Chapter Five
Juniper
I wake up groggy and disoriented from the time difference, wiping drool from my cheek with arms as heavy as lead pipes. All those travel articles advised me to get out of bed at a normal time, no matter how impossible that felt. Well, it is impossible. With a rejuvenating, full-body stretch, I reach for my phone on the nightstand. Above a few missed call notifications from an unknown number, the clock reads 5:19.
In the evening.
Sleep evaded me for hours last night. The second my head hit the pillow, I couldn’t stop thinking about, well, everything. When I’d find my passport. What Cara thinks of me. What Aidan must think of me.
At some point, I fell asleep and probably turned off my alarm in a fog. Aside from stumbling into the kitchen for some cereal while it was still dark, I’ve been out cold.
I stretch again to wake up my limbs. When I check my phone, my focus breezes past the missed calls and to the bolded text messages from an unfamiliar number.
Got your number from Cara. Out for the day, but ring if you need anything. Left a set of keys on the table by the door. Also let me know when you get these texts so I’m sure I’m messaging the right American girl. – Aidan
I grin and save his contact in my phone.
JUNE: No Juniper here, just Marissa
Scrubbing a hand over my face and heaving an enormous sigh, I stand to shower and get ready to go. Last night, Cara proposed a one-on-one hangout at the bar. I call Ethan on my way over, since he hoped to check in yesterday but got slammed with meetings.
“Juney! I was hoping we’d connect.” I picture him with his feet propped on his desk, twirling a pencil between his fingers, like a cocky frat boy who somehow landed on the masthead of a popular digital magazine. “How’s the trip? I’ve been missing your little face around the office.”
I cringe. Ethan’s sexist comments have been a regular part of the job. Confronting him about his behavior wouldn’t get me anywhere, and I’d much rather have a salaried position at The Edge than none at all. With this assignment on my plate, I definitely won’t say anything.
“You slept the entire day?” Ethan interrupts as I share what I’ve been up to since arriving. “Juney. I know you went for a family thing, but you’re there to work too.”
“Of course. I didn’t intend to crash so hard, but my body was down for the count. I’m here for two weeks, so I’ll just catch—”
“No ‘just.’ No excuses. Listen.” Ethan lowers his voice. “There’s been some tension in the office, with you on this assignment and all.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve heard some rumblings from some of the senior staffers about preferential treatment, that sort of thing. It’s all bullshit, in my opinion, and they’re jealous, but I can see their side of things. A huge article. We’ve sent you to another country to report. We’re covering expenses.”
“You told me you’d cover a portion of expenses.” They offered a paltry daily stipend that barely put a dent in my flight costs. The New York Times this is not. Working at The Edge for years should earn me some seniority, but I don’t argue. This is the first piece I’ve gotten that’s not a clickbait-y listicle, but something legitimate. It hurts that my coworkers can’t show any support for me, though.
“There’s a lot of promise in this story. I mean, what are the chances your test would turn out like this? It’s why I supported you doing this from day one. I did, didn’t I?”
When he heard me talking about my test results in the break room, he latched onto them like a leech. He may have had good intentions, but I can’t pretend that potential page views didn’t also influence his actions.
“Sure,” I say, “but I—”
“And look, I want you to have your own column just as much as you do. Word got to Nancy, and you know, if the editor in chief is buzzing about a piece that hasn’t even been published yet, then—well, let’s say this could mean some very good things for your career here.”
“Right.” The din of McCarthy’s Pub grows louder as the golden lamp out front comes into view. “ Very good things. ”
“How ’bout this? You want the story to perform well, don’t you?”
“Of course,” I say without hesitation.
“Me too. I know what the readers come to read, but we need this to be perfect. Show everyone that this decision to go out on a limb and send you there made sense. I’d like to work on this more closely with you, so can you write up a rough outline in the next few days? Just something that organizes your thoughts a little. In the meantime, I’ll set up a shared folder where you can drop your notes and your progress.”
“We’re working together on this?”
“More like I’ll supervise,” he says with typical Ethan nonchalance. “If you knock this out of the park, it’ll reflect well on the both of us in Nance’s eyes. Win-win, right?”
I bite my tongue. I don’t need the hand-holding, but I’m in Ireland already, and I have no other realistic options. If a group project is what it takes to secure my column and finally take on bigger and better assignments, then I’ll do it.
