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It is something I am used to, this way men have of not talking: they like to kick a divot out of the grass with a boot heel, to slap the roof of a car before it takes off, to spit, to sit with their legs wide apart, as though they do not care.
Now that my father has delivered me and eaten his fill, he is anxious for his tobacco; to have his smoke, and get away. Always, it’s the same: he never stays in any place long after he’s eaten – not like my mother who would talk until it grew dark and light again.
My father takes the rhubarb from her, but it is awkward as a baby in his arms. A stalk falls to the floor and then another. He waits for her to pick it up, to hand it to him. She waits for him to do it. Neither one of them will budge. In the end, it’s Kinsella who stoops to lift it.
Why did he leave without so much as a good-bye, without ever mentioning that he would come back for me?
She takes the hairbrush then and I can hear her counting under her breath to a hundred and then she stops and plaits it loosely. I fall asleep fast that night and when I wake, the old feeling is not there. Later that afternoon, when Mrs Kinsella is making the bed, she looks at me, pleased. ‘Your complexion is better already, see?’ she says. ‘All you need is minding.’
Walking down the road, there’s a taste of something darker in the air, of something that might fall and blow and change things.
I think about the woman in the cottage, of how she walked and spoke, and conclude that there are huge differences between people.
‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’
‘Ah, the women are nearly always right, all the same,’ he says. ‘Do you know what the women have a gift for?’ ‘What?’ ‘Eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what’s coming before a man even gets a sniff of it.’
‘You couldn’t stay here forever with us two old forgeries.’ I stand there and stare at the fire, trying not to cry. It is a long time since I have done this and, in doing it, remember that it is the worst thing you can possibly do. I don’t so much hear as feel Kinsella leaving the room. ‘Don’t upset yourself,’ the woman says. ‘Come over here.’ She shows me pages with knitted jumpers and asks me which pattern I like best – but all the patterns seem to blur together and I just point to one, a blue one, which looks like it might be easy. ‘Well, you would pick the hardest one in the book,’ she
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We fold what clothes I have and place them inside, along with the books we bought at Webb’s in Gorey: Heidi, What Katy Did Next, The Snow Queen. At first, I struggled with some of the bigger words, but Kinsella kept his fingernail under each, patiently, until I guessed it or half-guessed it and then I did this by myself until I no longer needed to guess, and read on.
Mrs Kinsella gives me a bar of yellow soap and my facecloth, the hairbrush. As we gather all these things together, I remember the days we spent, where we got them, what was sometimes said, and how the sun, for most of the time, was shining.
Several things flash through my mind: the boy in the wallpaper, the gooseberries, that moment when the bucket pulled me under, the lost heifer, the mattress weeping, the third light. I think of my summer, of now, mostly of now.
