Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
We stopped for gas—well, petrol, as Eamonn called it—just outside the city.
We grabbed a few snacks from the shop, all the things he said I had to try like Tayto crisps and a Curly Wurly chocolate bar.
Once back on the road, he turned the heater on, and we started playing a game of trading off questions without explicitly saying that was what we were doing.
I asked more about the car, which made Eamonn light up and start talking about the condition he’d gotten it in, the things he’d done to fix it up, until he glanced over and seemed to realize that I only understood half of what he was talking about.
“Sorry,” he said. “This car is the closest thing I have to a hobby.”
“It sounds fun.” Not that it was a project I’d have taken on or had fun with, necessarily, but just that I could tell it had brought him some joy, and I liked the excited way he talked about it.
He asked me about Marisol, and I asked him about his sports allegiance since all I knew was that it wasn’t Liverpool.
He asked about other places I’d traveled, and there was a brief flash of confusion on his face when my list was fairly short, after I’d made that whole thing about how If you haven’t traveled, you haven’t lived. But he didn’t say anything.
I’d felt the way we were avoiding certain questions, almost like by mutual agreement we’d decided not to broach potentially incendiary topics.
He didn’t question me any more about his brother, and I didn’t bring him up, either.
There was one burning thing I’d been wondering about all day, though, and I didn’t want to make anything uncomfortable but I also wanted to understand him, and I felt like this was a crucial part.
“Can I ask,” I said finally, hesitating a little, “what exactly you went to prison for?”
He turned down the music until it was practically off. It hadn’t been that loud to begin with, so it felt more like the way that you turn it down when you need to concentrate on complicated directions.
“Ah,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to be coy about it. I would’ve told you. I only didn’t…” He swallowed, seeming to second-guess wherever that line of conversation was going to go. “It was for car theft. And arson.”
When I’d asked if it was for anything violent, he’d said Not as such. The arson was the Not as such part, I supposed. Violence in its own way, depending on the circumstances. He’d said that he was guilty. “What happened?” I asked. “If you want to share it with me, I mean. You don’t have to.”
“It’s not that compelling a story,” he said.
“Typical night out with the lads. We took a car, which was something we did then—this wasn’t our first time doing it.
Usually we drove around, found somewhere to drink or take a hit of something, then left it for the guards to find and return to its owner.
This time we drove it to the middle of a field, and set it on fire. ”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Why not,” he said, then gave me a look. “That sounds like I’m taking the piss, but it was the reason we did most of the stuff we did. Why not. I hot-wired the car. I didn’t start the fire, not that it matters, really. We were all there.”
“And you got caught?” A silly question—obviously they’d gotten caught. It was more that I wanted the story as to how.
“Lighting a fire has a way of calling attention to yourselves,” Eamonn said. “We weren’t in quite the condition to think about that part.”
I was silent for a long time, turning it all over in my head.
It was a bad thing to do. I didn’t want to minimize that, or try to pretend otherwise, just because I met Eamonn ten years later and thought he seemed like a nice guy.
Even if I knew how to hot-wire a car, which I certainly didn’t, it would never occur to me to take someone else’s property and destroy it as part of a fun night out with my friends.
The kind of friends I’d had at that age were people who brought their crochet projects with them to our shared hotel room after prom.
“My mother was devastated by it,” Eamonn said.
“The morning I went in for my sentencing even, we had a big row over my suit. She wanted me to wear a blue tie and I wanted to wear the same black one I usually wore for formal occasions, made some crack about how if this was my funeral I might as well. She didn’t like that, she—”
There was such pain in his voice, I suddenly knew that I hadn’t imagined it, that moment back at the church when I thought he’d gotten choked up. It was all there beneath the surface, waiting to bubble over, and I could almost feel his desperation to put it all back in.
“She didn’t like that,” he repeated after a moment, his voice steady again. “Sure look, that’s how it was.”
“What color did you end up wearing?”
