Chapter 3
The JFK check-in agent’s smile never wavered, but her eyes hardened as she placed Molly’s suitcase back on the scale for the third time.
‘Sorry, but you’re still three pounds over the weight limit. You’ll need to remove some items or pay the excess baggage fee.’
The woman’s badge read ‘Cheryl’ with a golden star beside it, marking her as some kind of supervisor. Even at this late in the evening, her lipstick was perfect, her airline scarf knotted with geometric precision.
‘How much is the fee?’ Molly asked, already reaching for her wallet. Time was money and right now, the line forming behind her was ticking like a meter.
‘A hundred and fifty dollars.’
Molly’s hand stilled. The rational part of her brain – the part that managed marketing budgets in the millions – knew this was a trivial expense. The stubborn part, the one that sounded suspiciously like her grandmother, balked at the principle of it.
‘I’ll repack,’ she said, hefting her suitcase off the scale with a grunt.
‘There’s an area over there.’ Cheryl gestured vaguely toward the terminal’s center, where the fluorescent lighting seemed particularly harsh against the darkness outside.
Molly dragged her suitcase to an open spot on the floor. She knelt on the hard tile, her cream blouse and tailored black pants – chosen for comfort but still unmistakably business attire – already collecting dust. With quick, efficient movements, she unzipped her meticulously packed luggage.
She began removing items, mentally calculating their weight. She could swap the ballet flats she was wearing now for the considerably heftier suede boots she’d packed, and maybe take out her cardigan and bulkier coat as carry-on along with her laptop case (old habits …).
As she made the footwear switch and tucked away the flats, her fingers brushed against something soft – the velvet parcel – as she realized she’d forgotten to take this out to pack in her carry-on.
So maybe the luggage snafu was a blessing in disguise.
Molly tucked the pouch protectively alongside her travel documents in her laptop case, then continued sorting the suitcase with renewed determination.
Ten minutes later, she approached the counter again, hair escaping her neat bun of earlier, a fine sheen of sweat on her forehead despite the terminal’s aggressive air conditioning.
‘Let’s try again,’ Cheryl said, lifting the suitcase onto the scale. The digital display flashed: 49.8 pounds.
Molly exhaled. ‘Thank you,’ she said, though she wasn’t sure what she was thanking the woman for.
The agent handed over her boarding pass with that same professional smile. ‘Gate 42B. Boarding to Shannon begins in an hour.’
Security was its own special form of torment.
Molly joined the snaking line, shuffling forward in socked feet, her boots and coat in one plastic bin, electronics in another.
Ahead of her, a harried mother struggled with a toddler who’d decided that the checkpoint was the perfect place for an impromptu dance recital.
Molly checked her watch; forty minutes till boarding. Her stomach growled, reminding her that coffee and perhaps actual food should be a priority. The line inched forward.
When she finally cleared security, she made a beeline for the nearest refreshment kiosk.
The line there was mercifully short, just one person ahead of her – a man in a rumpled suit jabbing at his phone while he waited.
His agitation was palpable, radiating from him in waves that pushed against Molly’s own frayed nerves.
‘Coffee, splash of milk please,’ she told the barista when her turn came. And a sesame seed bagel. Simple, efficient, enough to power through until she ate on the plane.
Drink secured with a plastic lid, she turned to head toward her gate – only to collide with the rumpled suit, who had decided to backtrack at precisely the wrong moment.
The lid went flying and hot liquid sloshed over the rim of her cup, splashing across her cream blouse in an impressive display of physics.
The brown stain spread instantly across the silk, a Rorschach test of her misfortune.
‘Jeez, sorry,’ the man said, jumping back. ‘I didn’t see—’
‘It’s fine,’ Molly cut him off, though it was anything but. It wasn’t his fault, really.
The restroom mirror reflected a woman she barely recognized.
Her hair was mussed, dark circles shadowed her green eyes, the left one smudged where her mascara had started to migrate.
The coffee stain on her blouse formed an irregular continent across her abdomen.
She dabbed at it with thin paper towels that disintegrated on contact, leaving tiny white pieces across the silk.
‘Perfect,’ she muttered to her reflection. ‘Just perfect for a seven-hour flight.’
She did her best to clean it with what was available, then pulled on the cardigan, and buttoned it over the damage. The temperature in the terminal was somewhere between refrigerator and meat locker, so at least the extra layer wouldn’t seem out of place.
The gate agent’s voice crackled over the intercom, announcing priority boarding for her flight and Molly looked up, startled by how quickly the time had passed.
Only when she’d settled into her window seat, belt fastened across her lap, did she finally switch her phone to airplane mode. The small act of digital disconnection felt both terrifying and liberating – like stepping off a ledge, unsure if she’d fall or fly and she fidgeted a little.
‘First time to Ireland?’
Molly turned to find her seat mate – a silver-haired woman with kind eyes and an Irish accent – watching her with interest.
‘Is it that obvious?’ she asked, smoothing her hair self-consciously.
The woman smiled. ‘You have the look. Part excitement, part terror.’
