LITMIR.BIZ

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stopping at Seapoint before moving on toward Howth or Bray. Your father said nothing. You watched him carefully. He took off his shirt and used it to wipe under his arms and neck, packed sinew and muscle moving just beneath his skin, sallow and scarred.

      The workday was ending when you heard him hum a faint, nameless tune. It lifted your mood. He told you to start cleaning up. It was two hours before the bookies closed, and now he was in a hurry to leave.

      “Bring that tray back in to her,” he says. He was standing stock-still, looking at the great house. The pennies you’d pay for his thoughts. “Go on,” he says.

      As you bent and picked up the tray, you saw a string of tiny ants leading from the grass along the rosewood, ending at the untouched biscuit.

      “I need the toilet,” you say.

      He looked at you and exhaled. “Just go behind the wall there, like I did.”

      You felt your shoulders shrug.

      “Take your shoes off before you go in there—be quick about it.”

      When you got to the granite step, you dipped and pulled your boots from the heel. Your socks were wet, gray-white, and a blackened toenail was exposed on one side. You used your shoulder to push open the heavy door, and the first step on the cold flagstones chilled your feet. Narrow splinters of afternoon light found their way through the gaps in the shutters, burnishing here and there the contours of the kitchen. You found an old Belfast sink and unloaded the tray into it, putting the biscuits into the bin, and later you thought about her finding them.

      In the hallway, stronger light filtered past stained-glass panels above the main door, and a patchwork of amber, red, and blue inched across the floor. The walls were high, the cornices seemed to float, and the pictures on the walls were not pictures of the pictures, even you knew that. The sound of your own movement up the stairs disappeared into the carpet. You found the bathroom following her directions: top of the stairs, first on the right.

      Once locked inside, you finally admitted to yourself that you didn’t need to be. You were there to discover her, as if in the stacked white towels, the pile of books on the floor, or the assorted toiletries, both gilded and plain, she could be found. There was an ink drawing without a frame, hanging from a single thumbtack: a large woman, naked, drawn from behind, her head turned. Her eyes found you. Your fingers traced the outline of the ink, every curve, every curve. You wondered if she was still at home or if every room in the house was like this—empty and full of her at the same time.

      You didn’t wash your hands; instead you ran the tap and watched how the rising steam fogged the mirror just a little, just enough to blur your reflection.

      The lock made a steel popping sound even though you took great care to be quiet. Pat, pat, pat down the stairs without a whisper. You knew that the way to your father was back through the kitchen, but in the hallway off to the left, a door was open. You stood completely still, comforted by the fullness of the silence as it settled around you like water in the bathtub.

      A few easy steps, and you were standing inside the doorway, watching her. She sat on a worn blue couch, facing into the room, her elbows stuck to her knees and her head resting in the pocket of her hands. Not reading or sleeping or even allowing her shoulders to rise with her breathing, just staring, the way you’d watch telly, but there was no telly. Her old bathrobe had been replaced with a soft red sweater and a dark wool skirt that ran just past her knee.

      Without remembering your place, you say, “Are you not feeling well?” At first she didn’t move, then she turned and you could see one of her eyes, and she laughed a little, but just with her breath. Keeping the same half smile, she says, “I feel fine.” There was a joke in there, but it was only for her.

      You wondered if she had heard you come in and traced your movements throughout her house. “I don’t want to be a butcher,” you say. You rubbed your fingers together and they were numb.

      “No?”

      “No,” you say.

      “What do you want to be?” she says.

      “I don’t know,” you say. “I want to go away, leave here . . . Ireland, I mean, leave Ireland.”

      “Where would you go?” she says, and you heard the sudden blaze of a car horn outside, and you knew it was him, missing the 4:10 at Cheltenham.

      “I don’t know,” you say, and felt you needed to pick somewhere, anywhere. “Maybe Barcelona,” you say then because, in case she asked, you knew it was in Spain.

      “Well,” she says. “Maybe you can move to Barcelona and become a vegetarian.”

      You looked away, unsure. The car horn again, longer this time.

      “You have a beautiful face,” she says, but you didn’t think she was trying to be mean. Your face felt suddenly hot.

      “I think that’s me da,” you say.

      “I think so too,” she says, turning away. Her hair spilled forward, and you saw her white neck. You stepped back, out the door, through the hallway, across the kitchen, and outside into the still-light garden. You were running toward your father.

      4

      You could hear the car engine making that tick-tick-tick cooling-down sound.

      “That’s one fifty, one seventy. One seventy-five.” In the front seat beside your father, your hand held out as he counted coins into it. Cars passed, and a scatter of children could be heard somewhere, laughing.

      “That’s three fifty, four.” He dug around in his front pocket, searching for more coins, staying away from his back pocket, where he kept his roll of notes. You lowered your hand to seem as if you didn’t expect any more; you had learned to be grateful for any amount, you always got more that way.

      He found another fistful, more than he wanted to give over, you knew, but he could never put them back now that he’d shown them.

      “Here,” he says, and put the whole pile of coins in your palm. “Here, now listen,” he says. “Hide that from your mother.” It was more than six pounds, maybe seven, guessing by the weight. You wouldn’t count it until you were up the road and out of his sight.

      “Thanks, Da, thanks.” It was wrong to put the money straight into your pocket. You weren’t sure why, it just was.

      You were done with each other then, itching to take leave of each other’s company. The car was parked beside the bookies, and there were the notes in your father’s back pocket. For a moment you thought about your mother at home and that awful look when she worried. You thought about her chapped and hardened hands. She did so much.

      “You were a help today,” he says. You almost said thanks, but didn’t. “Jesus, but she was a posh one, huh? I’d say a silver spoon there all right.”

      The sun had dipped below the slate rooftops so slowly that it seemed to be clawing to hold on. A bus went past, and the car rocked a little. You wanted to have that easy way with him, that easy way men have. “Oh, silver spoon is right.” That’s all you would have had to say, then laughed. You thought about her, her name—what was her name? You couldn’t ask him. She’d never once looked at the hole in your sock, and she must have seen it. You remembered then that she wore a gold chain around her neck, and wondered if it had a crucifix at the end of it. She’d fingered the chain absentmindedly when she looked at you.

      “She was nice,” you say. But not like you were committed to it, not like you’d fight for it.

      “Nice me arse,” he says quickly. He looked out the car window, his eyes rolling over the Paddy Power sign as if for the first time. “Nice? A few biscuits . . . She got you cheap enough? Huh?”

      “Suppose,” you say.

      “Suppose is right,” he says, and looked at you once before his hand reached for the door handle. “Not a word now,” he says, and the car trembled when he got out. You did the same, the

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