The Time Keepers

Chapter 20

CHAPTER 20 Long Island, 1979

A NOTHER CASE OF BOYS BEHAVING BADLY —THAT ’ S WHAT CAME to Grace’s mind again when she saw Katie’s face after school and could read her annoyances.

“Buddy bothering you again?”

Katie nodded.

“He’s always been difficult.” Grace shook her head. Just remembering all the little incidents with him over the years made her irritated. It was made worse by Adele’s inability to set boundaries with him and her husband, Pat, always traveling for work.

Still, despite their differences, Grace tried to have empathy for the pain in Adele’s family. She could never forget that morning when she saw the military car drive down the street toward the O’Rourke family home. Grace had just put Katie in her crib for her nap when she saw the car pass in front of her window, and Tom had not yet left for work.

“Oh, Jesus … no …” she remembered hearing him say out loud, followed by a terrible moan. She stepped closer to her husband and knew instantly the men in uniform had to be bringing bad news about his friend Bobby O’Rourke.

Grace’s stomach sank. Just like her husband, she knew that the sight of that car was like watching a hearse pull into the town.

Even before the news of his uncle’s death hit Bellegrove, “Buddy,” as he became nicknamed, had not been an easy child for Adele. With their delivery dates so close to each other, Grace had been hopeful she and Adele could go on walks together with their babies bundled up in their prams, but even that was a challenge. Buddy wailed constantly, his expression defiant, and nothing, neither bottle nor cuddling, could soothe him.

“He’s no piece of cake,” Adele confessed in a rare moment of vulnerability. “He wails like a demon in the morning when he’s hungry and punches his tiny fists into the air like a boxer.”

It had been Adele’s parents’ idea that she name the baby after her brother, Bobby, who’d enlisted eight weeks before the birth; the entire clan was so fraught with worry that he might be killed in combat. When the boy was born with flaming red hair, so unlike Bobby’s dark curls, the family seemed perplexed, as if this little howling baby had somehow betrayed their expectations that he be born the spitting image of their brother and son.

“My mother’s painted the nursery the same the same shade of blue that Bobby had in his childhood room,” Adele confided to Grace one afternoon as they walked with their prams into town. “She’s even taken his old books and filled them on the shelves.” Adele had reached over to try to console Buddy, who was fussing with a little wet fist in the air. “She just doesn’t know what to do to calm her nerves with Bobby being shipped off and the headlines getting worse every day.”

But when he was only six months old, the news of his uncle’s death would devastate the entire O’Rourke family. After the terrible news, their grief became refocused on the newest boy baby added to the family tree. The following Christmas, Buddy was given his late uncle’s American Flyer set, all the tracks, switches, and train cars repackaged in their original boxes and wrapped for the occasion with festive paper and red satin ribbon. Adele did not have the heart to tell her mother that after her husband had taken hours to reconstruct the whole train-scape on the floor, Buddy had taken one of his Lincoln Logs and smashed the steam engine right off its dark black rails, permanently breaking one of its wheels.

Although the mothers of Bellegrove would never say it out loud, they all knew that Buddy was not the kid you wanted your child to invite home. When a rock mysteriously broke through the Finnegans’ window one afternoon, most people believed it had to have been the work of eight-year-old Buddy, who lived next door. No evidence against him could ever be found, and the Finnegans ended up having to file a costly insurance claim to get it replaced.

Grace loathed to exclude any child when she gave birthday parties for each of her daughters. But when Buddy tore the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey sheet off the wall when he thought no one was looking, she caught him red-handed.

She confronted Buddy directly, not going to Adele first, who sipped punch from a plastic tumbler, her legs crossed beneath her cherry-red dress and white sweater.

“Now, why did you do such a naughty thing, young man?” Grace cornered young Buddy in the living room as other children zoomed by, holding the plastic pinwheels she had handed out as favors.

“Dunno what you’re talking about, Mrs. Golden,” he answered, making his green eyes wider in an effort to appear more innocent. It was a well-practiced look.

“I saw you with my own two eyes, Buddy.” She held out the ripped paper sheet with the donkey printed on it. “You went right up to it and tore a piece from it.”

“Wasn’t me …” he insisted with such conviction that his ability to lie sent a nervous chill right through her.

Adele must have seen the two of them exchanging words because seconds later, she was standing in front of Grace with her hands on her hips. A few droplets of punch had spattered on her white sweater.

“What’s the matter, Gracie? You look like you’re upset about something.”

“We’ve had a little incident with the donkey poster.” She tried to force a smile while raising the torn sheet for Adele to see.

“Well, that’s just awful. But you don’t think Buddy did that, do you ?” Her voice grew louder in disbelief. “I mean … there are just so many children here. How could you really know who did it?”

“I actually saw him do it, Adele.”

Buddy slithered to his mother’s side.

“He’s always being wrongly accused.…” Adele pulled him close to her side, and Grace was sure Buddy had looked up at her and narrowed his eyes and smiled.

“Let’s go home now, Buddy.…” Adele said, taking her son protectively to her side.

“I really didn’t want to make a big deal out of this, Adele,” Grace tried to explain. “That’s why I chose to speak to him directly.”

But Adele was no longer listening. She had suddenly become distracted by the punch stain on her sweater. Visibly distraught by the string of red droplets, which no doubt would be difficult to remove, she fled the party with her son. Grace was hopeful that Adele wouldn’t remember their uncomfortable exchange the next morning, for the sweater seemed a far more pressing matter.