A Gift for All Seasons Read Free

content with what you have” philosophy they’d crammed down their kids’ throats right along with that homemade vegetable soup.
    Not that flat-screen TVs, cell phones and state-of-the-art laptops weren’t in the mix with seventies furnishings and his grandmother’s crocheted afghans. His parents weren’t Luddites. But their penchant for shoehorning the new into the old had, over the years, shaped the little house into a vibrant, random collage of their lives.
    This was also the home, the life, he’d returned to in order to heal, the safety and stability it represented restoring his battered psyche far more than the damn lotion he applied every single day to keep his skin supple.
    Joe Shaughnessy glanced through dark-framed glasses perched on his hawkish nose, still-muscled shoulders bulging underneath plaid flannel. Like Ma, there was no sympathy in his eyes, ever. Or in his voice. At least, not now. But his brothers had told Patrick how, when Pop heard, he’d gone out into the postage stamp of a yard behind the house and bawled like a baby.
    And for damn sure he’d hang them all by their gonads if he knew they’d ratted on him.
    Already seated on the booster seat that had been a permanent fixture for years, Lilianna slurped her soup, dimpled fingers curled around her spoon. For her grandmother, she’d eat vegetable soup. For him, no way.
    Patrick released a tense breath, then plopped beside her at the scarred wood table that had seen many an elbow fight over the years. Sunlight flooded the spotless room, gilding maple cabinets scrubbed so many times the original finish was but a memory, flashing off the same dented, decaled canister set that’d been there forever. Even the minimal updates they’d done ten or so years before—changing out the laminate counters, the cracked linoleum floors—had somehow left the comfortable shabbiness undisturbed.
    Patrick pulled April’s card from his shirt pocket, handed it to his father. “Got a lead on a job.”
    “Yeah?” Joe telescoped the card until it came into focus. Time for new glasses, apparently. “Where?”
    “The old Rinehart place.”
    His father’s eyes cut to his. “Somebody bought it?”
    “One of her granddaughters decided to turn it back into an inn. Sam hooked us up.”
    His forehead knotted, Pop returned the card, broke off a piece of homemade bread and sopped up the broth left in the bottom of his bowl. “Last I heard, Amelia Rinehart had let the place go to rack and ruin. I’m surprised the girls didn’t just unload it—”
    “We had our wedding reception there, you know,” his mother put in, setting a bowl of soup and two thick slices of bread in front of Patrick, then sitting at right angles to him. “Back in its heyday.”
    “Not to mention ours,” Pop added with a chuckle.
    Patrick frowned. “You did?”
    Ma swatted at him with a crumpled napkin. “Go look at the wedding pictures on your way out, that’s the Rinehart. Or was. It’d been in Amelia’s husband’s family for years, they turned it into an inn right after the war. Was quite the destination in these parts for some time. But after he died, she stopped taking in guests. Except for her three granddaughters, every summer—”
    “May I be s’cused?”
    Ma leaned over to wipe Lili’s soup-smeared face, then shooed her off. Only after they heard the clatter of toys being dumped out of the plastic bin in the living room did his mother say, “Old gal was a strange bird, no other way to put it. Rumor had it she rarely talked to her three daughters, even the one who stayed here in St. Mary’s. But she loved her granddaughters. In her own way, at least.” She leaned back, the space between her graying brows creased. More toys crashed. “You went to school with one of them, didn’t you?”
    “Melanie, yeah,” Patrick said, spooning in a bite that was more potatoes and carrots than broth. “For a while. But she and her mother moved away before she