The Parting Glass by Emilie Richards

Unfortunately, he was not oblivious.
    “Protecting her seems to be my job, whether I choose it or not,” he said, looking straight at the road ahead.
    “Why is that? What’s your relationship to her, other than physician?”
    “She was my grandmother’s best friend.”
    “And you’re carrying on the tradition. I like that.”
    “She gives me no choice.”
    “I can see she wouldn’t. Once we began discussing this arrangement, she gave me little choice, either. She’s a tyrant, isn’t she?”
    He couldn’t fault the way she said it. With admiration and affection. And besides, it was altogether true.
    “Has Irene explained how we’re related?” she said.
    “She’s been circumspect.”
    “Here’s a history lesson. Back in the nineteenth century there were four Tierney brothers living in the house Irene occupies now. Two of them died. A third, Terence, emigrated to Cleveland, where another brother had gone and died before him. Terence is my ancestor. The fourth, Lorcan, traveled to England and disappeared. Everyone thought he died there.”
    Finn wasn’t sure why he had asked. The details were too complicated and intimate, but now that she’d begun, he couldn’t tell her so. “But if he had died there, I suppose you wouldn’t be on your way to Shanmullin now. Irene wouldn’t be alive.”
    “That’s right. Lorcan was her ancestor. Lorcan was jailed in Liverpool. I don’t know for what. By the time he made it back to Shanmullin, his family was gone. All of his brothers were dead by then, and his parents had gone to Cleveland years before to live their few remaining years with Terence’s widow, who had remarried a man named Rowan Donaghue. Lorcan was poor and illiterate and didn’t know how to get in touch with them or even if they were still alive. The village priest was dead, as well, and by then a good portion of Shanmullin had emigrated, too.”
    “Your name is Donaghue, not Tierney.”
    “Lena, Terence Tierney’s wife, had a son by Terence, born after his death. When she married Rowan Donaghue, Rowan adopted little Terry, and they changed his name to Donaghue. They went on to have many more children, but Terry’s my ancestor. So technically, my sisters and I are Donaghues by adoption, not that it matters. We all have the same great-great grandmother.”
    “And Irene’s grandfather stayed on in Ireland and worked the land?”
    “Irene says that Lorcan was in his forties by the time he came back to Ireland, tired and bitter. He married a local woman, had one son, Liam, and died years after.”
    “Liam is Irene’s father.”
    “That’s right.”
    Finn knew the rest. In the early 1920s Liam and his wife Brenna had abandoned Ireland for the United States, hoping to start a new life. Irene had been only a small child at the time and remembered little about those years. “I suppose all this somehow explains why Irene’s family didn’t find any Tierneys in Cleveland.”
    “Exactly. Lena married a Donaghue and changed her son’s name. That was many years before Liam arrived in Cleveland, and apparently he never talked to the few people who might have remembered, including Lena herself, who was an old woman by then. Irene just happened to find out about us on the Internet. The Cleveland Plain Dealer did an article about the history of the saloon my family owns, and Terence Tierney’s name was mentioned because Lena was the founder and he was her first husband.”
    “Odd that Irene would still be looking for relatives, don’t you think?”
    She combed her hair back with her fingers, a lovely, feminine gesture he hadn’t been privy to in a long time. “Not really. She never married, and she has no children. We all want to feel connected, don’t we? She’s not well. I think the idea of wanting some part of you going on into the years is natural.”
    He froze, fingers gripping the steering wheel. At one time he’d understood that need himself.
    Peggy looked over her shoulder at her