And so, Gavin Donohue spoke the tale of his Irish love. It was a slow telling, halting and starting again like an engine without enough oil. But the pieces of the story were intact—the story of his journey to Ireland, of meeting the first Colleen. Twilight fell long on the sandbar as the tide moved in, but it was Ireland that filtered into the Lowcountry evening air; the emerald world their dad took over an hour to describe. Fiddle music seemed to echo across the water. Galway Bay, winter whipped and fierce, raged at the sandbar instead of the calm May of Watersend, South Carolina. A pub, known dimly in a faded photo, sprang to life with boisterous County Clare villagers, with grief and love and laughter. And above all of this, and through it, “The Lark in the Clear Air” played on and on and on.

They arrived home in silence; enough had been said, the puttering of the boat and the whip of the wind were their companions. They docked and hugged each other good-bye without I love yous and see you laters, everyone absorbing what they had heard and now knew. When Shane and their dad had left for the pub and Hallie drove off to her children, Colleen slipped into her bedroom and began to compose the tale Gavin had told.

Yes, she thought, something had always been whispering, a certain knowing lurking at the edges of her consciousness, the gap of a secret where her mother’s full attention might have been. Why had her mother insisted on calling her Lena, never by her full name? Now Colleen knew . . .

Colleen wrote so quickly that she misspelled words, shortened sentences. She would clean it later, but she needed to get it all down, everything her dad had said as best she could remember. The truth had struck her like a body blow and she still felt numb. Because she’d learned today that she had another mother, another woman to be called by the same name.

THE MEMORY BOOK

Gavin Donohue’s Story

Her name was Colleen O’Shea, and you met on an unseasonably warm September day in County Clare, Ireland.

As you stepped inside, the O’Shea pub was resonant with the sounds of a woman playing the fiddle and singing softly, “Dear thoughts are in my mind and my soul it soars enchanted . . . as I hear the sweet lark sing in the clear air of the day.”

You’d stumbled into an evening of mourning for a local couple who’d passed to the next world only days before in a terrible car accident. The Irish mourn this way—completely and with their entire being. There can be nothing held back. How else can one celebrate a life? they asked.