Once Upon a Lie by Maggie Barbieri Read Free Book Online

was slowly stealing his mind and his essence, the thing that made him Jack.
    He turned into a petulant child, his arms folded across his chest. “I don’t have to tell you everything, you know.”
    “No, you don’t.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to know everything anyway. She waited. “So where were you?”
    His voice was as tangled as if a clump of cotton were stuck in his throat, and when he spoke it came out thick and hoarse. “That I can’t remember. That’s one of the things.”
    She knew he was upset. It was these times, when he had the realization that his grasp on what was now and what was then was tenuous, that made him scared. It scared her, too. She changed the subject. “Tell me about Water for Elephants .”
    “Now why would you want to know about that?”
    She pulled up at another light. She leaned over and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. “Because unlike you, I happen to love elephants.”
    Maeve had printed out directions, but she didn’t need them. She drove the narrow, windy streets of her old neighborhood and wended her way down to the river, just past the train tracks and into the parking lot of the Metro-North station, where she parked the car illegally. She figured she could keep a watch from where they stood so that if the police came, MTA or city, she would be able to move quickly.
    Twenty or so people had gathered riverside, the blowsy Dolores clad in an expensive black pantsuit, the jacket of which was stretched across her broad back. She was wailing openly, just as Jack had predicted. He got out of the car and surveyed the scene. “Why are we doing this again?” he asked.
    That was a very good question. She didn’t tell him that Dolores had specifically requested his attendance, saying that Sean had loved Jack like a dad—Maeve was pretty sure that that was an out-and-out lie—nor did she mention the fact that their nonattendance at the funeral had been duly noted by the entire family. She guessed that their attendance at the wake didn’t count. Apparently, it was the funeral that mattered. Maeve wasn’t sure why she cared, but she did, more for Jack than for herself. She counted the number of people whose wakes or funerals she would be required to attend and came up with exactly four. Once those people were gone, she could quietly fade into the sunset, never to be seen again by any members of this wholly dysfunctional family.
    She and Jack found themselves in the large throng. Dolores made a show of giving Jack a big hug and an even bigger kiss, one that he wiped away when she wasn’t looking. She proclaimed loudly that now that the “latecomers had arrived,” they could commence with the service.
    No Irish family is complete without one priest to call their own, be it a relative with a vocation or a parish priest who had seen his fair share of goings-on and had heard the confession of every member of the extended family. Today, the go-to guy was the ubiquitous Father Madden, the same guy who had married Maeve to Cal all those years ago and who now looked at her with a mixture of sadness and disappointment because he knew she was divorced. Despite preaching to the crowd about the resurrection, he seemed to seek her out specifically, making eye contact with her the whole time, maybe trying to make her understand that the rising of the Lord on the third day applied to dead marriages as well. On that account, she was a nonbeliever. She held his gaze, having found over the years that the person first committing to the stare was usually the first one out when it became a two-person contest. She listened with faux rapt attention to his droning about Jesus and how He died for our sins.
    If that were truly the case, He would have died a second time knowing that He had created the ultimate sinner, Sean Donovan. Or at least turned over in His tomb.
    A priest was supposed to preside over the burial of ashes, not the scattering of them, but Maeve knew from the e-mail that had