“So, we'll get through this then, and what will be, will be. Que sera, sera,” he said with a broad smile. “As those old American tourists say.”
She frowned, before nodding her head. “We do have a full house, and I imagine by noon, we'll have a line out into the streets of people waiting for a table.”
“Great,” he said, bringing his attention back to the documents in front of them. “Guess I'll see you soon.”
“Sure,” she sighed, and rose from the chair, not completely satisfied, but not disappointed either.
12
Daniel
The day passed quicklyand night came on so suddenly, he’d all but forgotten that life existed outside this room.
Aside from a small oil lamp on the desk, Daniel sat in the dark. His mother often chastised him for refusing to use the light, claiming he’d strain his eyes that way, but he liked the way rooms felt with the lights off.
This was especially true with musty rooms like the back office. He felt of darkness like some did of fresh snowfall—that it muffled the sounds in a space and created a tranquility that didn’t exist before. Darkness happened to be more reliable.
With the lights dimmed and the hallways finally quiet, Daniel was better able to hear himself think and, if presented with the rare opportunity, even managed to catch up with his thoughts. Tonight, the young man was hunched over a small stack of paperwork—mostly invoices for products that Daniel now recognized as his father’s exclusive suppliers.
Normally, he’d track these numbers into a larger, confidential spreadsheet, but the long night of paperwork had made him bleary-eyed. He rubbed at his heavy eyelids, trying his best to bat away the exhaustion with long, dramatic blinks. Despite his best efforts at warding them off, he yawned for the first time after only sorting the first few pages in his stack. He groaned, knowing that the stream of yawns would be endless now that he’d opened the gates—he placed his head in his hands. As soon as he closed his eyes, he felt relief. With a shiver, Daniel wondered if his mother had been right all along—
He dismissed the thought in the next moment, smiling when an image of his mother’s disapproving eye roll came to mind. Through the spaces in between his slender fingers, Daniel made out the crude shape of his father’s bar cart—it had been a gift from his father to Noah for their first (successful) year in business together. On top of the polished surface, glass bottles stood close together like the makings of a crystalline forest—their contents’ colors ranging from a soft amber to a deep, chocolatey brown.
Daniel had been considering giving up drinking before he returned to Galway. He’d gotten into some pretty good habits while he was away for school, and, at most, he’d have some type of lager with lunch, but only after earning it by spending most of the morning doing intensive physical labor. As he rose from his seat behind the desk, Daniel's eyes scanned the intricate glass bottles, noting how their tops glinted in the oil lamp’s glow behind him.
Seemingly at random, he plucked one of the cylindrical bottles from the cart. He ran his hand over the quilted design the glass had been imprinted with—the amber liquid sloshed around inside. He popped the top off, taking a deep sniff. Before he could accurately identify what the sharp scent reminded him of, Daniel downed a sizable gulp. As he swallowed—a warmth spreading down his center—he realized the smell had made him think of his mother’s nail polish remover, and he cringed.
Underneath a cap the color of deep violet, the white bottle had held an equally-offensive liquid. Daniel took another gulp to wash away the faint memory of the inky liquid his mother had insisted on cleaning her nails with every Friday.
Daniel returned to the table—his mouth singed from the taste of the Vodka- he much preferred fine whiskey. Without sparing another moment, he lifted the pen he’d discarded earlier to the form in front of him, and quickly marked a few of the boxes, approving the shipment while knowing in the back of his mind that it was wrong. The pub hadn’t received the additional crates of lager that this invoice claimed, but he knew that the document his black pen glided over was a ruse—only meant to fake out a nosey investigator.
Daniel’s forehead was pinched together when he reminded himself that his brothers on the force would redirect any unwanted attention—but there was still a small part of him that begged him, even now in the safety of the back office, to check over his shoulder. He ignored the small voice, feeling the creeping sensation of gooseflesh work its way up his arms like frenzied ivy. He swatted the sensation away, letting the sting of his slap eat away at the stubborn bumps.
The plan he laid out for himself over the next few days included finishing up the remaining sets of paperwork as quickly as he could. Catching up on this would make his father focus on his own side of things—he’d become even more of a micromanager in Daniel’s life ever since he’d joined the family business—and the impending freedom excited Daniel. He had assumed that this earned free time would be spent at the Murphy’s pub, most likely stocking shelves in the back and loading the heavy bags of ice into the main chests behind the bar. He’d wondered before if Caitlin would become drunk on her own power now that she had a reason to boss him around—he smiled to himself as he signed his name in a quick flourish. Of course she would, he thought, moving onto the next page in his stack.
The Caitlin he knew before had been waiting for years—since she’d first discovered her clear advantage in academics—for a chance to give Daniel firm direction. Now that she had it, he thought that she would have been hellbent on using it to her full advantage by unloading the shittier, more physically-demanding jobs to him. However, that didn’t happen. She hadn’t seemed willing to let him take on anything, and he doubted she would have at all if her father hadn’t stepped in and put him in charge of the paperwork.
