Dinner is served at 6:47 PM.
My mother's table seats ten in a pinch. We are eleven tonight: my mother, Cathleen, Maeve, me, Stavros, Nico, Siobhan, Sofia in her highchair pulled up to the table, Cormac, Ronan, and Nora on a stack of two telephone books on a kitchen chair. Finn could not come; he’s in New York closing a thing. Dimitri said he would come but didn’t, which is what he has been doing for seven weeks now, and I will have to address it with him before the wedding.
My mother stands at her end of the table.
She lifts her glass. The room quiets.
She says, in English, for the O'Briens and the half-Greek child: "Tonight we are eating together. The Konstantinos and the O'Briens. The Greek and the Irish. We are eating because Maeve walked into a grand jury yesterday and did the work that has been hers to do for eight months. She walked in for the dead and she walked out for the living. She came home to her daughter. She came home to my son. She came home to all of us."
My mother pauses.
She looks at Cathleen.
"Cathleen flew up from Florida to be here for her daughter. She didn’t tell her daughter she was coming because Cathleen Callahan is the kind of woman who shows up without making her arrival something the other person has to manage. I have known Cathleen by letter, through Brigid, since 2019. I have known her in person since six AM. She’s welcome in this kitchen for the rest of her life."
Cathleen's eyes fill. She doesn’t let them spill.
My mother lifts her glass higher.
"To Maeve. To Vincent Marchetti, whose name was said yesterday in a federal courtroom. To the women in this family, by blood and by marriage and by letter and by choosing. ‘Stin ygeiá mas.’ To our health."
The table answers. ‘Stin ygeiá mas.’ Even Nora, who has heard the phrase eight times this evening already, is rendering it as ‘steeneeahmaz.’
We drink.
Then, before anyone has set down their glass, I say, "There is one more thing."
The room turns to me.
I take the envelope from my inside pocket. I hold it up.
"Ronan brought a letter from Galway. From Brigid. To the women in this room. She told Ronan I would know when to give it to them. The time is now."
I cross to my mother. I hand her the envelope.
My mother looks at it. The handwriting on the outside. The cream paper. She’s been receiving letters in this handwriting for seven years, since Brigid wrote her the first time after the funeral mass for Lex's father, which Brigid didn’t attend but was told about by Cormac, which is how the correspondence between two grandmothers across an ocean began.
My mother opens the envelope.
She unfolds the letter.
She looks at it for a long second. Then she looks at Cathleen. Then she looks at Maeve. Then she looks at me.
She says, "Brigid wrote it in English. She wants me to read it aloud."
"Then read it," Cathleen says.
My mother reads.
? ? ?
"To Eleni, to Cathleen, and to Maeve, the woman my son tells me is the strongest one in any room she walks into."
My mother pauses. Maeve's eyes are already wet.
"By the time you read this letter, my Cormac and your Lex and your Ronan will all have done what they had to do, and Maeve will have spoken her testimony, and the case that has been hanging over you for eight months will be the kind of case that lives in courtrooms now and not in your kitchens. I am writing because I want to tell you what I know."
"I have been a Galway woman for seventy-three years. I have buried two men I loved and I have raised five sons and I have outlived more than one war that the world didn’t call a war. I know what it costs to be a woman in a family like ours. I know what it costs to raise a daughter in a family like ours. I know what it costs to keep going when the men in your life are doing the work that brings women like us together by letter across an ocean for years and years before we ever meet."
