One of Book Riot's 100 Must-Read New York City Novels
Firefighters walk boldly into battle against the most capricious of elements. Their daughters, mothers, sisters, and wives walk through the world with another kind of strength and another kind of sorrow, and no one knows that better than the women of the Keegan-O'Reilly clan. Ashes of Fiery Weather takes us from famine-era Ireland to New York City a decade after 9/11, illuminating the passionate loves and tragic losses of generations of women in a firefighting family—with "characters that come so vividly to life one forgets one is reading a novel . . . Anyone Irish will face an uncanny recognition in these pages; everyone else will be enthralled meeting such captivating figures" (Matthew Thomas, New York Times–bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves).
One of Book Riot's 100 Must-Read New York City Novels
Firefighters walk boldly into battle against the most capricious of elements. Their daughters, mothers, sisters, and wives walk through the world with another kind of strength and another kind of sorrow, and no one knows that better than the women of the Keegan-O'Reilly clan. Ashes of Fiery Weather takes us from famine-era Ireland to New York City a decade after 9/11, illuminating the passionate loves and tragic losses of generations of women in a firefighting family—with "characters that come so vividly to life one forgets one is reading a novel . . . Anyone Irish will face an uncanny recognition in these pages; everyone else will be enthralled meeting such captivating figures" (Matthew Thomas, New York Times–bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves).
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
One of Book Riot's 100 Must-Read New York City Novels
Firefighters walk boldly into battle against the most capricious of elements. Their daughters, mothers, sisters, and wives walk through the world with another kind of strength and another kind of sorrow, and no one knows that better than the women of the Keegan-O'Reilly clan. Ashes of Fiery Weather takes us from famine-era Ireland to New York City a decade after 9/11, illuminating the passionate loves and tragic losses of generations of women in a firefighting family—with "characters that come so vividly to life one forgets one is reading a novel . . . Anyone Irish will face an uncanny recognition in these pages; everyone else will be enthralled meeting such captivating figures" (Matthew Thomas, New York Times–bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780544526693 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Norah O'Reilly
April 1983
THE BAGPIPES TOOK UP "Going Home" as the firemen bore the coffin out of the church.
Norah O'Reilly paused on the threshold of the heavy double doors, thrown open as they'd been on her wedding day, a gray November morning, altogether better suited to the end of the story than this soft April afternoon. A warm spring rain had begun to fall during the Mass.
Norah scanned the faces of the assembled firemen, three deep from the curb to the street, skipping the mustached, the older guys, the not-tall, the dark-haired, the obviously non-Irish, the ones in white caps, who were the officers. She didn't see Sean. She saw Sean a hundred times.
Cameras flashed as she stepped fully outside. For ten years, she'd been an understudy in this play, but she'd never once rehearsed. She didn't know her lines, forgetting the names of longtime friends, missing cues, blinking stupidly at outstretched hands and stepping into hugs moments too late. Wherever she went, she left whispers in her wake. Poor Norah.
This morning, while savagely biting the tags off her new black dress, she'd resolved not to cry in public. She would be brave. Not like a fireman, but like a Kennedy. The Kennedys were always burying each other. They knew how it was done.
In the crowd, Norah spotted Amred Lehane with his hand over his heart. He knew, of course, that civilians were not supposed to salute. Amred, the buff. She recalled Sean explaining that to her. A buff was a fire department fanatic. They often knew more about the history of the department than the guys themselves. Some buffs were attached to particular companies, like Amred, who belonged to the Glory Devlins and whose insistence on calling them by the company nickname instead of the number was so strong that the men had caught the habit.
The firemen who had not come into the church for Mass, the ones who hadn't known Sean personally, and those from other cities surely spent the service having a breakfast beer across the street in Lehane's, the bar Amred and his sister owned. Amred would have told them how Sean used to bartend there, that he and his Irish wife had met there. Poor Norah. She supposed that was her name now.
The men eased the coffin down the steep steps of Holy Rosary. Norah knew that they would not let go of Sean, but rather than watch, she lifted her face to the sky. Happy is the soul rain falls on. An Irish proverb. Rain on the day of a funeral was good luck.
She sensed her brother's eyes on her. All three of her brothers had traded Galway for England. Two had called to tell her how they'd liked Sean the time they met him. Only Cathal got on a plane.
