Chapter 3
CHAPTER
THREE
Tús Maith
Aoife
My grandmother used to say that the bravest thing a person could do was to begin.
Not to finish, not to succeed, simply to put one foot forward into the unknown and trust that the ground would hold.
She said it in Irish first, the way she said most things that mattered, and then she would say it again in English for my benefit, because my Irish was never as good as she deserved.
"Tús maith, leath na hoibre." A good start is half the work.
She had a saying for everything. I used to tease her about it, and she would tip her head to one side and look at me with the slight smile she kept for moments when she was quietly pleased with me and did not intend to show it fully, and then she would tell me to stop being smart and drink my tea.
I thought about that saying on the morning I flew into the city with two suitcases and forty-three hundred American dollars and the address of a cousin I had never met written on a folded piece of paper in my coat pocket. I thought: this is the beginning. I thought: the ground will hold.
The cousin's address turned out to be an apartment building that had been converted into something else three years prior, a fact I discovered at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday in late March standing on a pavement that smelled of exhaust and old rain with my two suitcases and no plan.
I stood there for a moment and looked at the building, which was now some variety of commercial space with a logo on the door I did not recognise, and I felt the particular quality of aloneness that comes not from being without people but from being without anyone who knows your name.
All right, I thought. This is still the beginning.
The ground is still holding. We simply need a new plan.
I found a hostel that night, a narrow building with a bunk bed above a German architecture student named Petra who snored with a dedication I found almost admirable.
I lay awake looking at the ceiling and listening to the sounds of a city that did not know I was in it, and I told my grandmother, silently, that I was all right.
It took me three weeks to find the apartment on Carver Street.
Four flights up, a studio small enough that you could stand in the centre and touch two walls without fully extending your arms, with a window that looked out onto the side of the building next door and a radiator that knocked every night at around two in the morning as if checking that you were still there.
Three hundred and eighty dollars a month, which was the only reason I could afford it.
I scrubbed the place from top to bottom.
I hung the curtains my grandmother had made me bring, yellow cotton with small white flowers, because she had said a person needed something cheerful in their windows or the mornings were too hard.
I put the knitted throw she had made on the arm of the secondhand couch I found on the street two blocks over.
I lined my books on the windowsill and planted three small herb pots beside them, basil and thyme and mint, because my grandmother had always grown herbs and the smell of them made a space feel like somewhere a person actually lived.
I stood in the middle of the apartment when I was done and I looked at what I had made of it, and I thought: it's not much.
Then I thought of my grandmother, who had made a home out of a rented terrace in Galway for thirty years and made it feel like the warmest place in the world, and I thought: it doesn't have to be much. It just has to be yours.
?
My name is Aoife Walsh, and most people cannot pronounce it.
This is not a complaint, only an observation.
In Ireland it was unremarkable. Here it becomes something people study with a frown, sounding out letters in combinations that make a kind of sense if you are applying English rules to an Irish word, which is almost always the wrong approach.
I have been called Ay-oh-fee, and Ah-oh-fee, and, memorably, A-fuh, by a woman at a social services office who seemed personally affronted by the spelling.
I correct people gently when I can and let it go when I cannot, because there are larger things to spend your energy on.
My grandmother told me what it meant when I was seven and asked.
Beauty, or radiance. She said it with a directness that was entirely characteristic of her, looking at me across the kitchen table with her reading glasses on and her hands wrapped around her cup, as if delivering a fact she expected me to receive and accept without argument.
I remember thinking that she must have made a mistake.
That it must have been someone else's name that meant that.
She had not made a mistake. She never made mistakes, or if she did, she made them so gracefully that nobody noticed.
Brigid Walsh was the most competent person I have ever known, and also the most gentle, and the combination of these two things in a single person is rarer than I had understood when I was young and took her entirely for granted.
My grandfather, Seamus, was a different kind of person.
Where my grandmother was steady and always in motion, he was unhurried, a man who believed that a thing worth doing was worth taking time over.
He had been a fisherman before his back gave out, and he carried that life in his body, the broadness of his shoulders and the way he could sit with silence as if it were a comfortable companion.
He called me his little fish, which made no sense and which I loved.
When he laughed it started in his chest and arrived late, as if the joke had to travel some distance before it got there, and I could always tell when something had genuinely delighted him because his laugh was uneven, slightly lopsided, like something he could not quite contain.
They raised me because they had to, and then because they wanted to, and eventually because I was as much theirs as if I had always been.