When I get off the phone and step into the pub, I may as well have a flashing neon sign above my head. A poster near the cash register advertises live music, but by walking in, I feel like I’m the one putting on a show. Even after the bar patrons resume their impassioned conversations, I have the eerie feeling of their eyes on me.
“June!” Cara’s ever-exuberant voice sounds behind me. She’s snagged a spacious booth by the window and waves me over. “You made it. Welcome back to McCarthy’s Pub. Drinks on me.”
“Thanks.” When I sit down, the cracked leather bench squishes underneath me and releases a puff of air. “Did I do something wrong? Why is everyone watching me?”
“Everyone’s curious ’bout the American girl. Never mind them, they’ll sort themselves out soon enough. Fancy a pint?”
I nod and Cara gestures toward the bartender, who nods back at her. An older gentleman pours the drinks, so Aidan must not be working tonight.
“So what’s the craic?”
“The crack?”
“Not crack, the craic .” Cara chuckles. “Sorry. It’s like asking how you are. Or you could say someone’s good craic, like they’re good fun.”
“Oh.” I stash that bit of Irish slang in my brain. “I woke up about an hour ago, so either great or terrible, depending on how you think about it. You?”
“You poor thing, you must still be exhausted.” Cara pushes a plate of fries toward me to share and dips a fry into a blob of ketchup for herself. “Today went well. I found someone to step in for my shifts next week while I take time off to enjoy being a bride and all, which is a tremendous relief. I want to offload all responsibilities for the minimoon. With my sous-chef getting sick while all of this is ramping up, I’ve been scrambling.”
Just then, the bartender approaches the booth with two pints of amber liquid. He has a lean, friendly face framed by salt-and-pepper hair, and he walks with an almost unnoticeable limp.
“Noah, I’d have come up and got the drinks.”
“Well, I hoped to meet this fine lass m’self,” the man says, his soothing accent laced with sweetness.
Cara introduces us while Noah sets down the foamy glasses and wipes his hand on his apron. “Noah’s known me since I was a small one, so any embarrassing stories he tells you are entirely fabricated.”
“I intend to save those for the wedding.” He pats her shoulder with a grin. “So June, been to Ireland before?”
“No.” Then, quieter, I add, “First time abroad, actually.”
“First time!” he exclaims, and I brace myself. I shouldn’t have said anything because I bet he’s ready to chastise me for not traveling more in my life. If I could have traveled, I would have, but my grandmother was so inconvenienced by having to take me in that going on vacation was out of the question.
“Well, you chose a grand first country for your first-ever holiday,” he goes on, and I relax a little more inside the booth. “You’ve also got the best sister, you’re in the best town, and you’ve come to the best pub. M’family’s owned this pub for almost a hundred years. Passed down from my granda, to my da, to me. And then someday—”
The crisp sound of glass shattering jerks his attention away. “Oi!” Noah calls to the back as a group of people part, dodging the blame.
“Gravity spike,” a gentleman’s voice whoops.
“I’d best take care of that, but you two let me know if you need anything.”
Noah shuffles away and pulls a broom out of the closet.
“He’s nice.” I watch as he sweeps up the broken glass. “Aidan’s dad?”
“Yup. Top man, he is. You’ll meet Danny’s mam soon, I’m sure. She’s not here right now, I don’t think…” Cara peers around the bar before shaking her head with what looks like a tinge of disappointment. “But Noah’s lovely, like Danny. They’re both men with generous hearts. Both have been through a lot. Both’re stubborn as hell too, so they butt heads all the time. Sort of how my mam sends me up the wall sometimes, but I still adore her to bits.”
I nod, pretending to understand. All my mom and grandma did was fight—over me, over my mom’s addiction, over whatever—and it never looked like love. But neither did my interactions with my grandma, though we fought on rare occasions. Raising another kid in her sixties was not part of her plan, especially after struggling with her own daughter, so she resorted to apathy. By the time I landed in foster care in my unadoptable teen years, I discovered the silver lining to my situation—I didn’t owe anything to anyone, and I only had to worry about one person: me.
“Okay, you’ve got to promise not to laugh at me.” Cara’s fizzy glee interrupts my spiraling thoughts. “I’ve a list.”
“A list?”
She unfurls a food-order ticket covered in writing from her pocket. “Afternoon was slow at work so I brainstormed some questions. Favorites and things like that.” Her megawatt smile dims, and she folds the paper back up. “Sounds daft now that I say it out loud, doesn’t it? Forget it.”
