“Kathleen…” Mom shakes her head.

I realize no one has explicitly said that to her, that Kathleen is dead. She would have been just a little older than me, were she still alive.

I nod solemnly. “Car accident.”

“Oh God.”

Mom breaks off the hug and sniffles, grabbing my cheeks in her oily, wrinkly, mom-hands. She examines my face with the precision of a hawk to see if there’s a crack in my mask, if I’m telling the whole truth.

“It’s real, isn’t it? This thing with Mal,” she asks brokenly.

“The realest.” I laugh, happy tears sliding down my cheeks.

“And you know all about what happened with Glen?” She looks at me from under her fake eyelashes, blinking slowly.

I nod. “About the scar, too. I’m not mad, Mom. I just wish you’d told me. I could’ve handled it. You didn’t have to go through all this effort.”

“Oh, but I did.” She rushes into my words, sliding her hands from my cheeks to my arms, squeezing. “I wanted you to know you deserved to be loved. You are the most precious thing in my world, Aurora, even if you don’t always feel that way. I wanted you to think he adored you, but I had to keep you far enough away from him so you’d never know the truth.”

“Is that why you didn’t want me to come to Ireland?”

She sighs. “That, and we seem to have it hard for Irish men. I didn’t want you to move across the ocean and leave me in America. It was selfish, but you’re my only family.” Pause. “I mean, you and the cigarettes and the hairspray.”

We both laugh, until I remember I have something I still need to clear up with her.

“The pictures. You sent Mal the pictures with the mean things I wrote about him. You sent him a letter saying I aborted his baby. It started a chain reaction that caused everything to fall apart over here. You have no idea.”

I’m not going to pin Kathleen’s death on Mom, obviously. But she did manipulate the hell out of our lives.

She sniffs, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her glittery denim jacket, which has pink patches and a sequin collar. That’s a sight I didn’t think I’d live to see. Usually my mother will grab anything within reach, including the Bible or a kid in a bubble, and use them to wipe off her snot before tarnishing her precious clothes.

“I know. There’s no better way to describe it than I was being manic. I didn’t trust Mal, and I didn’t want you to end up in a bad situation like me. When I sent him the pictures, I thought that’d be it. I should’ve known your love was stronger than that. When he kept sending letters, I lost it. I knew he’d get to you soon enough. So when I sat down to write him my own letter, I described everything I’d gone through when I found out I was pregnant with you—with one little alteration. I wrote it as if you had an abortion. I couldn’t stomach it. It took me three days to write the letter, and I went back and forth. I threw up every hour. But it just cemented the fact in my head that you shouldn’t be put in this position. Only now I can see what kind of damage it must have caused the three of you. Please know, I thought it was a fling. Puppy love. Something you’d grow out of in no time. At no point did I think you wouldn’t find a better man for yourself in America.”

The sad part is, I believe her.

I know she did horrible things, and still, I cannot help but feel compassion for her. I saw how hard her life was. We lived under the same roof. She always provided for me. She always did her best.

I wrap my arms around her again, and we sob into each other’s shoulders. It’s the toughest—and by far best—conversation I’ve had with my mother. And it hurts like a bitch.

“I love you, Mom. But if you do something like this again, I swear, I’m going to go apeshit on your ass.”

She laughs, grateful for the fact I lightened up the mood.

“Oh, trust me. I know better than to mess with kismet, fate, and their peers. So what are you going to do about Summer?”

She pulls away, running a loving hand along my arm. It’s the first time she’s ever done that, and I feel a rush of excitement, like we’re morphing into something different. More real. “You know, in the spirit of forgiveness and moving on and all the mumbo-jumbo you millennials are into?”

“Oh, you know… I think I’m going to let karma beat her down for a little while.”

A NOTE FROM GLEN (RORY’S DEAD FATHER)

I cocked up.

That is a blanket statement, of course, because that happened quite a lot, literally and figuratively. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I threw everything in the shitter. Maybe when I had my first drop of alcohol, when I was eleven. Uncle Paddy left the bottle on our kitchen counter, and my parents, who’d fought all night, slept in. It made sense to try whatever it was that made grown-ups in my family able to tolerate each other and put a smile on their faces.

I was hooked after that.

Or maybe it was when I knocked up Elaine, Kathleen’s mother. It was all fun and games until I had someone else to take care of, and I didn’t know how, because my own parents had expected us to raise ourselves. I had a few more brothers—six or seven, I don’t remember—but I was the youngest. My parents were in their forties when I was born, and they never showed the slightest interest in me.

Maybe it was when I ran away from Elaine and Kathleen and locked myself in my parents’ old house and wrote “Belle’s Bells.” Not a day passed when I wasn’t asked about that song—on the street, in a letter, a fan email, or by a prodding radio host who remembered I was still alive and called me for a brief interview, usually around November.

I wish I could tell you it was about Elaine.

Or the girl before her.

Or the girl before her.

I wish I could tell you it was about Kathleen.

But the truth is, this wonderful song about love and heartbreak and addiction and angst and all the things that make people’s hearts move is about…alcohol.

A stiff drink to take it all away.

Which is why, till the day I died, people speculated as to what it was about.

Now, Rory and Debbie were a different story altogether. I think I actually fell in love with Debbie in Paris. When she told me she was pregnant, my gut reaction was to tell her to move to Ireland with me. So I did.

She tried to make it on her own in America, but when she realized it was harder than she’d thought, she finally accepted my offer. By which time, I was a deadbeat drunk, not an artist drunk. Quite a difference.

I could tell you I didn’t move to America because I had a daughter I couldn’t leave, and later a son, too. But I wasn’t that great a da. I was torn and messed up, but had only myself to blame.

The day I hurt Rory was the day I lost hope. It is hard to rationalize and make excuses for a no-show father, but it is impossible to justify one who hurt his own baby.

I came out of jail worse than I went in, with one big difference—I stopped trying to reach out to Debbie and see Rory, and I started putting an effort into what I had.

Kathleen knew I was a terrible, abusive drunk, but I did my best with her.

With Mal, too. It broke my heart to see my daughter pining for a boy who was waiting for the big bang. She was just a floating star in his universe. I knew those things couldn’t be changed.