Foster

by Claire Keegan

when I hesitate, she hesitates with me.

I’m unused to sitting still and do not know what to do with my hands.

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.

‘Haven’t you earned it?’ ‘I don’t know have I,’ he says. ‘But isn’t it happening anyhow.’

We go to the butcher’s for rashers and sausages and a horseshoe of black pudding, to the chemist where she asks for Aunt Acid,

‘Not long now till they’ll be back to school,’ says the woman behind the counter. ‘Isn’t it a great relief to have them off your back?’ ‘This one is no trouble,’ Mrs Kinsella says, and pays for the card along with some sheets of notepaper and a packet of envelopes. ‘It’s only missing her I’ll be when she is gone.’

He goes out, stumbling a little, then comes back in with a sheet of sandpaper and scuffs up the soles of my new shoes so I will not slip.

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. He takes shorter steps so we can walk in time. I think about the woman in the cottage, of how she walked and spoke, and conclude that there are huge differences between people.

Maybe the way back will somehow make sense of the coming.

I hold on as though I’ll drown if I let go, and listen to the woman who seems, in her throat, to be taking it in turns, sobbing and crying, as though she is crying not for one now, but for two.