One Year Read online

  Books by Mary McDonough

  LESSONS FROM THE MOUNTAIN: What I Learned From Erin Walton

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  One Year

  Mary McDonough

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  THE FITZGIBBON FAMILY

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  CHAPTER 74

  CHAPTER 75

  CHAPTER 76

  CHAPTER 77

  CHAPTER 78

  CHAPTER 79

  CHAPTER 80

  CHAPTER 81

  CHAPTER 82

  CHAPTER 83

  CHAPTER 84

  CHAPTER 85

  CHAPTER 86

  CHAPTER 87

  CHAPTER 88

  CHAPTER 89

  CHAPTER 90

  CHAPTER 91

  CHAPTER 92

  CHAPTER 93

  CHAPTER 94

  CHAPTER 95

  CHAPTER 96

  CHAPTER 97

  CHAPTER 98

  CHAPTER 99

  CHAPTER 100

  CHAPTER 101

  CHAPTER 102

  CHAPTER 103

  CHAPTER 104

  CHAPTER 105

  CHAPTER 106

  CHAPTER 107

  CHAPTER 108

  CHAPTER 109

  CHAPTER 110

  CHAPTER 111

  CHAPTER 112

  CHAPTER 113

  CHAPTER 114

  CHAPTER 115

  CHAPTER 116

  CHAPTER 117

  CHAPTER 118

  CHAPTER 119

  CHAPTER 120

  CHAPTER 121

  CHAPTER 122

  CHAPTER 123

  CHAPTER 124

  CHAPTER 125

  CHAPTER 126

  CHAPTER 127

  CHAPTER 128

  CHAPTER 129

  CHAPTER 130

  CHAPTER 131

  CHAPTER 132

  CHAPTER 133

  CHAPTER 134

  CHAPTER 135

  CHAPTER 136

  CHAPTER 137

  CHAPTER 138

  CHAPTER 139

  CHAPTER 140

  CHAPTER 141

  CHAPTER 142

  EPILOGUE

  Copyright Page

  For my parents.

  Who taught me the importance of my roots and what it means to be

  Irish, American, and Catholic.

  Acknowledgments

  This book came together through amazing people sharing their lives with me. So much of my foundation, my friends, family, and their beliefs are in this book. Over the years, I have adopted so many parents, cousins, and sisters into my life. I truly know family is what you make it and blood is not always thicker than water. My extended family is a testament to that belief.

  None of this would have happened if not for John Scognamiglio, who always believed I could do things I only dreamed of. Thanks for your help, support, amazing vision, passion for books and the written word. I can’t thank you enough for your patience, belief in me, and knowing I have more to share.

  To all the women in my life who molded me into who I am. This book is about us and the love we share through the good and bad times. To me, we are family. So many thanks to: Kate for years of inspiration and book sharing, Maria for being the bomb whenever I call, Elise for all things Catholic, for listening and “getting” me so well, to Karen for leading me back to my purpose, to my Goddaughter Chelsea for the beautiful photos, Angalamabama for the walks, your ears, and the hair! A special thanks to Geri Jowell for sharing her experience of cerebral palsy with me. Hugs of gratitude to my Godmother Aunt Ellen, June, Sybil, Carol, Claire, Kari, Nancy, Cori, Mo, Ann, Nina, the +coffee gals, Bethie, Cheryl, and the Witches of Westminster.

  To my incredible friends, I treasure you and am so grateful for your love and advice . . . always. Thanks for talking me off the ledge and reminding me who I am. Thanks to Tom for your wisdom, to Kevin for being the ultimate docent, Tim my executive assistant, Eric—the best mensch I know, Runtie for always being in my lap, to the Sacred Six and the Fabulous Five for showing me the importance of celebrating life.

  To Sydnee, Robyn, and Kylie for reminding me how important it is to hold the women in our lives close . . . blood or not.

  Eternal love to my brothers Michael and John, my touch stones to my past, present, and future. Thanks for remembering our childhood so I could write about it.

  To the kind and durable Walton fans whose love of the show lifts me up. You are always there for us. To my incredible Facebook friends, you have supported this book from the moment I mentioned it to you. Your support in all I do in life and online is greatly appreciated. I hold you all as family.

  To my Don, your love and support sustain me. I am so Blessed to call you husband.

  THE FITZGIBBON FAMILY

  CHAPTER 1

  Mary Bernadette and Paddy Fitzgibbon had lived at 19 Honeysuckle Lane in the town of Oliver’s Well, Virginia, for most of their married life. The town had been founded by a small band of English settlers in 1632, including one Noah Oliver, who had gone on to become its first elected official. The reason the town was called Oliver’s Well and not Oliver’s Landing or Oliver’s Town, was lost to time. Presumably, Noah Oliver had had some doings with a well.

