Foster

by Claire Keegan

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.

I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.

With my mother it is all work: us, the butter-making, the dinners, the washing up and getting up and getting ready for Mass and school, weaning calves and hiring men to plough and harrow the fields, stretching the money and setting the alarm. But this is a different type of house. Here there is room, and time to think. There may even be money to spare.

Her hands are like my mother’s hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.

‘Where there’s a secret,’ she says, ‘there’s shame – and shame is something we can do without.’

As soon as she says this, I realise she is just like everyone else, and wish I was back at home so that all the things I do not understand could be the same as they always are.

Neither one of us talks, the way people sometimes don’t when they are happy – but as soon as I have this thought, I realise its opposite is also true.

This water is cool and clean as anything I have ever tasted: it tastes of my father leaving, of him never having been there, of having nothing after he was gone. I dip it again and lift it level with the sunlight. I drink six measures of water and wish, for now, that this place without shame or secrets could be my home.

I want to say I am afraid but am too afraid to say so.

Everything changes into something else, turns into some version of what it was before.

‘God forgive me but if I ever run into that woman again it will be too soon,’

Kinsella takes my hand in his. As soon as he takes it, I realise my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go so I won’t have to feel this. It’s a hard feeling but as we walk along I begin to settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be.

‘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.’

‘Daddy,’ I warn him, I call him. ‘Daddy.’