Sand Castles by Antoinette Stockenberg Read Free Book Online Page B

unearned wealth came from feelings of guilt. What she couldn't figure out was why she couldn't crush feelings like that once and for all. For most of her life, fighting guilt had been a daily, ongoing war, won or lost one small skirmish at a time. It was no surprise that she found herself back in the trenches just then , ducking her mother's missiles.
    "This gets nailed over the cellar door. For luck in general, okay?" Wendy said doggedly. She returned the horseshoe to the shelf at the top of the cellar steps — but then washed her hands extra long as a kind of penance before going back to her mother and their deep-fried treat.
    Muttering something about heathenish superstitions, Grace O'Byrne waited until they'd finished their pastry before saying what was really on her mind.
    "So where's your brother lately? He hasn't been to see us in weeks."
    "Oh ... you know Dave," Wendy said, automatically vague. "Always on the move."
    "Your aunt Genevieve is constantly asking me what he's up to — which of course she would; she knows it's always no good — and I really don't know what to say anymore. I think she asks out of spite. Her David's turning down business, her David's bought a new BMW. Her David has such important cases, Alan Dershowitz would be green. Her David, her David," she ended up darkly.
    "Yikes, Mom, you're in a mood."
    "Why shouldn't I be? I had my David first."
    The two Davids had been born less than a year apart, and to that day Wendy could not understand how first cousins born to close family in the same neighborhood could be given the same name. What could possibly have been the point? Someday she was going to work up the nerve to ask her aunt.
    "I think Dave's got a couple of things going on," Wendy said with a carefully offhand shrug.
    Her mother picked off her discomfort instantly. "Have you been giving him money?"
    "Money ...? Well hardly at all," Wendy had to confess.
    The look her mother gave her was more mournful than critical. Dave was the youngest, the most charming, and the most unemployable of all five siblings. He was his mother's last hope, the one she was praying would become a priest and use his connections to get her skipping past purgatory and coasting into heaven—but Dave couldn't decide on a job, much less a calling.
    "He's always on the lookout for work, Mom; really, he is," Wendy said, rallying to her brother's defense. (That's the way it always had been: five against one, and still they were outnumbered.) "But it's hard to find an exact match to his abilities. When's the last time you saw a want ad for inventors?"
    "There is a shortage, you know."
    "Of inven—? Oh, priests. Yes. But Dave has a girlfriend, don't forget."
    "He's had a hundred girlfriends. He can't support any of them. He can't support himself. A priest would have room and board."
    "Hmm. True. But I don't think that's considered sufficient motive for going into the priesthood."
    "It'd give him a place to take a deep breath and figure out what he wants out of life."
    Her words eerily echoed Jim's about himself. Dave and Jim: two men a lot alike, a lot at sea. Suddenly uneasy although she didn't know why, Wendy lied and said, "Dave seems happy enough."
    "Your brother is going to be thirty-three next month," her mother said crisply. "How happy can he be?"
    If Dave was going to be thirty-three, then Grace O'Byrne was going to be sixty-five; they were born in the same month. Was that, perhaps, what her tense mood lately was all about? Becoming a bona fide senior citizen who was eligible for Medicare?
    It was hard for Wendy to believe that her mother had reached that milestone. For someone who had raised five kids in a house the size of a shoe, on a budget the size of a shoestring, the woman looked fit and ready to take on half a dozen more of them. True, she was a little heavier, a little grayer, a little slower out of the gate; but to Wendy and her siblings, Grace O'Byrne Ferro was and always would be the Amazing Grace.
    "