Patrick nodded, wishing he was half as confident as his tailor.
Patrick bought his mother a bouquet of daisies on the way home. The flowers would help soften her up before he read her the riot act over the way she was jabbering about his cases. Birdie O’Neill’s greatest hobby in life was bragging about her son, and it had become a problem.
When Patrick first began practicing law, he’d asked her not to discuss his cases. She’d pinched his cheek and promised to behave, but inevitably he’d hear about her nattering whenever he visited the barbershop or a pub. It was usually harmless, but this case was different.
It had all started when Father Doyle showed up at their apartment two months ago, pleading for Patrick’s help with the infamous Mick Malone case, and Birdie overheard everything. Patrick didn’t want the case, but how could he turn down his old benefactor?
He walked up to the fourth-floor apartment he shared with his mother and let himself in. Birdie lay sprawled on the sofa at a strange angle, watching the pigeons feed on the lump of suet she set on the windowsill for them.
“You okay, Ma?” he asked.
Birdie turned her face toward him and sent him a smile. “Daisies! How nice.”
She still made no move to rise. Patrick crossed to the other side of the room, where they kept a pitcher filled with water from the pump that served everyone in the building. On the way, he noticed the cake his mother had brought home from the bakery. It looked like a basket. The bottom half used interlocking strands of chocolate frosting to look like wicker, and real strawberries were mounded atop the cake. If he didn’t know better, he’d have mistaken it for a genuine basket of strawberries.
“Those cakes sold out before I even finished them,” she said with pride.
Birdie O’Neill’s cakes made the Gerald Bakery famous. Crowds of people came to the bakery window each day to admire her whimsical creations. Sometimes they were towering layer cakes built to resemble city landmarks like Grand Central Station or St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Other times she imitated the natural world, like this strawberry basket cake. Once or twice a week, she brought a cake home to share with the neighbors. It made them one of the most popular renters in the building.
“Nice cake,” he said, picking out a ripe strawberry and popping it in his mouth.
Birdie still hadn’t gotten up from the sofa, and there was nothing on the stove for dinner. That was odd. She usually took great pride as a housekeeper. Her day started at four o’clock each morning when she headed to the bakery to start the ovens, and she finished by early afternoon, which left her plenty of time to prepare dinner. Their apartment usually smelled like heaven when he arrived home.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, since she wasn’t the sort to complain.
“I fell while lugging in a sack of flour from the wagon this morning,” she said. “It was dark, and I slipped on a loose brick.”
He closed the distance between them and hunkered down before her. “And you worked the rest of the day?”
“Don’t worry, it was nothing,” she teased while pinching his cheek. He didn’t complain. He’d finally persuaded her to stop pinching his cheek in public, but he didn’t have the heart to ask her to quit at home. “The pain went away for a while, but now it’s bad again.” She had a bandage on her forearm too.
“Did that happen when you fell?” he asked with a nod at the bandage.
“I scraped the wagon wheel on my way down. It’s nothing. Mr. Gerald patched it up as soon as I got inside.”
“Mr. Gerald ought to lug his own sacks of flour.”
“Don’t be taking that tone,” she said. “Mr. Gerald is a fine man who has always treated me well.”
Maybe, but Birdie was too old for lugging heavy sacks and tending hot ovens before the crack of dawn. No man should have to worry about his mother collapsing under the weight of a thirty-pound sack of flour.
“You can quit, Ma. I’m making decent money these days.”
“Please don’t make me point out that Mr. Gerald always pays in cash.”
Patrick looked away. When they’d first arrived from Ireland, they were so poor that Patrick had to beg on the streets. That sort of shame never fully went away, and depending on his mother for steady income was humiliating. He would start getting tougher with his clients. Some of them could afford to pay in cash, and he needed to start demanding it.
But first he needed to win the Mick Malone case.
“Ma, you’ve got to stop talking about my cases in public,” he said. “Keep quiet about the Mick Malone case. It’s important that his book gets published before the Blackstones find out about it.”
“They’ll get wind of it sooner or later,” she pointed out.
“Let it be later. The book will hit the shelves in September. The closer we get to that date without anyone knowing about it, the better our chances.”
No one in the city wanted to take on the Blackstones, but sometimes a man didn’t have much choice.
2
