Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-Six
“Mind that step right there,” the old man said as he led us into the entryway, before giving Eamonn a toothy smile. “Ah, what am I saying, you know. Name’s Michael Leahy, by the way. And you are…I don’t remember the names of all Maura’s young ones.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Eamonn said, reaching down to unlace his boots to leave them by the front door next to a row of shoes. “There were a lot of us. I’m Eamonn. Number four of six.”
In all this time, I’d never seen Eamonn with his shoes off.
He was wearing plain olive green socks, nothing particularly exciting about them, but it still struck me as somehow intimate to see them now.
Since I’d been wearing flats, I ended up barefoot on the rusty orange tile, which made me feel practically naked as Eamonn looked down at my feet.
“Feels good to get those off, huh,” he said, and even though I knew he was talking about shoes I felt myself blushing a little.
Our host had already gone ahead, crossing through a living room to call into the next room over. “Frances! We have company.”
I wanted to spend more time in the living room, which had a fireplace and a couple worn, overstuffed chairs.
I wanted to spend time in every room, even though I knew it wasn’t like it would be exactly the way it had been when Eamonn lived there, that the furniture was all different and maybe other material changes, too, like the flooring or the paint on the walls.
The room where Michael was leading us turned out to be the kitchen, which had its own door, completely different from the more open concepts I usually saw in Florida houses.
An older woman sat at a small table pushed over to one corner, furiously erasing a page in a sudoku book.
“Micky, is that you,” she said, “interrupting me when I’m trying to do my puzzle. Now I can’t remember where this three was supposed to go.”
“We have company,” he said, moving to stand in front of her now, his tone just as jovial but a little louder.
She looked up at that, and it occurred to me that Frances’ lack of response the first time was less that she wasn’t listening and more that she had some difficulty hearing at all.
“Frances, this is one of Maura’s, from before us—Eamonn.
He brought his girl with him, to show her the house, er—”
Michael said that so casually—his girl, seeming to think that this was just an average let me take my girlfriend to where I grew up type of visit. The silence stretched a moment too long before I realized I’d been meant to insert my name into it.
“Jess,” Eamonn said for me, his hand barely skimming my lower back, as if presenting me to be introduced. “And I’m Eamonn—like your husband said, I grew up here. I appreciate you letting us take a look around.”
“Oh,” Frances said. “Of course, of course. Sit down if you’d like.”
There were only two chairs at the table, but she’d gotten up to leave them both empty, crossing over to grab a kettle off the stove and fill it with water from the tap.
“You’ll have tea of course, won’t you,” she said, and there was really no way to answer but in the affirmative, because she was already putting the water on to boil.
“Only if it’s no bother,” Eamonn said. “Thank you.”
The open sudoku book on the table suggested that the woman had been at work on this one puzzle for a while—it was still covered in a fine dust of eraser flakes, lots of scribbled notes in the margins, a few of the numbers gone over and over to make the pencil marks bolder, like she wanted to indicate those were ones she was sure of.
“It’ll be a minute,” she said. “You can poke around, if you’d like. You’ll see we’ve not made too many changes, although we did some redecorating. In the bathroom especially.”
“It certainly needed it,” Eamonn said, and I could tell that he partially meant it and partially was being gallant, trying to give Frances a point of pride.
He took me back through the living room, with its fireplace that was covered with a 1980s-looking heat screen, trimmed in bright gold.
“Is that original?” I asked, pointing down at it.
“Ha,” Eamonn said, touching the clock on the mantel with one finger. “No. This is the same, though—Kathleen must’ve let them have it.”
The clock was small, set in a curved piece of wood that hugged the top of the mantel.
If Eamonn hadn’t mentioned it, I would’ve thought it was part of the fireplace itself.
Maybe that was why it had ended up staying for all those years.
Even without having a watch or a phone, I knew it couldn’t be displaying the right time—it said it was four forty-five, when it should be closer to nine or ten in the morning.
Eamonn must’ve also noticed it, because he gently tilted the clock forward, fiddling with something on the back.
Finally he replaced it to its original position, which was clear from the outline of dust around it.
