“Yeah, but,” he said, tilting in his seat to pull his wallet out of his back pocket. “When in Dublin.”
Ten
Grafton Street was busy, thewide walkway crowded with people. Outside one store, there was a little girl leaping around like she was a frog while a group of adults nearby talked and laughed, and Eamonn and I separated for an instant to go around a couple who’d stopped in the middle of the street to go through a backpack together. A kid with glasses and signage all around him advertising his social media channels was doing a surprisingly competent cover of “Riptide,” and I slowed down just a bit to listen.
“Do you need anything?” Eamonn had stopped outside a pharmacy, inclining his head toward the store. I hesitated just long enough for him to open the door and gesture me inside. “Come on.”
The truth was that I would have killed for the chance to brush my teeth. But I also didn’t want to keep asking him to buy things for me, all Becfola jokes aside.
“You have to keep track of any money you’re spending on my behalf,” I said. “Including gas money.”
He’d watched me grab a travel-sized toothpaste from a bin by the front, together with a toothbrush that folded up and came with a cap. “Your dental hygiene accessories won’t put me in the poor house.”
“It’s important to me,” I said. “Please.”
“Yeah, sure.” He’d turned to fiddle with the display behind him, until he seemed to realize that he was fingering a packet of condoms, and he dropped his hand. “Need anything else?”
“Well, notthose,” I said, then immediately wished I hadn’t. His cheeks had gone a little pink and I’d wanted to see if I could get him to blush all the way. But instead I was the one left feeling awkward, with another of those comments that made it seem like I was reading more into things than was there.
Eamonn cleared his throat. “I think some people still think of Ireland as a place where they wouldn’t sell these in shops. But we’ve come a long way.”
It was as if he thought he could defuse all potential awkwardness by citing historical context, which was somehow even more endearing than the blush. “Do you remember buying your first ones? Did you think you’d die of embarrassment?”
Eamonn sucked the inside of his cheek before breaking out into a grin, and I knew it would be a good story. “Niall told me and some other lads to nick some from the shop,” he said. “We were going to use them for water balloons, and he said to make sure to get ones with jumbo or magnum on the box, ’cause they’d make the best balloons.”
“No,” I breathed, already laughing. “He didn’t.”
“The shopkeeper caught us,” Eamonn said. “What do youse think you’d be using these for? The cheek of ya.He sent us home but never told our mams, a class move because it was the same place we did the shopping every week.”
“Niall set you up,” I said. “How old were you?”
“Seven or so. Niall would’ve been…” He paused, as if doing the math, and even in that second it felt like the mood shifted, away from a funny childhood memory and toward something else. “…thirteen.”
I tried to think of any comparably silly stories I could tell that would shift the mood back. “These days I go through self-checkout if I’m buying condoms, avoid any awkwardness. But one time I had a lot of groceries so I thought, you know what, I can do this, I’m an adult. Only I ended up with the youngest bagger ever, I swear it was this kid’s first day at his first job, and he turned beet red and started stammering. He kept dropping items and fumbling with the bags, too, so the whole mortifying experience took twice as long as it should’ve.”
“Like imagine you had to go through Joe for your most sensitive items.”
“Joeis a professional,” I said, feeling a need to stick up for our earnest young server. “As long as I wasn’t trying to sneak a copy ofDublinersin under my produce, I think he’d let it go.”
Eamonn looked like he was holding back a smile again. “Even Joe would have to allow that was Joyce’s most accessible work,” he said, before nodding his head toward the rest of the store. “Let’s see what the next aisle has to offer.”
In the end, I let him buy me the toothpaste and brush and some deodorant, and then we headed into a department store where Eamonn said there were bathrooms on the second floor. “Best-kept secret,” he said.
I ducked into the bathroom to freshen up before putting my supplies in the pockets of Eamonn’s jacket. There was a slip of paper already in there, which I unfolded to look at because what could I say, I was nosy. It was a Tesco receipt from around Christmas, for flea shampoo for a dog.
So Eamonn must have a dog. I’d already known there was a ticking clock on us doing this, whatever we were doing…hanging out, walking around Dublin. When I’d asked him if he wouldn’t mind showing me around, I hadn’t expected him to spend the whole day babysitting me. But now I knew that there was definitely a hard stop, because how long could dogs go without being let out…eight, ten hours? I’d never had one, so I didn’t know.
Outside the shops, the little boy with glasses was gone, and there was another busker clearly about to set up to play. He was swigging a bottle of soda, his guitar still in its case. Eamonn fell into step beside me, both of us walking slower now that the crowds were jamming up the street.
“What’s a typical day like for you?” I asked.
He leaned in, like he needed to get closer to hear me. He really was tall—I would’ve asked him exactlyhowtall, but I already had a question pending so I guessed it would have to wait.
“A typical day?” he repeated. “Not this one, I’ll tell you that.”
The way he said it, I had no way of knowing if he meant that to be good or bad, so it seemed best to leave it. “Right, this isn’t exactly typical for me, either. I mean, like, imagine it’s a regular Monday, you’ve got work, you wake up. What does that look like?”
“It’s boring. Like you said, wake up, go to work, that’s pretty much it.”
