Beach Wedding(5)

“Right, like my tin badge from Philly is going to fly in the billionaire Village of Southampton? Are you feeling okay? Tom, listen, we’re grown up now. Please, I have a kid. Don’t bring on the dancing horses, Tom. Don’t be nuts. Just this one time. For me. I’m begging you.”

“Ah, no worries, Terry,” Tom said, his unhinged pirate grin suddenly ear to ear as he headed for his limo. “Revenge, er, I mean, fun, will be had by all.”



5

I didn’t know how the house staff managed to get the entire twenty-strong Rourke clan at one outdoor table that night, but somehow, they pulled it off.

Beside me and Viv and Angelina on one side of the long table were my sister, Erin, and her husband, Nick Murray, with their three grade-schoolers, Kevin and Billy and Megan.

Facing on the other side were my brother Mickey and his wife, Jo, and their four kids, Caitlin and Patrick and Dermot and Geraldine, who ranged in age from four to eleven.

Beside Mickey was my other brother Finn, along with his wife, Stephanie, and their two kids, Scott, who was nine, and Evelyn, who was seven.

My seventy-year-old mom, Rosemarie, sat at the end of the table, and at the head sat the man of the hour, the groom-to-be, Tom Rourke himself, who had managed to get back from the office just in time.

So far, so good, I thought, wiping my face with my napkin and placing it down beside the stripped remains of the most tender and delicious rack of lamb my mouth had ever had the good fortune to encounter.

I swirled my just-topped-off purply black glass of Bordeaux and had another sip. As I closed my eyes, the complex hints and notes of all the wonderful things the house manager and sommelier, Robin, had told me earlier to be on the lookout for (but I had immediately forgotten) tingled along taste buds I didn’t even know I possessed until that very moment.

Yes, I thought, opening my eyes as I leaned back. I looked around at my family, at the mansion behind them lit up like a temple in a dream against the night.

All things considered, even after Tom’s troubling revelation, so far Rourke Reunion Arrival Day was coming off pretty sweet.

“Excuse me, everyone! Excuse me! I’d like to propose a toast,” Tom said, suddenly standing, as the last of the dinner plates was expertly whisked away by the white-jacketed house staff.

Everybody was still laughing and talking and hardly heard him until our mom, Rosemarie, rang a crystal glass with some silver.

“Mickey and Finn, would you close your mouths or do I have to come down there with my slipper?” she said in her Northern Irish brogue.

We all laughed at that, remembering the road trips to East Durham in the Catskills, where one of Mom’s crazy brothers ran a ramshackle resort. In the era before stun guns, Mom had quieted the back-seat brawls of her four hooligan boys with the prodigious use of a slipper she kept handy in her lap for smacking us back to our senses.

“Why, thank you, Mother,” Tom said, laughing. “I had actually hoped you’d packed that slipper. We may very well need it before all of this is said and done. All joking aside, first I’d like to thank all of you for arranging your schedules to come out to celebrate my upcoming wedding.”

“What wedding? There’s no bride,” Finn said. “Is this all a hoax?”

“Exactly,” Erin said. “When do we get to finally meet her?”

“Soon. I promise. Very soon,” Tom said, smiling. “Introducing her to the likes of you is a very delicate operation that requires perfect timing. I’ve waited quite some time to tie the knot, so I don’t want to mess things up at the last moment. The trap is set. I can’t blow it now.”

High-spirited laughter and Bronx cheers abounded until Rosemarie gonged at the Waterford crystal again.

“Seriously, though, I love you guys,” Tom said, as he looked down the table. “I really do. Every last one of you. I can’t describe how happy it makes me feel after all this time to see us all at the same table again.”

We all actually did quiet down at that.

Because we knew how much it came from his heart.

After our dad died, Tom pretty much took his place. When he wasn’t working roofing or restaurant jobs, he was going to night school to get his MBA. Gave every one of his paychecks to Mom. Never complained about it. Not once. Wasn’t in him. People talk about manning up. Tom did it. Without a peep.

“That’s why I rented this place for us,” Tom continued. “I wanted to bring you all back here together to share in the good fortune God has shared with me. I wanted us to come back here to this place where we lived and worked and grew up together. I did it so we could put all our worries aside—if only for a few weeks—to look back and to truly realize what a wonderful and beautiful place Mom and Dad raised us in.”

“That’s so sweet, Tom,” said my sister, Erin, in the silence.

“No. Honestly. That’s why I did this. If I’m sorry about anything, it’s that Dad isn’t here with us,” Tom said. “He would have gotten a kick out of this, I think. I wish he was here to see that, well, I really did listen to him. That I absorbed everything he taught me. I wish he had known that. I know at times I worried him.”

“Tom,” my mother said, her eyes near tears. “Please. Don’t be so hard on yourself. He knew.”

A moment later, we turned as Robin came out onto the deck with two waiters carrying drinks on a tray.