The house was very neat, with everything seeming to be in its place, but there was something just a bit shabby about it, from the dust to the way parts of the curtains let in more light than others because they’d gotten faded from where the sun hit them.
“There was a picture of Jesus,” Eamonn said, pointing up at the wall, “that hung right there. It was too small to fill the space and always a little crooked, and way above eye level because I think Mam stood on a chair to put it up. Once Niall and I were wrestling so hard we banged into the wall and knocked our lord and savior right off of it, and you’ve never heard a woman scream like that.
She said it was a miracle not a bit of the glass broke, or there’d have been a place in hell for us. ”
He must’ve seen my eyebrows go up, because he gave me a cute, cheeky roll of his eyes. “Hell was always taking reservations in this house,” he said. “But she never meant it. We’d be laughing two minutes later.”
We turned down a small hallway with four narrow wooden doors, all ajar. Eamonn pointed at each one in turn.
“My mam’s room, the bathroom, the girls’ room, and the boys’ room.
Kathleen was beside herself when the twins were born and she heard they’d be put in with them, she was already fifteen years old.
Niall said he didn’t know what she was making a fuss about, it wasn’t like we couldn’t all hear the babies carrying on through the whole house. ”
It wasn’t a very big house. It seemed like this was all of it—the entryway, the living room, the kitchen, and then this hallway with the four doors off it.
I poked my head in the bathroom, the walls and floor all done in the same square, yellowed tile.
It looked clean and perfectly nice, but only surprised me because of Frances’ specific note about having redecorated the bathroom.
My first thought was that all the fixtures still seemed a little dated, not like they’d been replaced in the last few years. Then I looked up at the walls.
“Oh wow,” I said.
Eamonn leaned in behind me to peek, crowding me a bit until I could feel his body heat against my back.
“Jaysus,” he said, giving a low, impressed whistle. “That’s a lot of Garth Brooks.”
The walls were covered in photographs of the singer, memorabilia, a framed ticket stub. It was quite a comprehensive collection—I even saw a Chris Gaines album cover.
“I take it none of this is original?” I asked.
“There was never this much personality in here, I’ll tell ya that much. And it was one bathroom between the lot of us, so.”
“With that sink?” I asked in disbelief, gesturing toward the pedestal sink that I’d almost hit as I opened the door.
Now there was a single, cheery Christmas-themed soap dispenser on one corner, like they’d put it out as part of their holiday decoration and then had decided to just go with it.
But I could only imagine with six children—with four sisters—what this bathroom might’ve looked like.
“It was a circus,” he said. “Every day. Lots of yelling and pounding on the door.”
“I can’t believe how much I took it for granted that I had my own bathroom,” I said. “I mean, technically it was the guest bathroom, but we never had people over, so it was basically mine.”
When Eamonn laughed, I could feel his breath against my ear. “See, that’s what I mean by composure,” he said. “You never had to threaten to break a door down to take a shower and it shows.”
I had the wildest idea that Eamonn would kiss my neck, he was standing so close. But he moved away, and I felt ridiculous for even thinking it. He stood back, gesturing me through the door to the bedroom he said used to be his and Niall’s.
It appeared to be being used as an office-slash-storage-space now, with a desk on one wall with an ancient-looking desktop computer on top of it and a few bins stacked up in one corner. There was a radiator under the window and a single glass dome lamp hung from the ceiling.
“That’s original, though,” I said, pointing up at it.
“Oh, absolutely.” He still hadn’t come all the way into the room, was instead hanging out in the doorway.
He gestured toward the far corner of the ceiling, away from the window.
“There was a water stain over here that they must’ve painted over.
Niall wanted the top bunk until he saw he was right under the stained spot, and then he made me take it because he said he wasn’t about to live his life in the rain. ”
“Top bunk,” I said. “That must’ve made it interesting when you were older and had girls over.”
“Believe it or not,” he said, “you’re the first girl I’ve ever had in here.”
I shot him a disbelieving look, and he gave me a wicked smile. “I knew all the spots around town,” he said. “But yeah, technically. You’re the only one.”
