Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

because you try it and try it and try it a little longer and next thing it’s who you are.

AND SHE DIDN’T GO looking for trouble. Sometimes she felt she deserved more credit for how completely and truly she did not go looking for trouble, or at least the trouble her mother meant.

“The thing is, Peter, grown-ups don’t know what they’re doing any better than kids do. That’s the truth.”

He’d known for a long time now that his tendency to be careful was part of what kept him apart.

She wondered if she was simply very, very mean.

They’d both learned that a memory is a fact that’s been dyed and trimmed and rinsed so many times that it comes out looking almost unrecognizable to anyone else who was in that room,

And while he lightened her burden, he felt he’d lightened his, too.

They were both lonely for Ireland in some ways, or maybe it was loneliness for their own childhoods, before they knew decisions had to be made, before they knew regrets would pile up.

Francis could see that same nameless grief in her—not homesickness, exactly, more like a low fury at having to leave in the first place, and with so little money or wisdom, and to be in a place for so many years that was not home, though neither was home still a home, so where did that leave them?

“You’re harsh, Kate. Everyone says you’re so strong, but what you are is harsh.” Practical. Level-headed. Mentally sound. Not harsh. Blunt, maybe. Honest. Not harsh. How dare he.

And then she saw it all so clearly, the whole trajectory of their lives, a twin flare of lights against the gunmetal winter sky: we’re born, we get sick, we die. Beginning, middle, end. She saw her life as if held aloft by her own hand, and in an instant it spun away from her. Where did she want it to land? She was in the middle. The exact middle. Peter, too. How could she have failed to notice that the beginning had come to an end?

It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, he knew. It was that she loved him so much that it frightened her, loved him so much that she worried she might have to protect herself from it. He tried to let her know that he’d figured that out, finally, that there was no need to explain, but then he realized that she might not know it herself.

And then he saw what he’d never seen before, which was that Peter was fine. And Kate was fine. Lena was fine. And he, Francis Gleeson, was fine. And that all the things that had happened in their lives had not hurt them in any essential way, despite what they may have believed at times. He had not lost anything; he’d only gained. Was the same true for Peter? For Kate? Yes. And yes. Would they be somewhere more magnificent than this were it not for everything that had happened? Would their lives have been fuller and happier? Looking at them now, he didn’t see how it would be possible.