Installment Thirty-Nine

The happy young couple left me, their heads spinning with plans. I told them simply that I would await further instructions. It is their wedding after all.

Before chucking the almost-empty wine box, I had poured its cardboard remains into my glass. Staring out my window at the brick wall of the apartment building next door felt positively metaphorical.

The only question in my mind was whether to go outside and bash my head against it or figure out a way to break through it. The wall might have been covered with my own graffiti.

WTF GABRIEL KELLY?

I simply couldn't rationalize what he had done to his family. Of course his wife's death had been tragic. Anger would have been a natural response. But to run away from his own children? What on earth could have happened to warrant such a drastic decision?

An old friend from my 'diplomatic daughter' days had sent me a newspaper clipping from an Irish newspaper about his wedding. It's probably in one of the unopened boxes still littering my apartment.

I remember how I had studied the picture of Gabe's bride (I can now see her in Sean) and the way the photographer had placed their hands, wrapped together, around her bouquet. I had been terribly jealous.

At the time of his marriage I had not met Martin yet. In fact, I was having a rough time navigating the dating world.

No one I met in Canada had traveled and moved around as I had done. Marrying, even dating, someone who had stayed in one place all his life would practically constituted a mixed marriage for someone like me.

Of course Martin had not been mobile as a child. He more than made up for that, though, with his career choice in the oil industry. He became a serial expat after that.

The Gabe Kelly who ran out on his children was not the Gabe in that wedding photo and certainly not the one I grew up with in Argentina. Something devastating must have happened to lead him to make such a terrible mistake. I simply had to believe that.

As Deborah had mentioned Sean was considering reconciling with his father, I had quietly asked her as she was leaving if Sean had any idea where he might be living. I assumed the answer would be that he was in Ireland somewhere.

It turns out, though, that Gabe may have been 'hiding out' the past decade (if you want to call working in community development hiding), in Ethiopia of all places. It seems Ireland has a lot of aid projects there.

Remembering the last time I saw Gabe, in an airport of course, when he teased me for being out to save the world by working in international development instead of the more lofty (and snobby in my view) field of international relations, I found this news ironic.

But Ethiopia? I couldn't possibly make this stuff up.

I decided then and there that I would find him before Sean did. Exactly how I would accomplish this I would leave to the gods and Google.