“You should come in,” the man said. “Have a cuppa.”
“Thank you,” Eamonn said. “That’s kind of you. But—”
“Nobut,” the man said. “Frances would eat the head off me if she knew you’d come and I hadn’t invited you in. Follow me, you know the way.”
The man stood off to one side, motioning our car onto the flattened grass like it was a tricky maneuver and we’d need his guidance to do it. He kept pace with our car the entire way up the long drive, and I could tell the whole thing was killing Eamonn a bit, from being roped into coming into the house at all to having to drive two miles an hour so he didn’t pass an old man.
“We don’t have to,” I said. “We can always make up somewhere we need to be.”
“It’s fine,” Eamonn said. “We’ll have a cup of tea and be on our way.”
It was a cute little house, I saw as we approached it. It was painted white but it looked like that had been a long time ago, and now some kind of algae or moss grew up from the bottomof the house in a wavy line of blackish-green. The windows were framed in old, unpainted wood, and the front door had stained glass inserts in the top half.
“They kept it,” Eamonn said, leaning forward as he put the car in park. “I always loved that door.”
I had the strangest feeling then, similar to the one I’d had back when I’d been walking around Dublin at night by myself. Maybe my purpose in being here had nothing to do with Niall at all, but I really did feel like my purpose was wrapped up inhim. Eamonn. Like if this wasn’t a dream, if by some weird magic or twist of fate or whatever I was actually here, in this time and place…maybe it had been my purpose to lead Eamonn back to his childhood home, and heal something within him. There was no reason I should think of myself as that important to the life of this man I’d just met, who I really didn’t know at all. But somehow it felt like that purpose was just as much aboutme, even if I didn’t see how yet.
Last night, I hadn’t liked these thoughts. They’d made me anxious, vaguely irritated at everything I’d had to go through without knowing why. But today, I felt a certain kind of peace. I got out of the car, following Eamonn to the house.
Twenty-Six
“Mind that step right there,”the old man said as he led us into the entryway, before giving Eamonn a toothy smile. “Ah, what am I saying, you know. Name’s Michael Leahy, by the way. And you are…I don’t remember the names of all Maura’s young ones.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Eamonn said, reaching down to unlace his boots to leave them by the front door next to a row of shoes. “There were a lot of us. I’m Eamonn. Number four of six.”
In all this time, I’d never seen Eamonn with his shoes off. He was wearing plain olive green socks, nothing particularly exciting about them, but it still struck me as somehow intimate to see them now. Since I’d been wearing flats, I ended up barefoot on the rusty orange tile, which made me feel practically naked as Eamonn looked down at my feet.
“Feels good to get those off, huh,” he said, and even though I knew he was talking aboutshoesI felt myself blushing a little.
Our host had already gone ahead, crossing through a living room to call into the next room over. “Frances! We have company.”
I wanted to spend more time in the living room, which had a fireplace and a couple worn, overstuffed chairs. I wanted to spend time in every room, even though I knew it wasn’t like it would beexactlythe way it had been when Eamonn lived there, that the furniture was all different and maybe other material changes, too, like the flooring or the paint on the walls. The room where Michael was leading us turned out to be the kitchen, which had its own door, completely different from the more open concepts I usually saw in Florida houses. An older woman sat at a small table pushed over to one corner, furiously erasing a page in a sudoku book.
“Micky, is that you,” she said, “interrupting me when I’m trying to do my puzzle. Now I can’t remember where this three was supposed to go.”
“We havecompany,” he said, moving to stand in front of her now, his tone just as jovial but a little louder. She looked up at that, and it occurred to me that Frances’ lack of response the first time was less that she wasn’t listening and more that she had some difficulty hearing at all. “Frances, this is one of Maura’s, from before us—Eamonn. He brought his girl with him, to show her the house, er—”
Michael said that so casually—his girl, seeming to think that this was just an averagelet me take my girlfriend to where Igrew uptype of visit. The silence stretched a moment too long before I realized I’d been meant to insert my name into it.
“Jess,” Eamonn said for me, his hand barely skimming my lower back, as if presenting me to be introduced. “And I’m Eamonn—like your husband said, I grew up here. I appreciate you letting us take a look around.”
“Oh,” Frances said. “Of course, of course. Sit down if you’d like.”
There were only two chairs at the table, but she’d gotten up to leave them both empty, crossing over to grab a kettle off the stove and fill it with water from the tap.
“You’ll have tea of course, won’t you,” she said, and there was really no way to answer but in the affirmative, because she was already putting the water on to boil.
“Only if it’s no bother,” Eamonn said. “Thank you.”
The open sudoku book on the table suggested that the woman had been at work on this one puzzle for a while—it was still covered in a fine dust of eraser flakes, lots of scribbled notes in the margins, a few of the numbers gone over and over to make the pencil marks bolder, like she wanted to indicate those were ones she was sure of.
“It’ll be a minute,” she said. “You can poke around, if you’d like. You’ll see we’ve not made too many changes, although we did some redecorating. In the bathroom especially.”
“It certainly needed it,” Eamonn said, and I could tell that he partially meant it and partially was being gallant, trying to give Frances a point of pride.
He took me back through the living room, with its fireplacethat was covered with a 1980s-looking heat screen, trimmed in bright gold.
“Is that original?” I asked, pointing down at it.
