Chapter Ten #2
How to finish that sentence. I knew it wasn’t a matter of not being able to cut it in law school.
I’d always liked school, and while I wasn’t necessarily the kind of person who could do well on a test without studying, I’d never minded studying.
I could say I was too jaded about the career path.
I’d seen how much it had consumed my parents, who’d had me as an accidental pregnancy in their forties and had barely skipped a beat.
But I also saw how much purpose my parents’ jobs gave them, how they seemed like they’d been put on this earth to do one thing, and it wasn’t to travel or paint pictures or even, frankly, to raise me.
It was their law practice, and they were doing it.
We’d stopped in the middle of the street, and now I realized that we were the ones people were having to go around. Eamonn was looking down at me, clearly waiting for me to complete my thought.
“…daydreamy,” I said, giving a little laugh. “Here I am, too daydreamy to even walk, so imagine me trying to write an appellate brief.”
He knocked my elbow gently with his, his hands still in his pockets, and I couldn’t tell if he’d done it on purpose or if it was just the crush of people surrounding us that had made him bump into me. “If we keep going, we’ll get to somewhere a bit more open.”
We walked by more shops, a flower stand bright with bouquets that made me slow down for a second, just to take them all in.
A skinny guy leaning against a pole said something to Eamonn as we passed by, and Eamonn retrieved a coin from his pocket and handed it to him without even breaking stride.
Somewhere ahead of us, another busker was also playing a cover of “Riptide,” apparently the most popular song on Grafton Street.
“So that’s work sorted,” Eamonn said finally. “What about after? Do you go out, stay in, what’s your typical night?”
“On a Monday? I’m definitely staying in.
” Most nights, really. But I didn’t want to sound bland and unadventurous, even if he was the one who made it seem like his days were a boring cycle of sleep and work, rinse and repeat.
If I flipped the question back on him, he’d just say he stayed in, too, and provide no additional information, so I had to think of a different tack.
“When you go out, what kinds of things do you do?”
“Nothing much,” he said, predictably. “Sometimes the pub if there’s a match on. What about you?”
“I love to see a movie,” I said. “There’s nothing like that feeling of being in a dark theater, anticipating the moment the lights turn down, settling in to complete immersion for the next two hours.
There are some decent art museums in my area, some botanical gardens, although there are only a few months out of the year when the weather’s not too miserable.
My friend Mari and I used to go dancing sometimes—I miss that. ”
“Why don’t you anymore?”
I shrugged. “Just got away from it. Or it passed me by. I’m not sure. It can be hard to sync up our schedules.”
“Do you need someone to dance with?”
There was an odd undertone to his voice, and I glanced over at him, trying to figure out how he meant the question.
It could be a way of fishing around my relationship status, asking if I didn’t have a steady partner who could fulfill that role for me.
Taken another way, it almost sounded like…
an offer. Like he was saying he was available, if I needed someone.
He rubbed at the back of his neck. “You could go it alone,” he clarified. “If you love dancing so much.”
Of course. That made more sense. “True,” I said. “Maybe I’ll take myself out tonight, if I can find a place. I’m pretty good at doing things alone, actually. Like I’ll bring a book to a restaurant and read, no problem.”
I was thinking about Eamonn’s dog again, about the fact that there was a deadline on our time together. I didn’t want him to think I couldn’t handle myself without him, even though truthfully I was terrified to be without him. He was the only thing keeping me from absolutely freaking out.
“What do you read?”
Whether Eamonn was a James Joyce fan or not, the very fact that he’d taken me to a site from such a classic novel told me that I probably shouldn’t say romance if I didn’t want to deal with any potential dismissive reaction.
So instead I just shrugged and said, Oh, whatever, which made it sound like I’d been lying, like I’d never picked up a book in my life.
I thought back to all those books I’d seen in the waiting area of Eamonn’s garage—god, it felt so long ago, and it had only been earlier that morning.
“Do you like to read?” I asked.
