Kate Reilly Brinkley

7. BFFs, Pt. 1

I met Carol Prentice in the sixth grade through our mutual friend Lulu. She had a wicked laugh and a tiny toenail on each of her little toes. She had read all the Nancy Drew books. She also had a window air conditioner in her room, which was pure luxury in my book. Carol wentContinue reading “7. BFFs, Pt. 1”

6. An Irish Wedding

When my brother Dennis married Geraldine O’Mahony, I was eight. Dennis, like many other Georgetown alums, had found his way into the bar business, in his case, after teaching English at St. John’s High School. He met his beautiful bride at Matt Kane’s on 13th Street. She and her family had left Waterford, Ireland whenContinue reading “6. An Irish Wedding”

5. Sergeants & Ghosts

When you’re seven and following your older brothers, there’s a shortcut for everything: through a neighbor’s yard, over a fence or, in this case, behind an apartment building and down an alleyway. It was in this alleyway that we found a trove of discarded building materials from the construction of an apartment building on ConnecticutContinue reading “5. Sergeants & Ghosts”

4. Moe

When there were only five children in the Reilly family, my parents took the four older kids to Canada on vacation and left Kevin, the baby, at home with our grandmother. They visited Quebec and Niagara Falls, but the stories they came back with didn’t involve any of the sights. Apparently, Dad never wanted toContinue reading “4. Moe”

3. Heights

To explain how young my grandmother was when she married my grandfather, Mom said, She put a piece of paper with a 1 written on it in her left shoe and one with an 8 in her right shoe, so she could say yes when they asked her at the courthouse if she was overContinue reading “3. Heights”

2. Watch

One of my earliest memories is of standing in front of the toilet in the second floor bathroom at Jocelyn Street with my brother Brian. We were looking at our oldest brother Dennis’ watch as it lay submerged in the toilet bowl, trying to figure out what to do next. Kevin, Brian and I wereContinue reading “2. Watch”

1. Lost

It wasn’t until years later that I understood all children don’t go missing at some point in their lives. The story was one I had heard as far back as I could remember and, although I didn’t remember the event itself, I had absorbed enough detail to tell it as though I did. It wasContinue reading “1. Lost”

Characters

Brian was born 15 months before me. It’s fair to say he was the most beautiful child to come from parents’ prolific union — big blue eyes and black curls, the outward appearance of what was a most loving disposition. There was no one Brian came across who was not his friend, including the wormsContinue reading “Characters”

Jocelyn Street

Our house was a 1910 stucco house with a wraparound front porch. The sixteen steps that led to the porch made a perfect snow-packed slope on winter days. We would fly down the steps on metal saucers and land in a pile of snow at the edge of the curb. Inside, the front hall heldContinue reading “Jocelyn Street”