Though he knew it infuriated her, he’d grown more respect for the woman, and how hard she fought for the things she wanted.
He moved on, flipping the last page he’d signed over onto its face against the wood grain. Spots of his heavy ink had seeped through the thin page, giving it an almost-molded appearance in the flickering light of the oil lamp. Normally, this type of detail about the paperwork could’ve set Daniel off in a spiral of panic—wondering if his father would find the mistake and make a big show of correcting him. When he realized the feeling had rolled by him like a runaway trailer on a grade, Daniel looked up to the drink cart. The bottle glimmered at him. He stood up from his desk and wandered to it, plucking the glass from its central space on the wooden cart. The brown liquid slid down his throat easily this time. He parted his lips, releasing an alcohol-laden breath like a reluctant, wild animal. This one wasn’t so bad, and one that tasted familiar- it must have been some fine scotch. That was the issue with crystal decanters, they didn’t have labels, which made it difficult to differentiate them.
He left the bottle on the desk this time, barely taking the time to secure the lid again. The brown liquid burned all the way down his throat as he took his place behind the desk once more.
Before Daniel had come to Sophie and Caitlin’s rescue last night, his father had made it abundantly clear that his son needed to prove his loyalty to the business and by extension, his loyalty to the family. Rory Kelly wasn’t the type of man to make these sorts of comments without a good reason. As Daniel fought against the urge to take another gulp from the glass bottle, he realized that his father had been pushing him in Caitlin Murphy’s direction once more. Daniel turned the glass bottle-stopper over in his hand, twirling it over the tops of his fingers as he had done with a golden coin throughout most of his schooling in Dublin. As Daniel finished sorting the last of the paperwork into their distinct piles—the ones he’d hold onto and the ones he’d passed onto his father for safe-keeping—he celebrated with one final swig of the amber-colored liquid. He shook his head, letting out a soft whistle to himself.
“Burning the midnight oil in here?” a familiar voice called from behind him.
Daniel had nearly expected to find his father looming in the office’s doorway when he turned around, but was relieved to find his brother, Kilian. He smiled at his older brother, noting that the dim lighting made him look a few years older—or maybe that was just the touch of grey that had prematurely wound its way into his facial hair and around his temples. He knew he wouldn’t ask, not until the grey was present enough to become a trademark of his brother’s appearance, but he couldn’t stop himself from wondering if the family business had caused the change.
“Just taking care of a few loose ends,” Daniel gestured to the pile he’d managed his way through with the help of some of their father’s whiskey. He replaced the glass topper on the whiskey bottle.
“I don’t know how you put up with that stuff,” Kilian said, helping himself to one of the chairs around the table in the back office. The memory of the men in his family—joined by the short, portly Noah Murphy—sitting around the table sprang to Daniel’s mind. He’d remembered the eagerness in Kilian’s voice after their father had finally, officially, let his youngest son in on the family secret. His heart panged in his chest as he looked across the gloomy space at his brother’s face—Kilian was ten years older than him, and the time had aged him more than Daniel had realized. The lower part of his face was mostly obscured with dark facial hair, but even from his seat across the room, Daniel could make out small patches of scar tissue among the hair. Kilian’s blue eyes were still as bright as ever, but there were dark bags underneath them. He looked tired, as if he hadn’t rested for some time.
Daniel watched with a smile as Kilian plucked his own bottle from Noah’s drink cart. “Be careful what you choose,” Daniel flicked the surface of the whiskey bottle with his middle finger; the softtinkhis nail made against the glass delighted him. “Some of it’s a little strong.”
Kilian waved off his brother’s warning. He moved his fingers in the air as if he was practicing the keystrokes to a glorious ballad, but it ended abruptly—his hand shot out and pulled out a stout, dark bottle. He took a large swig, returning the bottle without another glance. His face hardly seemed to twitch. “Please,” there was a new richness to Kilian’s voice, as if the alcohol had lubricated the rusty machinery inside of him. “Nothin’ an Irishman can’t handle.” He lifted his eyebrows without looking up from the bar cart. For a split second, Daniel was certain that he was going to pull another glass from the wooden cart—the surprise was clear on his face when his brother turned to look at him directly. Kilian placed his hands over his stomach as he rolled himself back onto the chair legs; he peeked out the window as the wood threatened to slip out from underneath him. “Are you ready for tonight’s shipment?”
There was a devious part of Daniel that dared the chair to slip, but he tucked the wish away into the corner of his mouth with a smirk. “Nothin’ an Irishman can’t handle,” Daniel repeated back to this brother. There was a shaky quality to Daniel’s voice that he hoped his brother wouldn’t pick up on—it was impossible to tell with him looking out the window. Kilian nodded at him, giving Daniel an approving look as their father’s words about proving himself to the family splashed down his back like ice water.