  Over the almost four centuries of its existence, the town had grown to support a current population of almost three thousand people. There was a public grammar, middle, and high school, as well as a private academy. There was a community center, with a full kitchen for potluck suppers and an auditorium where the local amateur theatre group performed its plays.
There was a library and an old-fashioned single-screen movie theatre. Small, locally owned businesses—hair salon, florist, dress shop, restaurants, jeweler—flourished alongside the branches of two area banks and an insurance company. The Oliver’s Well Memorial Hospital was well regarded. The post office was a daily gathering place for the dissemination of gossip. There were no fast-food franchises or tattoo parlors.

  In many ways, Oliver’s Well was typical of any charming, historic American town, but many would argue that it had a unique appeal. Mrs. Fitzgibbon would be the most vocal and persuasive of those. At the age of twenty-one, Mary Bernadette, nee Lehane, had arrived in Oliver’s Well from her native Ireland via New York City. Though the promised personal connection—the uncle of a friend of a friend—and the housekeeping job he was supposed to have provided her did not materialize, Mary Bernadette had decided to stay in Oliver’s Well and make her way, liking what she saw of the quaint little town. There was little, if anything, that could deter her when she had decided on a goal. One of those goals was to marry the handsome and ambitious twenty-three-year-old factory worker named Paddy Fitzgibbon who she had met at the Church of the Immaculate Conception one bright Sunday morning.

  Now, fifty-four years later, Mary Bernadette and her husband were getting ready to preside over New Year’s Day festivities, surrounded by their family.

  “Paddy,” Mary Bernadette said from the door to the living room. “The garbage disposal is frozen again.”

  “I’ll see to it,” he replied, getting up from the armchair in which he was reading the day’s edition of the Oliver’s Well Gazette.

  “And do it before your son arrives and tries to help you.”

  Paddy chuckled and followed his wife into the kitchen. “He means well, Mary. He just didn’t inherit my handyman skills.”

  “Which is why I’ll never understand why he always insists on ‘giving things a go.’”

  Paddy retrieved the tool he used when some bit of plastic wrap or chicken bone had managed to slip down the drain and cause the garbage disposal to grind to a halt.

  “It was good to talk to Grace earlier, wasn’t it, Mary?” he said, opening the cabinet below the sink for access to the works.

  “It was,” Mary Bernadette agreed. “We don’t see enough of our daughter. And I wish she would call more often.”

  “Grace is a very busy woman. She does what she can.”

  Grace Marie Fitzgibbon—so called after her maternal grandmother, Mary Grace—was a nun in the small and highly unorthodox Order of Saint Prisca, Virgin Martyr. For those who wanted to know, Grace was happy to relate that Saint Prisca had met her grisly death in 270 CE. Paddy affectionately called Grace “our rebel,” and indeed, her politics were as far removed from those of her parents as it was possible for them to be. Currently she was stationed in Los Angeles, though in past years she had been posted to Central and South America, or, as Mary Bernadette put it, the ends of the earth. “And what is your New Year’s resolution ?” Mary Bernadette had asked her daughter that morning, to which Grace had replied, “To speak the truth and shame the Devil. To rage against injustice.” Well, that was Sister Grace for you.

  It had been so many years now, Mary Bernadette thought, watching her husband tinkering away, since their children had lived under the roof of the house on Honeysuckle Lane. Built in the mid-nineteenth century, it was a handsome white clapboard structure with stark black shutters and a stately brick chimney. There were two floors, on the first of which could be found a living room, dining room, and kitchen, as well as a small room once used as a study and now as an extra bedroom, and finally a powder room that Paddy had added many years previously. On the second floor were a full bathroom and three bedrooms. In addition to a cottage behind the house, where Mary Bernadette and Paddy’s grandson lived with his wife, there was a two-car garage and a garden shed on the property.

  “Almost done,” Paddy said, his voice muffled by the fact that the upper half of his body was inside the cabinet.

  Mary Bernadette peered through the window over the sink, from where she could clearly see the cottage. “I wonder where PJ is,” she said. “I thought he’d be here by now.”

  “I’m sure our grandson and his wife will be along at any moment.”

  Yes, Mary Bernadette thought. If Alexis wasn’t dawdling. She was a good girl but had her faults like most, one of which, in Mary Bernadette’s opinion, was a tendency to waste time. It was not a fault Mary Bernadette shared.

  Now in her midseventies Mary Bernadette was still a striking woman. Her thick, snowy white hair had once been as dark as ink. Her eyes were still a clear blue, and she only wore glasses for close reading. For the New Year’s Day celebration she had put on one of her favorite dresses, a dark blue wool A-line with a narrow, black patent leather belt at the waist. She was wearing the strand of pearls Paddy had given her on their fortieth anniversary, a pair of small pearl earrings left to her by her aunt Catherine, and her simple gold wedding band. The impression Mary Bernadette made upon virtually everyone she met—whether in her capacity as chairman of the Oliver’s Well Historical Association or simply as a congregant at church—was one of power and elegance, competency and resolve. And when she smiled her famously dazzling smile, people were almost universally smitten. Mary Bernadette was aware of all this and took the attention she was paid as a matter of course.