‘My grandmother was from there,’ Molly found herself saying. ‘County Tipperary.’
‘Ah, lovely part of the country. What brings you over? Looking for your ancestors, I suppose.’
Molly hesitated. ‘A promise,’ she said, uncertain where that had come from.
The woman nodded, as if this explained everything. She introduced herself – Nora or Noreen, Molly couldn’t quite catch it over the noise of the engines – then mercifully lapsed into silence as the plane taxied toward the runway.
Take-off pressed Molly back into her seat, the force a physical manifestation of momentum she couldn’t control. Below, New York receded, buildings shrinking to miniatures, then toys, then nothing as they pushed through cloud cover into the blue-white emptiness above.
Her eyelids grew heavy as the travel chaos ebbed. The steady hum of the engines wrapped around her like white noise. Her neck settled awkwardly against the window, but she was too tired to care.
Sleep claimed her in fragments – five minutes here, ten there, never deep enough to truly rest. A patch of turbulence jolted her awake just as she’d finally sunk into something resembling real sleep.
The plane dipped and swayed, passengers gasping as their stomachs floated momentarily. The seatbelt sign pinged on.
‘Just a bit of a tumble,’ the captain’s voice announced in a comforting Irish lilt. ‘Should be through it in no time.’
Molly’s neck screamed in protest as she straightened. Her right hand had instinctively moved to her laptop case, tucked securely under the seat in front of her.
The turbulence smoothed out eventually, but sleep remained elusive. Molly watched a movie without absorbing it, picked at the rubbery airline meal and paced the narrow aisle to stretch her cramping legs. Her body ached with fatigue, but her mind buzzed with alertness.
When the captain eventually announced their initial descent into Shannon, the windows showed nothing but darkness.
It was the early hours of the morning in Ireland, of course, still a while before dawn would reveal the landscape below. Molly felt a pang of disappointment – she’d imagined her first glimpse of her grandmother’s homeland would be those famous forty shades of green, not this impenetrable blackness.
Shannon Airport at 5.30 a.m. was a peculiar limbo – half-asleep yet fully operational, albeit sparsely populated with bleary-eyed travelers and airport staff moving with the deliberate slowness of the pre-dawn hours.
Molly followed signs to passport control, joined a short queue and was processed with surprising efficiency by an officer whose brogue was so thick she had to ask him to repeat himself twice.
‘Business?’ he asked, eyeing her more formal attire as he stamped her passport.
‘Personal actually,’ she replied, and he gave her a surprised glance.
The baggage claim area was empty, passengers from her flight circling the carousel like planets around an absent sun.
Molly waited, checking her watch, then checking it again as the minutes stretched until the bags appeared.
One by one, other passengers claimed their luggage and departed, until she stood alone beside the slowly rotating belt.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, approaching the service counter where a young man was tapping at a computer. ‘I’m still waiting for my suitcase from the JFK flight.’
He glanced up, nodded and checked his watch. ‘Sometimes stragglers come through on the next one if the lads stopped for their morning cuppa in-between. Give it a few more minutes.’
Molly’s eyes widened at this, but sure enough, some fifteen minutes later, her suitcase surfaced – it had evidently been a casualty of the inexplicable tea break.
‘Told ya,’ the baggage handler said, with a relaxed smile that suggested this was a common occurrence.
Her luggage finally secured, Molly made her way to the transportation desk, where a cheerful woman with dark hair greeted her, smiling when she told her where she was headed. ‘Golden Valley? Lovely spot.’
Molly nodded, pushing the small talk aside for now. ‘What’s the fastest way?’
‘Taxi would be quickest, but it’ll cost you a fortune, to be honest – a hundred and fifty euro or thereabouts.’
Molly winced. Between airline tickets, excess baggage palaver and overpriced airport food, the hits just kept on coming.
‘Any other options? Besides a rental car.’ She had already decided she wasn’t going to risk that, since she’d never driven on the left side of the road in the darkness, nor indeed anywhere other than within the US.
Heck, as it was, she barely drove in New York.
‘Yeah, the bus goes down that way. A longer spin, but only twenty euro.’
Molly hesitated, weighing time against money, her natural inclination to efficiency battling with the more practical voice in her head.
Aoife would have taken the bus without question, would have chatted with fellow passengers and arrived at her destination with three new friends and an invitation to dinner.
‘That’ll work,’ she replied decisively.
With timing, instructions and a ticket in hand, Molly found a café and ordered a tea this time – warm, rich and strong, and infinitely better than the tepid varieties back home.
She claimed a small table by the window while waiting for the bus departure time, watching as the first hint of dawn lightened the sky outside.
Despite the discomforts of the journey, despite her exhaustion, the sticky stain and rebellious luggage, a sense of rightness settled over her. She was actually here, in Ireland. About to fulfill a promise a long time in the making.
Whatever came next, she had finally taken the first step. Then, suddenly overcome by the significance of it all, to say nothing of the grief burden she’d been successfully holding back all year, tears finally brewed in Molly’s eyes.
If only her grandmother could see her now.