Norah told their parents not to come. Her relieved mother promised to have a Mass said for Sean in their own church. Her sister, though. On the phone, Aoife made no mention of emergency passports and plane tickets. She only cried and said she'd have Noelle make a sympathy card for her cousins. Aoife's daughter was ten, a year older than Maggie.
Norah started, then looked for the children. There were three, yet in four days they seemed to have multiplied, surrounding her with their confused blue eyes and moving mouths. Four-year-old Brendan was clinging to the skirt of her dress. Surely she'd had hold of him most of the way down the aisle. When had she let go?
She pried the fabric out of Brendan's fist and grasped his hand so hard he looked up at her in surprise. His hand was mucked with chocolate licorice, which she'd trusted would keep him occupied during Mass, even though the smell made her sick. Her dress, long-sleeved and too warm for the day, was tight over her breasts, which were already fuller. Nobody knew.
Aidan stood beside Brendan, wearing the suit and tie he'd worn this past Sunday, for Easter. Aidan would turn nine two days before Maggie turned ten. Irish twins. Norah located Maggie slightly behind her and reached back with her free hand, but Maggie shied away and then stared back at Norah, daring her to beckon again. Maggie, as the only girl, believed she was Sean's favorite, but it was Aidan who was his heart.
Maggie and the boys had Sean's eyes, a striking blue a shade darker than her own. Maggie glanced at her grandmother, wanting to be her ally instead of Norah's, but Delia, her gaze fixed firmly ahead, didn't seem to notice.
Suit yourself, Norah thought and turned around.
Sean's eyes were his mother's eyes. Delia O'Reilly, beautiful still at sixty-five. She'd been an elementary school principal, formerly a teacher, and there was something in her bearing that suggested it, Norah thought. She expected to be listened to. Sean had often called his mother brave. Back in the 1950s, not many people got divorced. Sure as hell nobody Catholic, he'd say. Many of her students had come to the wake, clearly self-conscious in their dress-up clothes, passing right by Norah. The boys kept their hands in their pockets as they mumbled that they were sorry. The girls had more poise, but it was easy to tell the ones who'd never been to a wake before by the way their wide eyes couldn't leave the open casket. Former students had come as well, college-aged if not in college, and they shook Norah's hand and told her they remembered Sean coming to their classroom in his uniform, and they remembered visits to the firehouse.
Norah, too, remembered Sean saying these kids pulling the fire alarm boxes accounted for probably half their runs. Delia would say that's why it was important that he talk to them. He would shake his head, but he never said no to her.
The coffin arrived at the bottom of the steps and Norah started down, going slowly, for Brendan. She sensed her brother tense. Cathal was ready to grab her arm if she stumbled. The cameras clicked in chorus. Aidan pressed Sean's helmet against his stomach. She made a mental note to be sure to let Brendan get a chance with the helmet. She would make Aidan give it to him as they were leaving the cemetery, when the pipers began "Amazing Grace."
A few members of the FDNY's pipe and drum band had played at their wedding too, though Sean hadn't been a fireman yet.
He'd been waiting to get on the job, increasingly worried that the city's money troubles would keep it from hiring more firemen, needed as they were. When he did get called, only a few months after the wedding, Norah had been too relieved to fret about his safety. A better paycheck and a steady one, she'd thought, as though he'd been hired to sell insurance. They could move out of his mother's house and into an apartment before the baby came.
Cross Hill Cemetery had been closed to new burials for a decade at least. But an exception was being made so Sean could be laid to rest, as the priest put it, near his grandfather and great-grandfather, firefighters both. The newspapers were making much of it. "Legacy of Bravery," said one headline.
And, of course, Eileen was in the papers too. The articles about Sean all mentioned that his sister had joined the class-action lawsuit against the FDNY and that she'd graduated from the academy last year, in the very first class to include women.
The procession halted. Three times, Monsignor Halloran blessed the casket with holy water, his spotty hand quaking. He'd baptized Sean too.
The firemen lock-stepped a turn and hoisted the coffin onto the pumper. The honor guard took up their places, four on either side of the pumper and two standing on the back. Firefighter Eileen O'Reilly was one of the four.
Her red hair was pulled back in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. When she got on the job, she'd cut it so it was above her shoulders, but she refused to have it short-short. She was already being called a dyke, she told Norah with a crooked smile. Couldn't give them more ammo. Norah laughed and felt she was betraying Sean, who'd found nothing funny at all about his sister's new career.