“No, no, it’s not.” I rest a hand on her forearm, surprising myself at the physical contact, but I don’t like seeing her beat herself up over something when I can tell that she’s just being nice. “We have to start somewhere. So…what’s on it?”
She lights up again, flattening the paper full of questions on the table for us to discuss, one by one. Things like my most commonly eaten food (pizza), my favorite movie ( Spirited Away ), and my biggest fear (heights). I ask Cara the same—her answers are chips (what the Irish call french fries), The Princess Bride , and clowns, and we dissolve into giggles as she shares a story about her first and only visit to the circus.
“Fancy another pint?” she asks with a glimmer in her eyes.
“Sure.” I smile and down my drink as Cara holds up her thumb and forefinger toward the bar.
Only one drink later, the alcohol makes my limbs loose and fills my mind with a pleasant haze. The sun has set here, but my body thinks I woke up in New York, which means I’m essentially having beer for lunch.
“So. First trip to Europe,” Cara says. “That’s exciting.”
“Yeah.” I chew the inside of my cheek, ashamed that I’ve never experienced another country outside of the United States. “Getting time off from work is tough.”
“Did you go places as a kid?”
“Day trips around town, but not packing up for two weeks abroad.”
“I get that,” she says. “My holidays growing up were road trips and camping with my mam. Never went far. Couldn’t afford much more with her raising me solo and all.”
Understanding dawns on me like the lights brightening up a notch. I’d kind of assumed that Cara had what most normal kids had—memorable family vacations to faraway lands, masses of presents around a Christmas tree, and more than a duffel’s worth of clothing. But with a single mom, that would have been tough.
“Wasn’t ’til my mam started going with Roger that we did more holidays and such.”
“When did they meet?”
“I was fifteen, and they married a year later. I was a little fecker to him too. Absolute brat.”
“Really?” I can’t help but laugh at her confession and her accompanying devilish grin. “You seem so…I don’t know, not that.”
“I’m easygoing, sure, but when someone crosses me, I can be a terror. Though, at the time, a lot of that was teenage hormones. Growing up, Mam and I were a team. There for each other no matter what. So when she and Roger got together, I turned into a complete nightmare.”
“You get along with him now?”
“Best mates. Mam jokes I like him better than her, and sometimes she grates so far under my skin, I’d agree. Guess I needed time with Rodg. And to not be a teenager.” She shrugs and wraps her fingers around the pint glass. “I treated me and my mam like a secret club he couldn’t join. But he was a part of it all along. He made her happy and only wanted the best for me, and I was putting this arbitrary limit to how many people I could love.”
She holds up her drink, waiting for my cheers. I tap my glass against hers, and she gives me a big grin in return.
The responsibility of writing about my time with Cara seeps deeper into my conscience. Perhaps a bit foolishly, I’d envisioned that I’d land here, and after a couple weeks, I’d have this monumental article. But I overlooked that this work has to come from somewhere. From opening up and forming some bond between us. Between sisters.
And Cara treats me like a sister sister.
“What do you remember…” The beer has made me brave enough to ask. “Do you remember much about your dad? Our dad?”
“Some, but not a lot. Mam’s lookin’ forward to telling you more. I recall thinking he was fun, good for a laugh. But I guess that’s easy to be when the responsibility’s not on you. My childhood was all my mam, and I never felt like it lacked. She sacrificed a lot, I’m sure of that, working double shifts and telling me to take the last bits of dinner because she was full. Looking back, I know she wasn’t.” Cara’s memories are the kind that I fight hard to keep from people, but she seems so at ease sharing them. “As for our da, I saw him a couple times at birthdays when I was younger and that was all. The nature of his work had him moving around all the time.”
In an email, Cara wrote about how our dad worked for an organization that responded to humanitarian crises worldwide. He spent his life helping others. It doesn’t seem to bother Cara that he wasn’t around for her as a father and ended up dying for the job. I can’t detect a hint of resentment in her voice.
“What was it like for you growing up?” Cara asks me.
My stomach clenches. When people ask me these kinds of things, I never know how much is too much to tell. I don’t need pity, and everyone has a different limit on the amount of trauma they can handle hearing. I learned to pack my upbringing away and stash it out of sight instead. Compartmentalization is a beautiful thing.
But something about the way that Cara rests her head in one hand, and how her eyes are gentle and unassuming, shows her question comes from curiosity rather than nosiness.