  “There, all fixed.” Paddy emerged triumphant from under the sink. “I suppose one of these days I should replace the thing with a new one.”

  Mary Bernadette refrained from pointing out that he had been threatening a replacement for close to three years. She loved and respected her husband in spite of any shortcomings, which, to be honest, were too few to mention.

  The patriarch of the Fitzgibbon clan was slim and wiry, though a hip replacement nine years earlier had left him with a slight hitch in his get along. His eyes were intensely blue. Mary Bernadette still considered him the most handsome man she had ever seen.

  Paddy was retired now from Fitzgibbon Landscaping, the company he had founded as a young man, but with his grandson PJ in charge he was able to keep his hand in on a job he had loved. Every other Sunday he served as an usher at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, and he filled in when one of the readers had to be absent. In his leisure hours, he spent time with his friend Danny Kline (Danny’s wife, Jeannette, was Mary Bernadette’s dearest friend). Paddy, an only child who had been orphaned at sixteen, was genuinely well liked in Oliver’s Well and greatly loved by his family. In that way, he had been heard to say, he was the richest man in town.

  “Mmmm.” Paddy smiled at his wife. “The dinner smells wonderful.”

  “Thank you,” she said. Mary Bernadette was making roast beef (for which, in her opinion, she was justifiably famous), with mashed potatoes, green beans, and homemade rolls. For dessert, she had baked an apple pie (for which she also believed herself to be justifiably famous) and cookies studded with chocolate chips and bits of candy cane. The cookies would satisfy her grandchildren.

  Mary Bernadette went back now to the living room. The Christmas decorations—including a real fir tree densely hung with ornaments and tinsel, a massive wreath made entirely of pinecones, and strings of blue and white lights in the windows—were still in place and would be until the Feast of the Epiphany, after which Mary Bernadette would carefully pack everything away until next holiday season. Her favorite decoration of all was the beautiful handcrafted crèche. It had pride of place on a side table in the living room, atop a blanket of Angel’s Hair to represent snow. Mary Bernadette turned the statuette of St. Joseph a little to the right and straightened a camel that was threatening to topple over on his fluffy base. Then she checked to see that the bowls of nuts and ribbon candy and chocolates were still untouched. To assure this, she had covered each bowl with a piece of plastic wrap. It wasn’t Banshee’s behavior she was worried about. It was Mercy’s.

  Banshee—currently asleep on one of the armchairs—was Mary Bernadet
te’s ten-year-old Siamese cat. She was long and lean, with lovely hyacinth blue eyes. Mary Bernadette had never told anyone but Paddy that she had purchased Banshee from a breeder in Arlington. She had a well-deserved reputation for frugality, and she did not relish the idea of people—her son, for instance—commenting on this one instance of extravagance. Anyway, intelligent and affectionate Banshee had proved well worth the expense.

  Mercy, however . . . Mary Bernadette eyed her husband’s shelter dog with a measure of suspicion. The creature, who for the past hours had been roaming the first floor of the house, sniffing at the oven, trying to snatch stray food from the kitchen table, and generally causing havoc, looked like two or more very different dogs randomly stuck together. There was a sort of ruff around her neck, though the rest of her fur was short. Her face was black, the ruff was a mottled white and gray, and her body was a patchwork of all three colors. Her eyes were ever so slightly crossed, giving her a quizzical expression, which suited her curious personality. Now, this curious personality was prompting her to sniff loudly at the straw in the Holy Family’s crèche.

  Paddy appeared in the doorway.

  “That dog is a menace,” Mary Bernadette said, turning to him. “Not even the baby Jesus is safe. Paddy, put her upstairs, won’t you.” Paddy was ostensibly in charge of the mutt, but while he doted on her and she adored him she never obeyed any of his commands. Mary Bernadette thought her husband’s canine rather dim-witted.

  “She’ll just whine until I let her out, Mary, you know that. Besides, I think Jesus faced worse threats in his life than a dog’s wet nose.”

  Mary Bernadette ignored the vaguely blasphemous comment and checked her watch. “Where is everybody?” she asked. “Dinner is almost ready, and there’s nothing I hate worse than to serve a cold meal.”

  “They’ll be here, Mary. They’ll be here.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “You know Mom’s not going to let me watch the games today. We should have stayed in Annapolis. I swear, I don’t know how Dad stands it.”

  Pat Fitzgibbon was driving Megan’s Subaru Outback; Megan was beside him in the passenger seat, and the twins, David and Danica, were in the backseat, each plugged into an electronic device that allowed them to ignore their parents’ boring conversations.