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wanderer.”
    The door into the house opens and out comes Ed with two pitchers, one of beer and the other of lemonade, followed by Aunt Kate with a plate of cookies.
    “Ed,” I say, “when did you come home?”
    “Just today, a little while ago,” he says, setting the pitchers down on the big white wicker table on the porch.
    “Looking fit,” I say. He’s taken his suit jacket off, wearing a very white starched shirt and bow tie.
    He’s added some muscle out there surveying with the army. Always tall, the Kelly men, both Ed and Mike well over six feet but Ed the only redhead among the boys and men, and me the only girl with red hair.
    “The Twins,” Granny Honora called us, though Ed was three years older than I. Always a special bond between us. Funny how I could tell him things I couldn’t talk about to my own brothers. Maybe because Mike and Mart and Jim only saw me as the little sister.
    I was so happy when Henrietta brought me Agnella. Finally a little sister for me. I loved Henrietta’s boys, too. Only babies when they first came to us. Hard for them growing up around that gang of big men, their uncles, tromping in and out of the place, filling our small apartment, beds in every room. Mam, Granny Honora, Annie, and I in one bedroom, with the four boys sharing the second and the third for Henrietta and her children.
    “This is how we lived when we came from Ireland,” Granny Honora would say. “Máire and I with nine children between us.”
    “I moved out as soon as I could,” Máire had whispered to me.
    And then the visitors; some fellow connected to us somehow coming from ‘Auld Ireland,’ sleeping up in the parlor for a month or two until he found work and a place of his own.
    Wouldn’t I love a room to myself in Aunt Kate’s boardinghouse, I think as I settle myself in one of the wicker chairs. John Larney and Rose share the swing, moving with a breeze that brings the freshness of Lake Michigan to us. And now Ed sits next to Mame on the loveseat.
    Aunt Kate pours out lemonade for Rose and Mame and me and beer for the boys and herself. Kate’s father was German and her mother was Irish, and although she and her sister—my aunt Nelly, Ed’s mother—have both married Irishmen, they still take a glass or two of Pilsen at night. A no-nonsense woman Aunt Kate, with her flowered apron and thick-soled shoes, gray hair pulled back in a knob. But kind. A second mother to Rose and Mame McCabe, who’d lost their own so young.
    Ed begins to tell us about his adventures with the army surveying team that was plotting a route for a new canal through the wilds of Michigan to connect with the Great Lakes.
    “At first,” he says, “I was rod man, only holding the rods while the others measured. All of the rest had gone to university. And here I was with only my night school learning. But I had on-the-job training at the Sanitary District, I told them, starting as an axe-man cutting trees along the canal. So then I worked my way from rod-man to full-fledged surveyor. At camp, after dinner, I’d get Captain Lewis to discuss the work. Asked him a lot of questions about the best way to blast through the rocks, how to test the soil, things like that. He gave me more and more responsibility. Said every important engineering project depends on an accurate survey. Have to know the lay of the land first. I told him that was true of most things.”
    John tells Ed he’s sure the army boys were impressed and hoped they would send a good report back to the Sanitary District. “You’re going to need help getting your old job back, Ed, with the Republicans in charge,” he says.
    John and Ed are off and running about who had been elected and whose brother-in-law had gotten the top job until Mame says, “Politics. You two always end up going on about politics. Can’t we talk about something else?”
    Ed smiles at her. “Sorry, Mame. Don’t mean to bore you.”
    Bore her? Politics are Ed’s lifeblood and he’s