The Memory of Lemon Read Online Free PDF

plain white “thinking of you” postcard from a town he was just passing through.
    We were having a long-distance connection, the very old-fashioned way.
    I typed the address into Google on my iPhone and foundthe City Vue on old Route 40. I touched the red locator balloon with my fingertips, as close as I’d gotten to my dad in years, then hugged the phone to my chest.
    Dad
.
    How many red locator balloons would it take to track his journey from Ohio, over the years, to where he was now? Jack O’Neil, the wanderer.
    I held the letter with shaking hands and read it again. This time, a surge of anger surprised me with its intensity.
    He had been thinking about
pie
? What about us? His daughter, his mother, his sister, his wife whom he’d left all those years ago. The people who had to pick up the pieces when he fell apart.
    But one thing just led to another,
my dad had written.
    He was right about that.
    After he left, Mom and I lost our house and had to move in with Gran. Mom and Gran’s relationship soured.
    Aunt Helen never married. Mom refused to move on.
    And I won’t even get started on me.
    Jack O’Neil had been a human wrecking ball, and we were all still picking up the pieces. He had thought only of himself, not the people he said he loved. How could we ever trust him again?
    What did he want from us now? Forgiveness? A new start?
    I folded the letter and shoved it back in theenvelope.

4

    FEBRUARY 1818
    IRELAND
    The Wanderer
    Eliza Shawcross sat in the morning room, a fine woolen shawl around her bony shoulders to keep out the chill. Even with the coal fire burning in the grate, she could barely feel her feet in their hand-stitched leather shoes. Her feet always seemed to be cold.
    Her ash brown hair was parted in the middle with side curls peeping out from under her lace cap, the mark of a married woman. Now in her thirties, Eliza knew she had lost whatever bloom she once had. Although her hair had dulled over the years, her gray eyes remained sharp and clear. Her mouth scraped across her face in a thin, bitter line as she gripped the quill pen, blowing on her fingers to warm them. The Ballykinsale household account book lay open on the desk. Her own black-penned linesshowed the same elegant hand as her late father’s. But her attention was elsewhere.
    From the long window, she saw the boy raking the front garden, picking up the dead leaves and limbs from the boxwood and holly beds, the aftermath of the previous day’s gale. That afternoon, he should start on the back—the pleasure garden and the kitchen garden—where the rigid protection of cold stone walls had saved the plants from the worst of the storm.
    Sean O’Neil was a handsome boy, actually a young man now, Eliza had to admit. Chestnut hair, green eyes. A good, sturdy build to him. Intelligent. He could read and write; she had seen to that. And a hard worker, like his parents, and just as Irish, through and through.
    His mother, Cathleen, had been a comfort to Eliza, keeping vigil each time a child washed from her body before its time, swept away on that cursed, bloody tide. Bringing her that special tea she brewed with a strip of dried orange peel.
    â€œFor a new day, missus,” Cathleen would say each time.
    Eliza removed Cathleen’s funeral holy card, printed with the image of Jesus pointing to his red heart encircled by a crown of thorns, from where it was hidden under the desk blotter. The priest at the Anglican church in Queenstown would regard this as a vulgar and lurid display of overwrought feeling. “Papist,” he would sneer if he saw it. He would also be shocked to learn that Eliza had paid for these cards as well as the funeral.
    Cathleen and her husband were two years gone, killed by a runaway team of horses hauling barrels of salted butter to the Queenstown harbor. The butter had been seen to first, the kegs passed hand to hand down to the dock and onto the ship,while the