Read A Sister's Promise for Free Online Page B

graveside, they were warmed by the bright sun shining down from a sky of Wedgwood blue, andsomehow this made the tragic deaths even more poignant. As the clods of earth fell with dull thuds on the coffins they seemed to reverberate in Molly’s brain. Dead! Dead! Dead! Kevin’s sobs became more audible and Biddy moved towards the child purposefully, but he pushed her away and turned instead to his grandfather. Stan held the little boy’s shuddering body tight. He didn’t urge him to stop crying either thinking he had a good enough reason to break his heart.
    He envied him in a way because he would have liked the opportunity to go home now and lock the door and cry his eyes out. Instead, he knew he had to lead the mourners to the room at the back of the Lyndhurst pub which Paul Simmons had booked, and make small talk with the people who had come to pay their respects.
    When he’d first been discussing the funeral arrangements with Mr Simmons, Stan, who had thought the mourners would only amount to a handful, said he intended to invite them back to the house. Mr Simmons had said he thought a room at a pub might be better and Stan, not up to arguing and certainly not with a toff, had agreed reluctantly.
    He had thought though the few people he had anticipated coming would look silly and maybe feel out of place, but it wasn’t that way at all. He looked at the crush of people around him in the room the pub had allocated them and was glad he had agreed. Kevin still held tight to his hand as Father Clayton, who had said the Requiem Mass, approached them.
    Father Clayton liked Stan, with whom he was not above sparring and joking, as he had liked Ted, and thought them fine men. He couldn’t understand for the life of him why they hadn’t turned Catholic and embraced the one true faith.
    That day though, Kevin’s large brown eyes still swam with tears as he turned them on the priest and demanded, ‘What did God want with my mammy and daddy?’
    Father Clayton didn’t have an answer that would satisfy the child. ‘We don’t understand the ways of God, Kevin.’
    ‘Not even you?’
    ‘Not even me.’
    ‘Well, then,’ Kevin said. ‘What’s the point of it all? That means that God can go round doing what He likes and you just say we can’t understand and that.’ He stamped his foot suddenly and cried in a high voice full of hurt and confusion, ‘I want to know. I think we needed Mammy and Daddy much more than He did.’
    ‘Kevin!’ The name was said like a pistol shot.
    Kevin jumped and his eyes were full of foreboding as he watched his grandmother approach. ‘Now you see the level of my concern that I explained to you this morning when I called in to introduce myself and arrange an appointment?’ Biddy complained to Father Clayton. ‘The child has not even been taught how to address a priest correctly, and as for questioning the ways of our Good Lord, well, words fail me totally.’
    Before the priest had time to reply, Stan burst in, ‘I think Kevin has a perfect right to ask what manner of God it was at all who allowed his parents to be taken away, and who else to ask but the priest? So you just leave him alone.’ He turned to Father Clayton and went on before Biddy could speak, ‘We’re taught that God loves us, aren’t we? Well, He sure as hell didn’t show much love to poor Nuala and Ted. That’s how I feel and so I know exactly what young Kevin means.’
    So did Father Clayton, and he was glad he had been the one assigned to take the Mass and not Father Monahon, for he would have torn the child to ribbons if he had been silly enough to say those things in front of him. As for Stan, a non-Catholic, Father Monahon would have a total lack of understanding for his pain. To Father Monahon, Catholicism and the pursuit of it was all that mattered. He was like the maternal grandmother, just recently arrived from Ireland, no doubt a devout and ardent Catholic, but not a woman he could take to at all. Father