Dobby lifted his gaze.
“Benji thought Lambert was his father.”
As the sun split its rays through the church’s broken ceiling, Dobby told LeFleur the story of Benji’s childhood.
“Benji’s mother’s name was Claire. My mother was Emilia. They were sisters. Very close sisters. When my father died, we came to America, just like Benji wrote. But he didn’t explain why we came.
“Benji’s father was supposedly an American, that’s true. And his mother did meet him in Scotland, the week of that golf tournament. And like a lot of women in our poor little town, she found herself pregnant too young. She never breathed a word to anyone except my mom. But once she started showing, Claire’s parents were ashamed. It was one thing in our community when people knew who the father was. They had someone to blame. But keeping the father secret made it harder for Claire. People acted like it was her fault. It was terrible, the way they treated her. She was smart. A good athlete. But once she gave birth, she was on her own. And Carndonagh was not an easy place to be on your own.
“She raised Benji by herself, working in a butcher shop during the day, living in a flat above it at night. They barely had a penny. The town looked at them as potlickers. Claire wouldn’t take any help from her folks. She was proud, even a bit headstrong, to be honest.
“One night, according to my ma, Claire came by, all worked up. She said she’d read a story in a magazine about Benji’s birth father. He was hugely successful now and lived in Boston. Claire said she was going to find him, tell him about their son. She believed he would take responsibility. Of course my ma told her, ‘Don’t be daft. He’ll cast you off like a beggar.’ But Claire was convinced. She and Benji moved in with us for almost a year, so she could save what she earned and use it for plane tickets. That’s when Benji and I got really close. We shared the same bed, ate our breakfasts together. We thought of each other as brothers, because we didn’t have brothers of our own.
“Anyhow. You read what happened. They went all the way to the States, and my mother was right. The guy rejected her. Claire was broken. My mother sensed it from her letters and phone calls. That’s why we moved to Boston, to be near her. They had a strong sister thing, those two, stronger than work, stronger than country. Funny, ’cause Benji and I kind of developed the same bond.
“Anyhow, by the time we got there, Benji was a changed kid. He knew he’d been rejected. He saw what it did to his mother. He started to hate anyone with money, or anyone who acted superior to him. I guess he associated them with the father he wasn’t good enough for. But that father was always in his head. As teenagers, we used to sneak into the bleachers at Fenway Park, the baseball stadium, and he’d look down at the people in the expensive seats and say, ‘Any one of those guys might be my deadbeat dad.’ Or we’d take the T line after school and ride out to Beacon Hill, the fancy neighborhood, and we’d smoke cigarettes and watch men coming home from work in their nice suits, and he’d say the same thing. ‘Might be that guy, Dobby. Or maybe that guy …’
“I told him to stop wasting his time. It wasn’t worth it. Don’t get me wrong. I had plenty of issues with the rich. But not like Benji.
“Then his mom got injured at the factory, and he quit school to take care of her. That was a raw deal. She did nothing wrong. A scaffold she was on collapsed, but that factory built a case against her so they wouldn’t have to pay lifetime health coverage. Imagine getting too injured to walk, and then being blamed for it. No wonder Benji was angry.
“I came back to visit them once. I was in the navy at that point, and Aunt Claire was in her wheelchair—it was the last time I saw her alive. Benji was still going on about why she was even working in that factory, and where was the father who should have been responsible for them? He said he’d go after the bastard himself if he ever knew who he was. But Claire took that secret to her grave.”
He paused. “Or so I thought.”
LeFleur looked up. “What?”
“My ma had moved back to Ireland. A few years later, she got cancer. I was with her one night, near the end, when she told me something she’d sworn to never tell anyone. She said that Benji’s father wasn’t only rich, but he’d become a pretty famous businessman. And that poor Claire had to read about him in the American newspapers.”
He hesitated. “And that his name was Jason.”
LeFleur blinked hard, his thoughts racing.