“Growing up was tough,” I admit, tracing doodles into the condensation collecting on my glass. “When I was young, I didn’t understand what was going on with my mom. Why she would be in charge of me sometimes and why, other times, she disappeared and I’d stay at my grandma’s. By the time it was just me and my grandma, she was so furious at my mom that I don’t think she could really—she wasn’t a great caretaker.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine. Around fourteen, she wasn’t fit to care for me anymore, so I went into foster care. No big deal.”
“What happened to her? Your grandmam?”
“Dementia,” I say matter-of-factly, modeling some of the same easiness Cara showed while discussing her past. “She’s in a care home now. I don’t really…” I take a big gulp of beer, questioning whether I should go on. “I don’t see her.”
“That makes sense.” Cara offers a sad smile. “Sounds complicated.”
“I was lucky. Didn’t spend my entire life in the system, and there were people who helped me along the way.” People like my ninth-grade teacher who always packed too much food for her lunch and would offer me some, or one of my first Couchsurfing hosts in New York who let me stay two weeks longer than we’d originally agreed. “There were people who pushed to make sure I had needs met. I’m white so I’ve had privileges other kids didn’t have. And the second I could emancipate myself, I did.”
“Still,” Cara says, interrupting my rambling. She tilts her head with a sympathetic look, concern swimming in her eyes. “It’s awful all the same. You were given difficult circumstances. Things no child should have to deal with.”
As she reaches across the table to pat my arm, my face prickles with the urge to cry. I could shout, roll around on the floor, and beat my fists against the wall. I never had a family, not with my mom, my grandma, or at any temporary homes. Cara may have had her mom growing up, but she understands a little of what my life was like. We have something that tethers us together—our father. A man who left Cara just like he left me.
We found each other, and I should be happy about that. But why did I have to live twenty-six years before finding this kind of connection?
I chug some more of my beer, risking a bout of alcohol-induced hiccups to hide the frustration stinging my eyes.
“Thought I’d find you two here.” Aidan appears at the end of the booth, his breezy accent disarming me. He ushers in a fresh bundle of cold air that clings to his bomber jacket like an aura. “I was out shooting the sunset. Mind if I sit?”
“Not at all!” Cara scoots closer to the window to make room for him.
He takes a seat across from me, and despite the chill he’s brought in, I remain toasty warm. The wind has tousled his hair, and a five o’clock shadow darkens his jawline.
“What’d I miss?”
“Sisterly bonding,” Cara says. “The usual.”
“Part getting to know you, part therapy session.”
At this half-joke, half-truth of mine, Aidan chuckles, and his lopsided smile knocks my thoughts off track.
“Get any good shots?” I manage.
He tucks his backpack further underneath the table, as if that would help him avoid my question. “Not really.”
“He’s lying,” Cara says. “He always gets something worthwhile.”
“He showed me a few of his photos.”
“What?” She looks at her best friend like she’s never seen him before in her life. “It took years before you shared a single photograph with me.”
“Not years.” He reaches for her beer and then says to me, “She exaggerates.”
Feeling protective over creative work is something I’m familiar with as a writer. I probably just caught him in a sharing mood the other day while he scrolled through his photos.
“So what’s this about lunch tomorrow?” he asks.
“Right.” Cara sits more upright and leans into the table toward me. “Mam and Roger are dying to meet you, June. Want to head over to theirs tomorrow? You both, obviously.”
“I don’t want to intrude on sister time.”
“You wouldn’t be,” Cara says. “We’ve so many folks coming in for the wedding, so I thought it’d be nice to have some time together before then. Besides, Rodg has a new point-and-shoot he’s got to show off, and he has a million questions about it.”
“I’ll join, so long as you’re okay with it?” Aidan locks eyes with me. His appear darker than before, like the trees in Central Park during the summertime dusk.
“Sure. Of course,” I say, ignoring the flicker of want in my belly. “You should absolutely come.”
I don’t have any issues with Aidan being there. I sensed some kind of attraction between us when we first met, but knowing how close he is with Cara puts any thoughts of getting tangled in his bedsheets to rest. He’s Cara’s best friend, and I’m staying at his place, so I have to get used to him being around, that’s all.
“Tomorrow then,” Cara says with finality.
Meeting her parents. I swallow, nod, and wash my concerns down with the last of my drink. I can do this. Meeting Cara, meeting her parents. This is part of the deal, anyway—part of having a family.
“Yup. Can’t wait.”