“I want to go back to Ireland,” Colin blurted out.
Joshua shot him a puzzled look. “What brought that on?”
“Just thinking about Killarney.”
“Well,that’salways a mistake,” Joshua said with a soft laugh. “Especially when you’re already about to be piled high with punishment cases for the vacation you just took!”
“I know we can’t go right away,” Colin said. “Maybe not until fall. Or even winter. But…” He gripped Joshua’s arm. “I want to start planning it now. Saving for it.”
Joshua frowned and leaned closer to him. “Colin, I repeat, what brought this on?”
“I don’t know. Thinking about Kathy, I guess, made me want to be in the park.”
Joshua nodded. “I understand. Let’s plan it for winter. I’ve never been there in the winter.”
“We could go for Chrismukkah,” Colin urged, using their combined word for the Christmas and Hanukkah holidays.
“Our mothers would kill us.”
“We’ll see them before we go,” Colin assured him. “And buy them enough Chrismukkah gifts that they’ll forgive us for being gone over the actual holidays.”
Joshua looked into Colin’s honeyed-green eyes. They were weary both from lack of sleep and from the kind of internal weariness that not even a week-long vacation could assuage. All prosecutors had to fight the tendency to take on the emotional pain of those involved in the cases for which they fought. It was an occupational hazard that haunted every prosecuting attorney, especially ones like Colin, who possessed a tender and empathetic heart. His longing for Ireland was genuine, and Joshua loved that land with equal devotion. But Colin’s yearning for his ancestral home was also a yearning for the healing he knew would touch him when he stood in that sacred place.
“I’d love to spend Chrismukkah in Killarney,” he told Colin. “Isn’t there a song about it?”
Colin laughed out loud. He placed a hand over his heart, lifted his head, and sang in his clear, perfect tenor:
* * *
“The holly green, the ivy green
The prettiest picture you've ever seen
I'm handin' you no blarney
No matter where you roam
It's Chrismukkah in Killarney
With all of the folks at home.”
“I’ll set us up a special PayPal account, and we’ll start saving now,” Joshua told him.
Colin rose and grabbed both their suitcases. “I’m gonna take these up. You want anything from upstairs?”
“No, darlin’. All I want is for you to come back downstairs and be here with me.”
“Give me five minutes,” he said, then leaped up the steps, a suitcase in each hand. And from above him in their bedroom, Joshua heard:
It's nice, ya know, to kiss your beau
While cuddlin' under the mistletoe
And Santa Clause, ya know of course
Is one of the boys from home
It's Chrismukkah in Killarney