“Black,” he said. “I was a stubborn fuck. And I thought I’d go mad in that house, the way she had something to say about everything, the way she was always giving out to me about one thing or the other.
I only saw it as love later—too late—when I realized all she ever wanted was for me to be safe and happy and good. ”
Eamonn cleared his throat then, giving a little cough before taking a long swig of his bottled drink. It seemed more about putting himself back together than easing any thirst, and he took his time setting his hand back on the gearshift, automatically checking the rearview mirror.
“She visited me every week, though,” he said. “Until she got too sick. It came fast. She died my first year inside.”
I didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry seemed inadequate, when I’d already said it to him before when he’d told me about his mother. But I realized this was the part that haunted Eamonn about his incarceration, not the details of what exactly he did or how he got caught.
For a while we just kept driving, the only sounds the steady hum of the tires and the music, too quiet now to make out most of the words, and a slight buzz that came from one of the vents until Eamonn switched off the heat.
“I was fortunate to only get three years,” he said. “Arson can get you life, depending on certain factors. There weren’t any people or buildings nearby, it was my first offense, and the fella who owned the garage we’d taken the car from wrote me a character letter for my sentencing.”
“That was nice of him.”
“You have no idea,” Eamonn said. The side of his mouth lifted in a smile, but even in the dark I could tell it wasn’t a real one. “Murphy was my old boss.”
I remembered what he’d said about how he’d landed a good apprenticeship out of school but blown it, and I felt like I understood more of the picture now.
Eamonn had stolen a car from the place he’d worked, set it ablaze, and still the man had written a letter in support of him.
That was beyond nice. It was practically saintly.
But I thought it had to speak to something about Eamonn, too, that the man would feel inspired to do something like that.
“When I got out, jobs were hard to come by,” Eamonn said.
“This might shock ya but a lot of people don’t want to hire criminals.
You have a great interview, say yes sir and no sir in all the right places, but you fill out the forms and there’s that one question and then you never hear back.
I worked two days as a house painter until someone must’ve looked me up, and then they were real apologetic about it but said I wasn’t the right fit.
Murph came through for me again—he was the one who knew a guy who knew a guy with a job at a garage with a flat above where I could live.
So I worked there for several years until the owner decided to up and move, and he sold it to me on pretty decent terms. And that’s how I came to have the garage. It’s more than I deserve, I know that.”
I could argue that last point, but I could tell that Eamonn was already agitated from the turn the conversation had taken, was ready for a subject change. He’d gotten that restless set of his shoulders again.
“And your shop does what, general car repair stuff? Oil changes and tire rotations and new…engine parts, I’m sorry, for some reason I’m blanking. Carburetors? That’s a thing.”
This time his smile was more genuine. “That’s definitely a thing,” he said.
“I’ll do all of it, but I’m not the fastest around, since it’s just me and a lad I have helping me out part-time.
I do a lot with cars that are a little fussy, that need some babying.
Like bringing this car here back to life.
I’m probably not the one if you’re looking for an oil change in fifteen minutes on your way to work. ”
The place I took my car promised it in five, although it felt like somewhat false advertising since the wait alone usually took up to twenty minutes. “You can’t do an oil change?” I said, deliberately misunderstanding him. “That seems like Mechanic 101.”
“Truly don’t know how they let me have a business license,” Eamonn said.
I thought back to the first time I’d met him, when he’d offered to take a look at my car even though his shop was closed and had no power.
I thought about how he said work didn’t leave him much time to date.
Somehow I knew without him needing to tell me that the fact that it was mostly just him at his shop, the fact that he lived above it…
he let it take up most of his time, because he genuinely liked his job but also because then he didn’t have to open himself up to anything else.
“You’d have more time to date,” I said, “if you weren’t babying cars so much. Just saying.”
He rolled his head from side to side, like maybe, but then he was biting back a grin like something about that was particularly funny.
“What?” I asked.