Free The Adored by Tom Connolly

kissed by the air of Eire fulfilled a young man’s life.
     
    By the time Eddie and Valerie were seniors in high school, their families became friendlier, realizing there was a very strong bond between their children. The Wheelwrights were monied; the McGuires were middleclass. Through Val and Eddie’s college year, they often dined together in each other’s homes or at the Wheelwright’s Club at Indian Harbor in Greenwich.
    So close had the relationship between the two families become, so sure of their future to become one family, that they vacationed together sailing in the Wheelwright yacht to Edgartown during the week after their children’s lifeguard duties ended.
    At the Wheelwright’s summer home on Martha’s Vineyard, Mrs. Wheelwright, older than Mrs. McGuire by fifteen years, came to have such affection for Valerie that she seemed more Val’s grandmother. In the early morning, Margaret Wheelwright and Valerie McGuire would walk down Katama Road and along South Beach, hand in hand. Mrs. Wheelwright, a kind gentle soul from an earlier time, loved Valerie; she loved the substance of the girl—still a girl, but the future woman was visible. “Bright, kind and loving,” was how Mrs. W., as Val called her, described the girl she hoped would one day marry her son.
    Valerie was all that and more. During the school year while at Columbia, two nights a week she tutored reading for illegal immigrants on the lower east side of Manhattan. The subway ride from her apartment on One Hundred Tenth Street was a far cry from the circumstances she found in life’s nomads from Guatemala, Africa, and China on East Tenth Street.
    And from all the joy shared by Valerie and Edward, there came the time when Edward left Valerie McGuire.

 
    Chapter 15
     
    The late spring snow had stopped falling. He watched the wind through the light snow blowing on the back lawn and out on the Sound. The wind lifted the snow, pushing it up off the ground. It formed into a mass, looked like a ground-bound cloud, and moved over the water. There the wind blew it apart sending the snow shooting upwards, then sideways. Then the wind stopped, and the frozen crystals blew back over and settled in the back yard.
    He lifted his glass and drank, immersed in the moment.
    Then the ache returned to his head. There were windmills everywhere in his life now. Was what he saw on the ice the wind blowing the snow or was it an unseen windmill kicking up a ruckus?
    Don Quixote had nothing on him; Mark Wheelwright laughed out loud, half in, half out of sanity. He was fighting windmills on every front. He had been named in five lawsuits stemming from bank losses in the recent great recession. He filed his own lawsuit against his former employer, Oceans Bank, and he had even filed a lawsuit against the golf course his property abutted, claiming adverse possession of land that he had tended for twenty years that the golf course claimed as its own, and that he knew was theirs, but since they wanted to put a fence up he decided he’d put up a windmill. His anger began with the wrongful death lawsuit against the Riverside Memorial Hospital and two doctors who had misdiagnosed pancreatic cancer that killed his wife of thirty-five years. And he was in the battle of his life with his alcoholism.
    It was 7 a.m.; Mark Wheelwright again lifted the glass of bourbon and shook his head. Tears rolled down his cheeks.
    *********
     
    “You left some stuff out last night,” Edward began as he entered the room noticing his father with a drink in his hand.
    Mark Wheelwright had a hangover, a bad one. They were all bad lately. His capacity for alcohol had diminished; he was drinking more and remembering less. “Like what?”
    “In the office. I was using the computer, and it was there.”
    “What was?”
    “Letters from Valerie’s mother.”
    Edward did not notice his father’s reddened face as Edward had looked away, embarrassed to bring this topic up.
    “And you read