Free Regrets Only by Nancy Geary Page A

heroes.
    Now she closed her eyes, momentarily picturing the face of her brother as he lay in the morgue. Aidan had cuts over one eye and minor external bruising, nothing compared to the massive swelling that the coroner had found within his skull. Her brother had called her just that afternoon and asked her to call back as soon as possible, but the piece of paper with the message taken by her college roommate had blown off her bureau and under the bed. A breeze from an open window kept her ignorant of what might have been his final plea for help. More than a decade later, she still couldn’t look at the notation “ASAP” without feeling overwhelming numbness.
    Lying on the metallic table was his lean, eighteen-year-old body covered by a blue tarp. She’d reached over and embraced him, begging for a response, a squeeze, a tickle, a tiny finger wiggle. But by the time she’d traveled from her college dormitory to Massachusetts General Hospital nearly ten hours had passed, a lifetime since the automobile accident, and she felt nothing but cold, hard, unresponsive flesh beneath her hand.
    The clatter of serving utensils on a platter snapped Lucy out of her nightmarish fog. “I see you took the plastic off the sofas,” she teased, wanting to distract herself with the gaiety of the gathering rather than morbid times she couldn’t forget. “This must be a very special occasion indeed.”
    As a child, she’d been mortified that her mother kept protective covering over the two couches and three armchairs in the first-floor parlor. But Mrs. O’Malley’s own childhood in Ireland had been frugal; even though her husband had provided well for his family and they now enjoyed a more than comfortable retirement, waste and carelessness simply weren’t in her lexicon.
    “Mind your tongue,” Mrs. O’Malley replied, only half-amused. “You never did understand that luxuries have to last. This is quality upholstery fabric. One day when you have a home of your own, you’ll see.”
    “Everything looks beautiful. Truly. You’ve outdone yourself.” She extended the dish. “Where do you want this?”
    “Find a spot on the table if you can.” Opening a drawer in the buffet, Mrs. O’Malley pushed aside assorted napkin rings, half-melted tapers, and a stack of doilies in a hopeless search for matches. “You’d think I was mad all the talking I do to nobody but myself. Did anyone hear me about the candles?”
    Lucy laughed. “Not likely.” There were a dozen people packed into the square kitchen and spilling out onto the back porch, not to mention the array of small children who seemed to weave in and out of feet, through legs, and over and under furniture. Her father presided over the crowd that included her brother, Michael, and his wife, Mary, plus her brother’s in-laws, a recently widowed cousin, the neighbors with their ninety-three-year-old grandmother, an aunt and her husband. And in the middle of it all, she’d left Archer Haverill with a perplexed expression on his face and a glass of sherry in his hand.
    Who would have thought? They’d hardly spent a night apart since the Flower Show. “Love at second sight,” he liked to remind her.
    But bringing a boyfriend home was something new. She hadn’t introduced a single male companion since she’d moved to Pennsylvania, and each year that passed added to her parents’ anxiety that she’d end up a spinster. Once she’d mentioned Archer’s existence, her mother wasn’t about to let him slip away. Even her father had insisted. “Give your mother a day of peace and bring the lad home for her to welcome,” he’d said on the telephone a week before. “She talks of nothing else.”
    “But we haven’t been dating that long,” she’d responded.
    “Your mother told me he answered your telephone at eight o’clock in the morning. That means you’ve been dating long enough.”
    Archer had accepted her invitation without hesitation. “What about your father?”