The pipers started "Garryowen."
Eileen's back was straight, her face impassive. Eileen looked like she was playing dress-up, as though she'd stolen Sean's Class-A uniform for the occasion.
Joe Paladino was escorting Delia. Sean, apparently, had left instructions with this request. But it was Nathaniel who should have been beside her, and Sean should have realized this. Nathaniel Kwiatkowski, whose gentle voice was accented with both Poland and Brooklyn, had known Sean his whole life. That should have trumped the goddamn holy fire department. Nathaniel was there, of course, not far behind Delia, but like an ordinary mourner.
Indeed, Joe startled Norah in all ways when, straining for composure, he explained Sean's wishes to her.
Sean never told her any details about his funeral. Firemen loved to say you never know when you get on the truck what you'll find when you get there, but Norah had spent her marriage convinced that none of them believed they might die on the job. That it was possible, that they very well might be, she'd thought a secret kept by the wives.
But choosing Joe to escort his mother at his line-of-duty funeral meant that Sean understood. And if Sean had, then all the guys from Sean's firehouse — the funny ones and the shy ones and the ones who bullied the probies worse than if the firehouse was a frat house, the swaggerers, the ones so kind they were like Irish priests in old movies — then all of them knew that they might, one day, go to work and get killed.
At the bottom of the steps, the fire commissioner shook Norah's hand and then Delia's. Then Mayor Koch did the same.
Both the mayor and the fire commissioner retreated, and Norah herded the children to the limousine, and as they climbed in, followed by her brother, she and Delia faced each other on the sidewalk.
"I will never —" Delia began, but then pressed her lips together and turned to Joe, who helped her into the car. Norah followed.
Norah didn't want Act II. She badly needed the curtain to come down and take the audience away. Then Sean could appear from the wings, grinning and carrying a bouquet of lilies.
"You did good," he'd say.
"That Mayor Koch," she'd say, "he's like an egg with ears."
And Sean would laugh.
The morning after the fire, before the children emerged from their rooms, she'd sat at Sean's desk and used his calculator. Possibly she'd never touched it before. He was the one who paid the bills and balanced the checkbook. She was almost thirty-four years old. Suppose she lived to be seventy? 70 – 34 = 36. Thirty-six years without him. More than half her life without him. She got up and lay down on his half of the bed.
Norah had the limousine drop them at her own house first so the kids could change their clothes. The after-funeral should have been at her and Sean's, but Delia insisted that her house would be better.
Though Cathal told her to stand her ground, Norah said she didn't want an argument. Delia owned the three-story brownstone that had belonged to her grandparents. It was the only one on the street that had not been cut up into apartments. Delia had grown up there herself, and after her husband left, she had taken it back from the tenants so she could raise Sean and Eileen there.
It was far bigger than Norah and Sean's two-story three-bedroom, just three blocks away. And Norah knew Sean didn't choose to live close to his mother so he could be there if she needed him. Delia didn't, as far as Norah could tell, need anyone. It was the house.
Sean had formally explained to the kids that Aunt Eileen had been adopted, and that it didn't matter. She was his sister and their aunt. Norah knew he meant it. Yet. When Norah asked him to please consider moving to Long Island because they needed more space, or even upstate, a town that wouldn't be too bad of a commute to the firehouse, Sean refused to discuss it. He was still the older child, and the boy. The brownstone certainly would have come to him, and he would have moved them into it someday.
Norah didn't change out of her funeral dress, much as she wanted to. Aidan threw on jeans and an FDNY T-shirt. After warning Maggie, who was staring fixedly into her closet, to be quick about it, Norah brought Brendan back downstairs to find Cathal standing before the small gallery of family pictures that were clustered on top of the bookcase in the front room.
Aidan went to the front door, and about every five seconds, they heard him kick it hard. Brendan dashed into the dining room to plunder his Easter basket.
"Aoife should have come," Cathal said. "And I'll tell her that next week."
"Next week?" Norah asked.
"I'm going home for a few days before I head back."
Norah felt a rising panic. Of course Cathal would be leaving. He wasn't about to take up permanent residence on her couch.
"You should go to Ireland, once the kids are out of school," Cathal said gently.
But she wouldn't be doing any traveling this summer if things remained as they were. She had the urge to tell her brother that she was pregnant. It would be like jumping off a cliff. Or backing away from one.
