Leaving Seán and his mum behind and making a life in Boston had been hard. He’d made so few trips back home over the decade he’d lived in Boston, he felt further and further away from his childhood. He missed Seán, obviously, and other friends, he missed Irish pubs and the craic, watching the hurling and the Gaelic football, he missed the landscape, the rain, the very air they breathed. But he’d been determined to get away and he’d done it.
Fitzgerald’s always attracted an Irish crowd and Patrick would catch up with the news back home and how Cork were doing in the Championship. Not that he wasn’t fully au fait, as he still listened to the matches on his phone or caught up with the news on the RTÉ app. His staff were all Irish, on working visas, and they soon assimilated into American life, as he had, with one foot and half a heart back in Ireland. His business partner, Kerry-Anne Daly, always said that he’d imported Ireland to Boston.
He’d only returned for weddings and funerals mainly. The worst, obviously, being his mother’s last year, where he and Seán shook hands with practically everyone from the town and county. Their mother had been a teacher and knew generations of Midleton families and the queue had snaked out of the church. The priest had said to him and Seán, ‘The queue is so long it could be seen from space.’ Father Peter had paused. ‘Or from heaven.’
God knows how he and Seán hadn’t rolled their eyes or made some joke which they normally would, but their mother’s funeral was a sobering occasion and, standing shoulder to shoulder with his brother, Patrick had felt so many emotions he’d no idea which one to focus on. Yet all Patrick could think about was getting on his flight from Cork back to Boston.
Back at the house, he and Seán made tea and ham sandwiches, and they smiled and chatted about Cork getting to the final and the story which was in the papers that weekend about the man who was caught on the motorway doing 120kph on his John Deere tractor. He remembered catching up with old school friends, thanking them for coming. ‘Mind yourself now,’ he said, as he waved them off at the end of the night, fuelled by cups of tea and a feeling of complete invulnerability.This is who I want to be, he’d thought.Not sad or crying, not the boy I was, scared of his own father, too shy to speak in school. I’m back from Boston, back among my own. Mam, you’d be proud of me.
Their father hadn’t come to the funeral, thankfully. Patrick had kept half an eye on the door of the church, expecting to see his face. And hers, probably. He’d bumped into his father’s partner, Sandra, in Midleton a couple of years earlier, his last trip back to the small town for Seán’s graduation. He’d ducked into Deasy’s and browsed the magazines, hoping she’d be gone. But she’d followed him in.
‘I thought it was you, Patrick.’ There was a desperate look in her eyes, reminding him of their old collie, Jimbo.
Patrick had managed a smile. ‘How’s yourself, Sandra?’
‘Grand now, Patrick. And you and Seán? All well?’
‘Ah, you know yourself…’ He didn’t want to give anything away. Nothing about him and Seán. He hesitated, hoping she would finish up and leave him alone.
‘And your mother, Patrick? I heard she wasn’t well?’
Why did she have to ask about his mother? Even if she was well, which she wasn’t, he wouldn’t have known how to answer. In Boston, he didn’t behave like this, hiding in newsagents, avoiding people. In Fitzgerald’s he strolled around, greeting people, finding the best table for guests, making sure the staff were happy and able to do their job, the glasses gleaming, the white tablecloths the brightest and the stiffest Irish linen. He always wore a suit, grasping hands, a word here, a joke there. A master of his own universe. And then in the kitchen, checking on Johnny, the chef that he’d brought over from Ireland having once tasted his scallops and black pudding in a little restaurant he’d been running in Bundoran. It was like he’d created the perfect world, there were never raised voices, nothing like the chaos of his childhood. Nothing like his father.
The following day, just as he was about to head back to the airport for the Boston flight, Seán had turned to him. ‘You all right?’
‘Of course!’ He gave Seán a small slap on his chest with the back of his hand. ‘You?’
Seán nodded, slowly. ‘Grand.’ He’d paused. ‘It’ll be hard without her, though, won’t it?’ His voice had cracked and Patrick needed Seán to understand they weren’t going to crumble. If he wasn’t going to be around, he needed Seán to be okay.
‘She’d want us to crack on with things,’ he’d said. ‘We’re going to be okay, Seán. We really are.’ He looked at his brother right in his blue eyes, the ones he’d inherited from their mother and she from her father, Jimmy Fitzgerald. A dairy farmer himself, son of one and on it went, each generation gathering more cows. Until they got to Patrick and Seán and the farming line ended with them.
He drove to the airport and cleared customs, and as he sat down on the flight, he felt his hands begin to shake. The shock of the funeral, the adrenaline of the last days, weeks and months, his grief beginning to seep into all the little crevices of his being. For feck’s sake. He reached his hand to the small bell above his head, and pulled it. ‘A double whiskey,’ he said, smiling at the steward. ‘No ice, please.’
He swigged back the whiskey, ordered one more, and fixed his eyes on some godawful film for the rest of the flight, willing himself gone from Ireland and wishing himself free of everything that had gone on before. Vulnerability, cracking up, breaking down was not an option. Never had been and never would be. He’d learned the lesson well from facing down his father for all those years and he was not about to start now. But there was one person he wanted to talk to, someone he used to know, someone he didn’t think about as much as he used to. She’d understand, he thought. She’d lost her own mother. But Rosie was years before and they hadn’t spoken for so long. They were strangers now. That was then. And today, back in Boston, heading back to Ireland, this time for Seán’s wedding, he felt nervous again.
3
ROSIE
‘Made from the finest Irish linen.’ The hotel’s house manager, Bertie, was showing off his new suit in the office to Rosie and Grace. ‘Sure, it cost an absolute fortune,’ went on Bertie, picking off some lint from his lapel, ‘but you know what they say, quality comes at a price. I feel like it’s the kind of thing WB Yeats wore when he was writing those long poems about swans and whatnot.’
Grace appraised Bertie’s suit approvingly. ‘Very dapper. Perfect for a heatwave.’
‘You look like a man of leisure,’ said Rosie. ‘Or a member of the British royal family.’
‘Perhaps one of the minor ones,’ said Bertie, modestly. ‘Now, tell me this, what time are the bride and groom arriving?’
‘Any moment now,’ said Grace, her nose an inch away from the fan, blasting cool air into her face so her hair was permanently in flight. ‘Well, the bride and her matron of honour are arriving soon. The groom is collecting his brother at the airport. I actually feel nervous, as though I’m getting married.’ She paused. ‘I may as well enjoy the feeling, because it might be the closest I’ll ever get.’ She picked up her mini-fan and angled it down the front of her dress. ‘Would it be wrong to wear no underwear under my kaftan?’
‘Wrong,’ said Rosie, emphatically.
‘Rosie, are you not melting in that suit?’ asked Grace.
Rosie never gave her clothes a moment’s thought. She wore suits on her working hours and jeans when she wasn’t. She had begun wearing a skirt suit when she was training and it was a no-brainer solution to workwear.
Bertie turned to Rosie, giving her the once-over. ‘You do look roasting,’ he said. ‘Have you considered something woven from the finest Irish linen?’
‘Or a kaftan,’ said Grace. ‘It’s so airy. The breeze is able to penetrate.’ To illustrate her point, she placed her mini-fan through one arm and the air rippled all the way through to the other arm. ‘If I didn’t like food so much, I might take off,’ she said. ‘But Rosie, a navy skirt suit is… well…’ She paused, as though trying to find the right words. ‘It’s just a small bit old-fashioned – and also too hot.’