Now it was Eamonn’s turn to shrug. “Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes.”
It was funny that we were both so reluctant to talk about this. It should’ve been a shared point of connection, something we had in common, and yet we both obviously had our reasons for not wanting to get into it. I knew what mine were. I wondered about his.
In the distance, there were strains of another song I recognized, something other than “Riptide.” Ahead of us, a mother was pushing a stroller and walking with her toddler hand in hand.
A raggedy stuffed monkey hung halfway out of the stroller, jostling with every bump on the stone street, until eventually it fell onto the ground as the mother and child walked on, oblivious.
Eamonn scooped it up as we passed, picking up his pace a little to hand it to the woman, who accepted it with a grateful smile.
“My sister Claire had a toy like that,” he said once we’d joined back up.
“A stuffed monkey?”
“Hers was a bear,” he said. “But one of those where she wore it out with how much she carried it around all the time. Poor thing had no neck to it, she’d squeezed out all the stuffing. Clairebear, we used to call her.”
By now I could recognize the song I’d been hearing.
We came upon a young woman dressed in head-to-toe black—black leggings, black sweatshirt, black beanie—playing her violin in the street.
It was a song by the Cranberries. I could hear the vocals in my head, the surging way she sang the wordless notes toward the end, even though now it was just a single violin playing the melody.
My eyes felt suddenly prickly and hot, and I turned and kept walking even as Eamonn lingered for another second before catching up.
“Your sister, or the bear?” I asked.
“Sorry?”
It felt silly that thirty seconds of a familiar song could get to me like that.
Oh, my life is changin’ every day…It was a song about possibility, it was a song that always made me want things, in the exact way I’d told Mari I just couldn’t let myself do anymore.
It was a song that made me feel like dreams could come true, like they did all the time.
Wasn’t it the most seemingly mundane things that could be miracles?
The difference between a child losing a beloved toy and having it tucked next to them in bed that night could be as simple as a stranger picking it up.
It felt too bittersweet, hearing that song right now, in these unusual circumstances. It made my chest hurt, like I was holding my breath. It made it hard to even speak.
Luckily, Eamonn seemed to figure out what I was asking before I had to say it again.
“My sister,” he said. “That’s what we used to call her. Still do, maybe.”
That maybe said more than he probably realized.
It made sense that he wouldn’t be as close with Niall, who was all the way across the Atlantic and—at least in my opinion—also a complete jerk.
But I wondered at these glimpses into the disconnect between him and the rest of his family, too.
I was trying to think of how to phrase a follow-up question that wouldn’t feel too invasive when Eamonn directed my attention to a big curved building on the corner.
“That’s the shopping center,” he said. “If you wanted to browse around more. And then St Stephen’s Green is right over there.”
The building was huge, covered in glass and iron framework, green planters lining the front windows.
But then beyond the street was the stone archway leading into the park, and I remembered that Eamonn had mentioned getting us to a more open place.
He’d said that for my benefit, like he was assuring me that there were less busy spots to go, but it occurred to me that he was the one who really didn’t like the crowds.
I thought about how he’d described his typical day—boring, he’d said, wake up and go to work—and I wondered if he came into the city much at all, never mind the touristy areas.
“Let’s do the park,” I said.
There were no cars coming, although there was a modern-looking tram that was already disappearing around the corner.
We went ahead and crossed the street, passing through a whole group of pigeons I expected to fly away as we got closer but who never budged.
There was an old man standing in the middle of them, his eyes closed, two pigeons perched on his forearms to eat feed from his cupped hands.
Eamonn must’ve noticed that I’d been bracing myself for their mass exodus, because he grinned at me, boyish and easy. “They’re used to people.”
We walked under the stone arch onto the path surrounded by plots of green grass and tall, scraggly trees. Yellow and white daffodils dotted the landscape on either side of the path as we headed into the park.
“It’s really beautiful when all the flowers come out,” Eamonn said. “We’re early for it.”
“It’s beautiful now,” I said.