Instead, she shook her head. "Airfare for all of us."
"We can help with that."
"We?"
Though Cathal never spoke of anyone, Norah suspected that he had a girlfriend he couldn't bring home. A non-Catholic. A black girl.
"Me and Eamonn and Donal," Cathal said after a hesitation.
There wasn't any way he'd meant their brothers, but Norah let it go.
"We'll see."
She went back to the foot of the stairs. "Magdalena! Pick any shirt!" When she got back to the living room, Cathal said, "I hate to bring this up today, but the fire department, they will take care of you?" "Three quarters," she said, and then, realizing he didn't know the lingo, she added, "Three quarters of Sean's pay for life."
Cathal nodded, and Norah read his thoughts: that can't be much for someone with three kids. It wasn't. Even with his full salary, Sean had still worked odd jobs as a carpenter when they came his way through the firehouse.
Maggie arrived in the living room still wearing her dress.
"Can I stay home?" she asked.
"You are not sitting around the house by yourself," Norah said. "You'll come to Gran's and get something to eat."
"I'm not hungry."
"You'll come to Gran's and not eat, then."
"Can I read?"
"You can stand on your head in the backyard if you like," Norah said.
Maggie noticed Brendan in the dining room and charged, shrieking, "Just because you ate all yours already doesn't mean you get to take mine!"
Brendan dove under the dining room table and scooted out the other side, bolting as Maggie frantically inventoried her Easter basket.
Brendan threw his arms around Norah's waist. Norah licked her thumb and rubbed away the chocolate from the corners of his mouth. She didn't spoil him — she didn't — but today she couldn't deal with it.
Maggie stomped into the living room. "Three of my chocolate eggs are gone."
Aidan shouted from the front door. "They're all waiting for us."
"For God's sake, Aidan, it isn't a surprise party." Norah pressed the heel of her hand into her firming belly and pushed a little. There was no Sean to cut them down with his decisive "Knock it off!" She was never the bad cop.
Norah put her narrowed eyes on her daughter. "Are you going to change?"
The front door banged. Aidan leaving. Norah shut her eyes.
"Norah?" Cathal said quietly.
She opened her eyes and said to Cathal, "Can you go with him? I'll sort this out."
During the Mass, the other wives had gone to Delia's house and set up. The food was arranged on the dining room table. Plates were out and napkins and plastic utensils. The refrigerator was stocked with Budweiser and Schaefer and Coke and ginger ale. There were stacks of plastic cups. Folding chairs set up. Ashtrays placed about.
Though she kept the black dress on, Norah discarded the stockings and heels. She would be a bohemian widow. When she thought the word "widow," it didn't seem as though Sean had died, only that the alphabet went mad after the first two letters of "wife."
Need anything? You're all right? He was, I know. Thank you, yes. He was.
I'm fine, thank you. I'm fine, really. Thank you. We'll be all right, thank you.
The rituals of the wake and funeral had let Norah hide the rattling of her bones. But now that they were nearing the end of the scripted part, her hands were being taken by fits. The right kept reaching for the left and clasping it tightly enough to hurt. She twisted her wedding ring around and around and kept grasping the gold replica of Sean's badge that she wore on a slim chain around her neck. Sean had given it to her not long after he'd transferred to the Glory Devlins.
Norah, near midnight the day of the fire — after Delia had left and she'd made Eileen go with her, which neither of them wanted, but Norah was too tired to care, after the children were finally in bed, and quiet, though maybe crying into their pillows (she refused to look) — she'd remembered Sean's wedding ring. Firemen weren't allowed to wear jewelry on the job, and she was forever telling Sean to take off the ring before going to work. It was a silver claddagh, of which hers was a more slender version. But she looked, and it was not on top of his bureau or hers. In a panic, she'd called the firehouse. Check his locker, she begged whoever answered the phone.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Ashes of Fiery Weather"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Kathleen Donohoe.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Devlin Family Tree,
Epigraph,
Norah O'Reilly,
Delia Keegan O'Reilly,
Mattie Starwaif Cullen,
Annie-Rose Devlin Keegan,
Maggie O'Reilly,
Eileen O'Reilly Maddox,
Katie McKenna,
Acknowledgments,
Reading Group Guide,
Q&A with Kathleen Donohoe,
About the Author,
Connect with HMH,