Read His Father's Son: To save the son he loves, a desparate father must confront the ghosts of his past for Free Online

now, hadn’t all this been her fault, and then she appeared in front of him, dressed in her nightclothes, her thick hair stuck to her face on one side where she had slept on it. She looked messed up. She was nothing like the girl who turned heads back in Kilmora.
    “Is he home, Joey?” she said, putting an ear to Marti’s bedroom door.
    He nodded and folded his arms and then he unfolded them quickly. “Will ye leave him be, sure the boy’s crook.”
    “Is he all right? Should I go in?”
    “No, will you get away from that door.”
    Shauna started to curl her lip, and then raised her hand over her eyes to stop the tears that were coming.
    “Go way outta that, will ye,” said Joey.
    “Is he okay?”
    “What do you care?” He grabbed Shauna’s arm and led her away from Marti’s room and into the kitchen, closing the door behind them. “It’s a sin that boy had to leave this house on an empty stomach this morning. Ye obviously expected him to beg in the street for a feed like some class of knacker.”
    Shauna’s eyes started to fill with tears. Joey shook his head. It was all a holy show. Wasn’t it a funny thing entirely, verging on the miraculous even, how she could produce herself at this hour, fresh as a daisy after half the day in bed and after leaving himself to collect a sick boy from the school.
    “Look, I’m sorry,” she said.
    “Isn’t it a bit late in the day to be sorry? It’s that boy of yours you should be saying sorry to when every child from here to the black stump knows it’s a mother that should be there for them in time of illness,” he said. “It’s about time ye pulled yourself together … for the boy.”
    Shauna opened her mouth like she had just taken a shock and then she took a deep breath. She looked like she was about to make a charge. “Is that your considered opinion then?” She leaned forward, poking a finger in Joey’s chest. “Well, it might be easy for you to say. It doesn’t make it easy in the real world when you have the burden of all burdens to carry around on your own two shoulders.”
    “The real world, is it now?” He was having none of it. “I’ll tell you what the real world is, shall I? The real world is what goes on out there when you’re lying in your pit feeling sorry for yourself.”
    “Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?”
    “No, probably not … sure wouldn’t that take eyes in your head and yours are shut most of the time.”
    “Well, that’s rich. At least my eyes are only shut when I’m asleep!”
    “Jaysus, when are ye anything else? Don’t I deserve medals after having wet-nursed you all these years, listening to your whining and putting up with your sluttish manner.”
    “Sluttish manner, sluttish manner. Well I wondered when you were going to start quoting me from the gospel according to Peggy Driscol. If your mother was half the saint you made her out to be she would never have raised a bastard like yourself. Abandoned as a babe you would have been.”
    Shauna was spitting mad and Joey didn’t know what he had done to bring it on. He’d only pointed out the facts of the matter. “That’s not her way,” he said.
    “It was ours,” she said softly. “It was mine, a mother, and I turned my back on our child. It was a long time ago and I’m suffering for it still, and will be for a long time yet. Is that not enough for you?”
    Joey felt shame for what he had said, but why was she bringing this up again? “You have a child here,” he said. The words caught in Joey’s throat like jagged little fish bones and started scratching away inside him.
    “Answer me, haven’t I suffered enough?” Her voice was higher now. She was pleading with him. “You think I haven’t suffered enough, is that it?”
    “Who am I to judge that?” said Joey. “There’s higher powers will have that pleasure.”
    Shauna’s voice went into a wail as she began to sob heavily, and then Joey walked for the door once again.
    “Joey, don’t walk