My parents were fourteen years old when I was conceived and seventeen when they signed the papers, and I have made my peace with this in the way that you make peace with a wound that healed crooked.
It does not hurt the way it once did. But the scar is there.
When I was old enough to ask directly, my grandmother told me the truth plainly and kindly, the way she told me everything, looking at me with steady eyes and no apology for the reality of it.
She said, "Your mam and dad were very young, and they were not ready, and they did the best thing they knew to do by bringing you to us.
And we have been grateful for you every single day.
" She meant it. You could tell, with my grandmother.
She was constitutionally incapable of saying things she did not mean.
?
I was twenty-one when my grandmother fell.
It was a wet October morning. She was coming down the front steps to bring in the milk, which she had done every morning for as long as I could remember, and her foot slipped on the second step, and she went down.
I was in the kitchen and I heard it — a sound I could not initially parse, wrong in its weight and its absence of what should have followed — and I came to the door and she was at the bottom of the steps with her eyes closed and a quietness about her that was wrong in a way I understood immediately even though I did not want to understand it.
She had struck the back of her head on the concrete path.
She never regained consciousness. She died in hospital four days later with my grandfather on one side of her and me on the other.
He held her hand and looked at her face with the expression of a man who has no more negotiating to do with the world and knows it, completely calm, completely devastated.
I held her other hand and told her everything I had been saving up to say when I was older and had better words, and I hope some of it got through.
My grandfather lasted six weeks without her.
The doctors called it Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, broken heart syndrome, the literal structural failure of a heart that could not renegotiate the terms of its existence without the person it had organised itself around for fifty-two years.
I could not be angry at him for it. I understood it better than I could say.
I buried them both within two months of each other. Then the landlord sold the property and I had ninety days to vacate a house that had been home for my entire life.
I packed what I could. I kept the curtains and the throw and the books and the herb pots and a framed photograph of the three of us taken in the garden the summer I was sixteen, my grandmother squinting into the sun and my grandfather's arm around my shoulder and me laughing at something out of frame, probably something my grandfather had said.
I kept a teacup with a chip in the handle that had been my grandmother's favourite because she said the chip was how you knew which one was yours.
I kept a letter my grandfather had written me on my eighteenth birthday in his slow, deliberate handwriting, three pages long, all of it about what he hoped for me and none of it about himself, which was exactly who he was.
I stood in the empty house for the last time and I looked at each room in turn, and then I looked at the ceiling and I said, very quietly, Tús maith. A good start is half the work.
?
The city was not what I had imagined, which is to say it was larger and louder and considerably less interested in my arrival than I had somehow managed to hope.
The first job was at Mae's Diner on Clement Street, run by a woman named Mae Abioye who was in her sixties and had been running the place for thirty years.
She hired me on a Tuesday after a fifteen-minute conversation that was more interrogation than interview.
She asked whether I could carry four plates at once, whether I had ever worked a double shift, and whether I was the kind of person who called in sick when I was not sick.
She looked at me steadily while she asked each question, the look of a woman who has hired enough people to know that the answer matters less than how you give it.
I said yes, yes, and no, in that order. She said, "Start Thursday."
Simone Carter started working the lunch shift four months after me, and she introduced herself by sliding into the seat across from me during my break and saying, "You're the Irish one.
I've heard about you." I asked who had told her about me.
She said, "Mae. She said you were the best server she'd had in ten years and also that you needed a friend because you ate lunch alone and that was sad.
" She said the last part without any cruelty, simply as a statement of observed fact, and then she stole one of my french fries and said, "I'm Simone," with the confidence of someone who has never doubted that she is going to be liked and has yet to be proved wrong.
We have been friends since that afternoon.
At night I went back to the apartment on Carver Street, and I cooked whatever I could afford and I read and I tended the herbs and I called nobody because there was nobody to call.
I was twenty-three years old and I was alone in a city that did not know me, and I told myself this was fine.
That it was the beginning. On the nights when this was harder to believe I would take my grandfather's letter out of the drawer and read it again, those three slow pages full of things he hoped for me, and I would think: he knew exactly who I was and what I was capable of, and if he believed all of this, then I have to believe some of it too.
I was twenty-three for another eight months before the man with the sad eyes and the fifty-dollar tip walked into Mae's on a Tuesday night and changed the shape of everything.
But I did not know that yet. On the night I am telling you about, I was simply a girl who had made a small home out of very little, and was trying, and was lonely in ways she had not yet learned to name, and who believed, with everything she had, that the ground was still holding.
It was.
It simply had more tests in store for me than I had anticipated.