Bloodlines by Jan Burke

better life than I could."
    "Maybe not. If you find out it's yours, then ask your mother--"
    "My mother's going back to Ireland, Jack," he said, struggling to keep his temper. "I won't add to her worries, and I won't keep her here. You're not to mention it to her."
    "Not to mention--!"
    "No. Not yet. I'll let her know when she's in Ireland. I'll tell her after the baby's born."
    Jack shook his head. "You're what now, twenty-two? Conn, you're not thinking straight. A marriage is a legal contract. You have no idea what you're getting into. You're talking about throwing your life away on a whore who--" He broke off, quickly raising his hands to deflect a blow. "Damn it, Conn!"
    "You're not to talk of her that way, Jack. Never again."
    "All right, all right."
    O'Connor subsided.
    "What is it?" Jack scoffed. "Love?"
    "Not a bit of it."
    Jack sighed. "All your hard work, so this--this dame can have a chunk of your check?"
    O'Connor said nothing.
    "I wish I knew why the hell--"
    "I've told you. It's the child needs thinking of, Jack. Not me, not Vera. The child."
    Jack studied him. "Why do I feel as if this has something to do with Maureen?"
    "Don't," O'Connor said, and averted his eyes.
    "Conn," Jack said sadly. "Jesus, Conn."
    O'Connor looked up again. "Will you do it or not? If the answer's no, I'd best get busy looking for someone else."
    "I'll be there--under protest."
    "You'll not say a word to her that makes her unhappy," O'Connor warned.
    "Oh, not on her wedding day," Jack said sarcastically, and turned and went back into the Wrigley Building.
    When the baby was born, Vera sent word to him. A boy, named as they had compromised--Kenneth John O'Connor. He had wanted to call him Kieran, after his own father, in the Irish naming tradition used in his family, and after Jack, but she said the name Kieran was "too foreign" and so he had agreed on the name she had thought closest to it.
    True to other agreements they had made, she did not live with him as his wife. He sent money. She occasionally sent a photo. More often, a change of address.
    Jack was quick to point out that the boy looked nothing like him. O'Connor nearly knocked him down for that.
    "Teaching you to fight was the stupidest thing I've ever done," Jack said when O'Connor had regained his temper, "because you don't know your friends from your enemies." But after that day, Jack never remarked on the child.

In no other matter, O'Connor realized, did he keep his thoughts so guarded from Jack. Whatever they might argue about was argued openly-- except for this subject. He knew this was in some part due to the fact that he didn't fully understand his own feelings about Vera and the boy. He only knew that when he thought of Vera, he thought of what had happened in her presence--of her comforting him as he wept, certainly, but even more often of that moment in Big Sarah's, when he felt so calm--and how, for some reason, he never worried about Maureen's ghost feeling disappointed in him after that. He decided that even if Vera had come to him that day to say that she needed help because another man had left her pregnant, his answer would have been the same.
    Two years ago, in 1956, she had filed for divorce. He had been surprised to discover how depressed that had made him feel. There had been no request for child support.
    Working on a newspaper had taught him all he needed to know about finding information on someone. He had called in a favor or two to learn the name of the man she was marrying and to look into his background. He could find nothing objectionable. Reports were that the man treated Kenneth as his own. O'Connor signed the papers. He hadn't heard a word from Vera since then.
    In that same year, Winston Wrigley II, the son of the founder of Wrigley Publications--who was now semiretired--faced up to what publishers all over the country were starting to realize: Americans who used to look forward to reading the evening paper after work now looked forward to