He gave a rueful little smile, more to himself than me. “Youknow, yeah,” he said. “I know I haven’t exactly been writing you an ode to my family so far. But we had fun. It was hard on Mam, I’m sure—and me hardest of all, maybe. Us oldest four were from her first marriage, and he was a drunk and a bollix but better for not being around much, and eventually getting himself gone entirely. Then the twins came along later, when I was eight. Their da stuck around for a bit, decent bloke all around. He was the one who got me into fixing cars, wanting to know how they worked. But eventually he and my mam broke up, I never did know why. I think he has another family now in Donegal.”
I hadn’t expected so much information, and I was almost dizzy with it, didn’t even know where to start. “So you were the baby,” I said. “Until the twins came along.”
The corner of his mouth quirked. “Yeah. Can you tell?”
I really considered that. “I’m not sure. If anything, I probably would’ve read you as an older brother.”
The answer seemed to please him. “You’re an only child?”
“Is it obvious?”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “But you talked about feeling lonely, you hadn’t mentioned any siblings. So I assumed. You do have a certain…”
The longer the pause lasted while he searched for the right word, the more I was desperate to know what it would be. I knew the stereotypes of only children. We were selfish, we wanted things our own way, we couldn’t get along with others. We’d been socialized to be mini adults from a young age.
“Composure,” he said finally. “You seem self-contained, to me.”
That was such an interesting word.Self-contained. I turned it over in my head, trying to decide if I thought it fit me. If anything, I thoughthewas self-contained, but I wondered if it was one of those things you could only observe about someone else and not about yourself.
“I don’t mean that in a bad way,” he said when I didn’t respond, like he thought my silence meant I was upset.
“No, no,” I said. “I didn’t take it like that. I was just thinking about it. I guess I feel like I’m spilling out all over, pretty much all of the time. But I’m wondering if that’s my own read on myself, and if it’s even true. My life feels like such a mess—the job I’m good at but feels like it doesn’t ask much of me, and which I don’t enjoy. I can’t seem to make a relationship work, or lately to even find someone to try a relationship with in the first place. I want these big emotions but I don’t think I’m the kind of person to inspire big emotions, do you know what I mean? Maybe Iamself-contained, maybe that’s part of the problem.”
“I think you’re the kind of person to inspire big emotions,” he said.
I gave him a smile to let him know that I appreciated him saying that, even if he only had a couple days’ worth of data and I had thirty-seven years’ worth. “You know what I mean,” I said. “Like all I used to want was for a boyfriend to give me flowers, and not because I specifically asked him to for Valentine’s Day but because hefeltlike it, he saw some flowers and he thought of me. Which is the most typical thing for me to say in the world, I know, there are literally entire sitcom episodes devoted to this very phenomenon.”
“Well, you’re inspiring me right at this very moment,” Eamonn said. “I thinkI’dlike flowers. That does sound nice.”
His tone was light, and I knew he was partly making a joke to make me feel better, to validate that it was an okay thing to want. But I couldn’t ignore the slight wistfulness to his voice, too, that told me there was something true in what he said.
“You’d have to start dating,” I said. “To get yourself in the flowers game.”
The rejoinder practically wrote itself—That hasn’t worked for you, has it?—but I knew Eamonn wouldn’t take the opportunity to say it. Instead, he scraped at a worn part of the steering wheel with his fingernail, before seeming to realize what he was doing and smoothing it back over.
“The last letter my mother ever sent to me arrived three weeks after she’d died,” he said. “That happened with the mail inside sometimes, it took a while to get routed. All that she was going through, my whole family was going through, I never got to be there for any of that. I wasn’t there for any of that, because of my own stupid choices. When I went to prison, most of my family were still living in this house, and by the time I got out, they’d all moved on. My mother gone, Kathleen already moved out with her husband, Niall in America, Sio taking some art course, the twins moving in with Kathleen. She’s the one who kept everything together, to the extent there was anything left to keep together.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning about his mother but also about all of it. “And I shouldn’t have pressured you to come out here, when you clearly didn’t want to.”
“No,” he said. “It’s good. I’m glad we came.”
There was nothing else we were going to be able to see, so we could’ve just left then. But for some reason we stayed in the car awhile longer, not talking but in a way that felt comfortable. The only sounds were the birds and a very occasional rush of another car passing us by, and whenever I felt Eamonn’s gaze on me, I’d turn only to catch him staring down at the steering wheel again.
The impression Eamonn had given me of his younger self had been that he’d been a bit wild, out of control. And now he seemed almosttooin control, like he’d set out a list of rules for his life and was determined to follow them to the exact letter. I thought of howunself-contained I’d felt when I was young, how I would’ve seen that descriptor as an insult, like being called boring or unimaginative. So maybe I didn’t need to live a big life—maybe neither of us did. But there had to be something in the middle, surely?
When an older man suddenly appeared at my open window, I’d been so lost in my thoughts that I gave a little yelp.
“Didn’t mean to startle ya,” he said, holding up a hand. “Are ya lost? Car break down?”
Eamonn turned the key in the ignition to fire the car back up, either to prove to this man that we were about to move on or to prove that his car was in perfect shape and ran like a dream, thank you very much. “We were just leaving,” he said. “Sorry to trouble you.”
“It’s no trouble,” the man said. Now that I’d recovered from my initial shock from him appearing out of nowhere like that, I saw that he had a friendly face. He looked nice, like someone you could instantly imagine as your grandfather.
“He used to live here,” I said, gesturing toward Eamonn. “We thought we’d drive by.”
The man’s face lit up. “Oh,” he said. “One of Maura’s, then? But sure you can’t be the one that went to America, you’re…”
I could feel Eamonn tense beside me, like he knew the main thing people might remember about him. But the man just waved his hand, either as if he couldn’t bring whatever he’d been thinking to his mind to finish the sentence, or as if he’d brought it to his mind and discarded it immediately as something that didn’t matter.
