Chapter 1

1

He sat beneath the apple tree in the back yard, staring out at the blue sky, at the slow crawl of the clouds, trying not to think or to feel anything, just waiting for everything to pass by, waiting for it all to blow over.

Leaning forward, placing his forehead against his knees, feeling the brush of the worn blue denim warmed by the early morning sun, he tried to think about everything that had happened, about how he had got to where he was, as a parent, as a father.

It wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened. Certainly, there were dramas in the little town of Bower Bliss that overshadowed his greatly, and yet when Jude Calohan had received the letter from Charlie’s school in Alexandros Hills, and when he had stopped to read what it actually said, he had acted…well, he had acted just like his father.

With a sigh, he lifted his head back and rested it against the cool bark of the old apple tree.

The Calohans had been in Bower Bliss for a generation or two, at least since before the war. There wasn’t much history to the arrival of Jude’s grandfather. They weren’t like the big Irish families that had documented the nation’s growth—no, Ronald Calohan, his grandfather, had simply been a man with a bit of money and a bit of sense; sense enough certainly to see the value in a property like the old house just outside of town, and sense enough to know that the war had changed things and that there were opportunities for a man like him, with the gift of the gab and a knack for convincing others to do the hard work for him.

Jude had not known the old man very well—he had died when he was still a boy—but there was enough of him in his own father for him to have an idea of what he had been like; enough to make him swear, as a young man, that he wouldn’t stay in Bower Bliss, that he would move away at the first chance he got, and that he certainly would never raise hischildren here. But, well, time and circumstance had changed all that, and now, in his late forties with two kids—one seventeen and one fourteen—he felt differently about the town, felt differently about life.

It was just…Charlie

He sighed again.

Charlie, short for Charles—a good name, his wife Marta had said when the boy had been born, a royal sounding name—was the oldest of the two boys. He felt a sudden pang in his heart, and realized that, sooner or later, he might have to stop saying that, might have to stop calling Charlie his boy.

He moved his head and then inclined it again, tapping it lightly against the bark and trying not to think of what had happened, of why Charlie had been sent home. Perhaps it wouldn’t come to anything bad. Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as he thought. Perhaps it was just a phase that Charlie was going through, like the time he had cried when he was little because he wasn’t allowed to take his plush kitten to school—actually, the toy had been a bear which the boy insisted on carrying with him everywhere and lovingly referred to as Polar Kitten

The clouds continued to roll across the horizon.

It wasn’t a phase, he knew that.

Reaching into the pocket of his tired flannel shirt, Jude pulled the crumpled packet of cigarettes he had told his wife he hadn’t bought and fished out his cheap lighter from another pocket, and tried to not watch the clouds as he lit one of the cigarettes.

Marta always complained whenever she even so much as sensed that he had been smoking, often taking to moving furniture around loudly and muttering things in Polish, and if he had been more mischievous, he might have considered doing it every now and then just to goad her into such a reaction—but he wasn’t that type of person, and he wouldn’t have been where he was, sitting in the shade of the apple tree, holding the crumpled red and white packet in his right hand and the cigarette between the fingers of his left hand if things hadn’t been getting to him.

The apple tree, so his father had said, had been the reason his grandfather had bought the house. Older than the Calohans and their time in Bower Bliss, it was a sign, the old patriarch had insisted, that this is where they were meant to be, that this old tree would be something to come home to—and in a way, the old man had been right; the tree had become a sign that he was home, just as surely as it was a sign he would never leave.