The memory madeher squeeze Danny's shoulder tighter, who in turn wiggled away from her grasp. He jogged ahead of her, sweeping snow off cars as he went to make snowballs and threw one at a passing crosstown bus. As she watched him, Holly tried to remember herself at that age: carefree, with two parents at home who loved her.
How that had all changed when Eileen had gone on to admit the awful truth.
Holly had stared at the women across from her, the woman she had called Mom all those years. It was as if she’d suddenly been given a pair of glasses that completely altered her vision. Instead she saw Eileen as separate from her: small and dowdy, with a bad haircut and poorly outlined lipstick.
‘I'm … not your child?’ Holly screamed, hysterical
Eileen grabbed her hands and Holly snatched them away. The blood drained from her mother’s face. ‘I’m so, so, sorry, I never meant you to find out like this. Your dad and I had planned to sit down together one day and … ’ She trailed off.
‘When? When were you going to tell me that I’m not your daughter?’ Holly started to cry and was angry with herself for it. She swatted a tear away as if it were a fly.
‘Oh Holly, youaremy daughter, you were sent to us – me and your Dad … ’ Eileen reached for her again and Holly stood up from the table, knocking the chair back.
‘Maybe some day you might want to find her – maybe when you had children of your own ...’ her mother continued pleadingly.
‘Children of my own?’ Holly spat at her. ‘I'm sixteen? What – you think I am going to follow in her footsteps and get knocked up?’ she hissed, assuming that was what had happened with her real mother. Her real mother … it was all so horribly surreal.
‘Holly ...’ Eileen pleaded
But Holly did not hear her; she was gone, leaving the house in a whirl, running down the stairs and out into the street. She started walking and had found herself in front of the hardware store. Her beloved dad was behind the counter, ringing up a can of paint for a young man in tight pants. When she entered the young man grimaced at her lewdly.
‘Hi sweetheart,’ her father said calmly, leaning his full weight on his hands on the counter. Looking the young man square in the eye he said, ‘Couldn't be luckier, having a daughter who likes to stop by to help her poor old father.’
But poor and old were the last words Holly would have used to describe her father that day. He stood about six feet two and was built like a large square, with broad shoulders and a long jaw. He pushed the can of paint across the counter to the now nervous-looking young man. ‘Enjoy!’ he said cheerily as the guy scampered out through the door.
When the door shut, Holly burst into tears. The next thing she felt was her father’s large, solid arms around her and him saying: ‘Shh, it can't be that bad, you haven’t got a worry in the world.’
When she finally calmed herself enough to tell him what had happened, he switched the door sign to ‘Closed’ and gave her a cup of coffee with a dab of whiskey in it, his Irish coffee special for bad days, he called it.
‘Do you know where I came from?’ he had asked her, very seriously. ‘Do you, Holly?’
She had shrugged in her impartial teenage way and waited for him to tell her, but he had just kept asking her questions.
‘Where was I born?’
‘In Ireland, Dad,’ she had sighed.
‘Yeah, but where?’ he insisted.
Holly paid attention now. ‘Your mother’s bed, in the Liberties.’ She had no idea where that was or what kind of a place it was, but it sounded like a good place for a childhood, carefree.
‘Yeah,’ he nodded sadly. ‘I was born to a woman who wanted another baby like she wanted a hole in the head. My older sister had sat out on the front step with her ears covered as my mother screamed her agony to the whole world,’
Holly looked at him. She knew the story about him being born at home, but he had never said he wasn't wanted. He had come from a large Irish Catholic family, where lots of children were inevitable – no one complained about it.
He pulled her closer. ‘Holly, my mother had me and barely looked at me, hardly said two words to me my whole life with her, which was only up to the age of fifteen.’ Holly had heard this story too, but in her mind she assumed he had left for New York at such a young age because he had just been wild and rebellious.
‘You know when I left for the boat to America, all my mum said was, “good luck.” She didn't even say my name. I think the whole time I was in the Liberties with my family, I never heard my mother say my name once.’
‘Oh, Dad,’ Holly hugged him back, suddenly tired of knowing more than her years.
‘All I'm trying to say,’ he added, squeezing her tightly, ‘is that we are all born – that’s the easy part. It's being loved and wanted that's tricky.’
Now, walking the snowy streets of New York, Holly watched her son, who ran ahead of her, then waited, then broke away from her again, like a colt experimenting with leaving its mother. She kept a steady pace, letting him be free and return as much as he wanted. There was no question that Danny was wanted and very much loved, at least by her.
They reached Twenty-Third Street, where the crowds were beginning to come out on the hunt for coffee, papers and fresh-baked goods. Danny's pace had slowed from a boisterous snowball pitcher to a shivering eleven year old. She linked his arm through hers. ‘Let’s take the crosstown bus to Madison and then catch the uptown?’
He nodded and took her arm. ‘Where are we going?’