I’d crossed over to peek out the window, which had a view of the expansive backyard and an old shed with various tools and equipment stacked near it.
When I glanced back over at Eamonn, he was watching me, still leaning in the doorway, his arms braced against either side of the doorframe. God, he had nice arms.
I could walk over there, put my hands against his chest, lean up to kiss him.
He’d make that sound in the back of his throat, put his hands in my hair.
There’d be something to it, kissing in full daylight, the sun streaming in through the window, in his childhood bedroom where he’d never brought a girl before.
But then we heard our host’s voice from the kitchen. “Come on now,” Frances called. “While the tea is hot.”
“Well,” Eamonn said, giving me a look from the doorway. I almost felt like he knew exactly what I’d been thinking. “That’s us.”
Frances insisted we both sit at the table, clearing away her puzzle book and some other items to give us more room. “So, what do you think?”
Eamonn took a cautious sip of his tea, which I wasn’t brave enough to do because I assumed it wasn’t a drinkable temperature yet. “It’s delicious,” he said. “Thank you again.”
“No, no,” Frances said, giggling as if he’d been deliberately playing a joke on her. “What do you think about the house? We’ve taken care of it, haven’t we?”
“Excellent care,” Eamonn said.
“That’s an impressive collection of Garth Brooks memorabilia,” I added.
Frances lit up like I suspected she would.
It was clear those items were her pride and joy, and when she wanted to talk about the house she mostly wanted to talk about Garth.
“We saw him in concert a few years back,” she said.
“He puts on an amazing show—but you’d know. Where in America are you from?”
“Florida.”
“So the South,” she said. “You’d know.”
I actually was only familiar with the hits, and even those not very well, but it didn’t seem like the time to mention that.
“What’s one of his most famous songs?” Eamonn said. “Jess, maybe you can sing one. To refresh my memory.”
He took a sip of his tea, like he was just making idle conversation, but I could see the mischievous look in his eyes.
You owe me one, they seemed to say. To which I could protest that I’d already paid him back by accepting his invitation to dance, but he and I both knew that hadn’t been a fair trade.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t enjoyed the dance.
“That’s cool that he played here,” I said, desperate to change the subject away from me having to sing anything. “Eamonn’s been telling me about some of the famous Americans who’ve come over the years. Like when Obama’s car got stuck, that kind of thing.”
“Well, it obviously wasn’t his car,” Frances said. “Just one of his fleet.”
Now it was my turn to look at Eamonn, and he gave me a little shrug. “The punchline was funnier if I left that out.”
I thought of his statement at Dublin Castle, about how the Irish have a way of making something sound even more spectacular by the next weekend.
I’d imagined then about how I might retell the story of these epic last couple of days, whatever magic had brought me here in the first place.
But for the first time I wondered about how Eamonn would tell this story.
Would I just be another regret, a woman he hooked up with once but it didn’t mean more than that? Would I mean anything to him at all?
I was rescued from the self-pitying turn to my thoughts when Michael came back in through the door. “I tried to get her going,” he said. “But no joy. I can run out to get some firewood for the fireplace, and we can light one of those.”
I’d had that impression from Eamonn again, like as much as he was enjoying the tea and conversation, he already had one foot out the door. He’d barely wanted to come here in the first place, so maybe that was why, or maybe it was just that restless energy he got.
But something about what Michael said seemed to grab Eamonn’s attention. “You having trouble with the heating?” he said.
“Aye,” Michael said. “But it’s later in the season. Won’t be needing it much longer.”
It only just registered to me how cold the house really was, the temperature inside not that much different from outside.
In some ways, it might have been colder.
And if they didn’t have any firewood at the ready, they probably hadn’t had a fire in a while.
I realized that some of what made Frances appear a little heavyset was in part the fact that she was clearly wearing multiple sweaters layered on top of each other.
Eamonn set his mug down on the table, and I could tell he was almost vibrating with excitement. He seemed like a boy who’d just been told it was Christmas morning.
“I can help with that,” he said. “Here, let me take a look.”