menus for the golf event, and, of course, find a band.
A band: the Unknown Souls.
CHAPTER NINE
I avoided all thoughts of Maeve’s myth of the Claddagh ring, of a good-bye on a dawn Lowcountry morning, and plowed through my work for the remainder of the day. When I settled into the library that night to read over the list of things left to do for the tournament, the bruised fatigue of the flu pulled at my eyelids. I lay my head back on the leather chair, took a deep breath of Daddy’s pipe tobacco.
The warm, yearning feeling for Jack that had once sat directly in my middle awakened. Sweet Jack. He, his mother, and Jimmy went to Arizona. He finally sent me a letter, which arrived a month after he left. This was an interminable length of time for a girl in love, twisting her Claddagh ring around and around until a raw spot appeared on her finger.
Eventually high school started, but my heart didn’t. We wrote back and forth, back and forth until life sped up, until high school and dates and dances and cheerleading filled the emptier moments of missing Jack, and the picture of our good-bye became tattered and faded.
Mr. Sullivan eventually disappeared into a pit of alcoholism and unemployment. The last I heard of him was when I was in tenth grade, and he was found asleep on Main Street. He’d lost his house, his wife, and his family. Although people murmured clucks of regret and said, “Poor Mr. Sullivan, his cheating wife up and left him with nothing,” I had no sympathy for him. I felt nothing but contempt for the man who took Jack away from me and slapped me to the ground.
Daddy didn’t let us talk about what had happened that early morning, and there began the slow process of denial. He’d deemed the Sullivan family trashy and was relieved when they’d left.
A thump startled me as my files fell to the floor. I opened my eyes. “Shit,” I said, and leaned down to pick up the papers, then lifted my gaze to see Charlotte standing in the library doorway.
“Hello, girlfriend,” she said. “You look like hell.”
“Thanks.” I threw a pillow at her and sat up.
“No, really, you do. Not just like you’ve been sick, but like you’ve . . . been really sick.”
“Very long day.”
“Thought the doc told you to take it easy.”
I shrugged. “I tried. I went to see Mrs. Mahoney today, and I’ve got to get through these files tonight.”
“Oh, that’s just what you needed to be doing—visiting Mrs. Mahoney.”
“I just sort of . . . ended up there.”
“Well, you never ended up at Mom’s and she asked me to drop these drawings off for you.”
I groaned. “Oh . . . I remembered, and then I guess I forgot.”
“What in the world are you so preoccupied with?” Charlotte sat on the edge of the ottoman in front of my chair.
“If you don’t remember, I’ve been in bed, sick for days on end.”
“I just came by to check on you. Every time I’ve come the last few days you’ve been sound asleep.”
“Hey . . .” I hesitated, then continued, “do you remember when Jack left?”
Charlotte rolled her eyes, then lay all the way back on the ottoman, her legs dangling off the end. She stared at the plaster ceiling, where a cut-glass chandelier had hung since before I was born. “How could I not? Terrible day . . . and you didn’t snap out of it for what? A year, maybe two? Thought I’d lost you forever.”
“Hmmm.”
Charlotte leaned across the chair and grabbed my hand. “You’re getting married in a few weeks. Now is absolutely not the time to wonder what happened to Jack Sullivan. Things work out the way they should. He’s probably married with seven children and living in Seattle.”
“No,” I said, and swung my legs to the floor and stood.
“What do you mean?”
“Follow me.” I motioned for her to come to the computer, clicked open the Internet and pulled up the Unknown Souls Band.
Charlotte took a deep breath as I clicked on Jack’s face and biography. “You Googled him?” she asked. “You have just opened up an entire can of . . . problems if you don’t leave this alone. But now that we’re here . . . what’s he doing?”
“Best I can tell, he and his brother, Jimmy, formed a band, Unknown Souls. They did it at first to raise money for an orphanage, but they had such