Read Online The Good Daughter by Jane Porter - Free Book Online

from County Clare, but that’s about it. Meg was going to do some genealogy research but I don’t know how far she got, or if she discovered anything relevant.”
    Polly gave her margarita glass a swirl, mixing the slush. “You’re lucky to know that much. I’m a mutt. A little bit of everything and not enough of anything—”
    “Except beautiful,” Kit reminded her.
    “Yeah, whatever.” Polly swirled her cocktail. “Did you like having a dad who was a firefighter?”
    “I did. My friends always had a crush on my dad—”
    “He is hot.”
    “He’s sixty-five.”
    “And still hot.”
    “Hands off. My mom’s crazy about him,” Kit teased, but as soon as the words left her mouth she pictured her mom, frail and fragile, little more than skin and bones, and she didn’t like it, didn’t want to think of her that way.
    “And now he’s finally retired.”
    “After forty years.”
    “That’s a serious accomplishment.”
    “Couldn’t happen now. Younger guys have to retire earlier. Dad was grandfathered in on the old charter. He could have worked until seventy, if he could have passed his physical, and that was never a problem for him. At sixty-three, he was still stronger and faster than most of the probies last year.”
    “Probies?”
    “Rookies.”
    “You are proud of him.”
    “I loved it when he worked. I always liked calling the firehouse and asking for Firefighter Brennan, and then they’d say, which one? Tom, Pat, or Joe? Because my dad worked in the same house with his brothers. Talk about stories. They had so much fun working together. It was a guys’ world.”
    “Would you want one of your sons or daughters to follow in his footsteps?”
    Kit paused to think. “If he or she could work with someone like my dad, or Uncle Pat or Uncle Joe, definitely. Because my dad and his brothers were physically strong. Incredibly strong. But even more important, they were mentally tough. And that’s the part you can’t teach someone.”

Five
    K it had a hard time sleeping her first night back in Capitola. She wasn’t sure if it was the two and a half margaritas she’d drunk at Margaritaville, or talking about her father retiring, or her mother’s cancer, but she woke repeatedly in the night, anxious and uneasy, and each time the same question returned: what would she do when Mom was gone?
    She’d have so much more free time. She’d need to fill that time. Adopting a child would be a good thing.
    Would the rest of the family agree?
    What would Tommy and Cass think? Would Cass mind?
    Of course she’d mind. Cass wanted to be a mom, too.
    At seven, Kit gave up trying to sleep and headed down the house’s steep staircase to the small kitchen to make coffee.
    Plopping down on the sole kitchen stool, she waited for the coffee to brew. Her head hurt and the worried, uneasy feeling lingered.
    She shouldn’t have had the rest of the second margarita, muchless the first half of the third. She wasn’t much of a drinker and should have known her limits, but after talking about Meg and Jack, then Mom and Dad, she had gotten a little too serious, and Polly had made it her personal mission to make her laugh. And she had. So Kit had drunk what was placed in front of her and was regretting it this morning.
    Liquor never solved anything and sometimes just made everything worse.
    Coffee in hand, she grabbed her long fuzzy sweater the color of Irish oats from the hook by the front door and stepped outside to the cottage’s front porch. The morning was cool and misty and she pulled her sweater closer as she leaned on the white-painted railing and stared off across the street to the beach, where the dark green surf crashed on pale, damp sand.
    Not all the beach cottages on Esplanade had an amazing view of the bay, but theirs did, and this morning the fog clung to the craggy bluffs and evergreens. Capitola lay ten miles south of Santa Cruz, and in the summer tourists and beach bunnies swarmed the town, but as it was