We kept walking along the water’s edge. Ahead of us was a couple with a big, bounding dog who kept running into the water, splashing before heading back up toward them, then making the loop again. When we passed them, Eamonn turned briefly as if to check on the dog one more time before moving on.
“Can I ask you,” I said, “there’s a receipt for some kind of flea shampoo in your jacket pocket—I wasn’t trying to snoop, I swear, it was just in there. But I thought you said you didn’t have a dog, so…”
I didn’t actually know how to phrase the question. It might come out sounding like I thoughthehad fleas. It might come out like I cared way too much about a potential girlfriend’s dogeven after he’d said he didn’t really date, and when I had no business getting jealous about something like that anyway.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “I think about getting a dog sometimes,” he said. “That’s all.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“Oh, you know,” he said. “The usual. They’re a lot of commitment. A lot of work. I don’t know if my life could handle a dog right now.”
Eamonn didn’t strike me as someone who was afraid of work, and from what I knew about his life, it actually seemed ideally suited to a dog. He lived by himself, he stayed home a lot, he owned his own business where, as far as I knew, he could let the dog hang around all day if he wanted. I didn’t know anything about the safety or health regulations around garages, but that seemed feasible.
Someone who went out of his way to buy flea treatments for a pet he didn’t even have also struck me as someone who really, really wanted a dog. I was trying to think of a way to phrase all of this without overstepping when he pulled on the sleeve of my sweater—well,hissweater, that I was still wearing. “See that guy over there?”
I looked in the direction he was indicating, and there was an older man sitting in front of an easel. Whatever he’d been working on, he seemed satisfied that it was done and was in the middle of handing it over to a woman and a young boy. The woman crouched down to show it to the boy, pointing at a few things in the picture before reaching into her purse for a wad of bills, which she handed to the man.
“Is he some kind of street artist?” I asked. “Like he paints pictures of scenes for tourists, that kind of thing?”
“I assume so,” Eamonn said. “Come on.”
The man was flipping through a pad, flying through various stops and starts of different paintings, pages covered in test smears of paint colors and a few rough sketches. When he reached a blank page he stopped, setting the pad back on his easel, glancing up when he saw us approaching.
“Excuse me,” Eamonn said. “I was wondering if—”
“As Gaeilge, le do thoil,” the man said, and Eamonn glanced at me.
“Ah, my Irish isn’t that good,” Eamonn said. “Hang on, let me—an féidir liom do, uh, péinteanna a úsáid?”
The man’s already wrinkled brow furrowed even more. “Mo phéinteanna?”
“Yeah,” Eamonn said. “If that’s the right word. Ach cúpla nóiméad. I’d pay you, of course. D’íocfainn airgead leat.”
This whole exchange was fascinating to me. “What are you saying?”
“Trying,” Eamonn said. “I don’t know if I’m making any sense. My sister would laugh her head off if she could hear me now.”
I remembered he’d said Kathleen taught Irish, which I’d already assumed was the language he was speaking. Since I didn’t know a word of it, it all sounded good to me.
The man let out a belly laugh of his own. “I’m only coddin’ ya,” he said. “The language almost died out, you know. It does us good to keep speakin’ it. Ask your sister, she knows.”
“Half of what she ever says to me is a quiz on Irish language or history,” Eamonn said. “She’d appreciate you.”
The man pointed at me. “And it wasn’t a famine,” he said. “Don’t believe ’em when they say that it was. It was an ethnic cleansing.”
“Oh, absolutely,” Eamonn said. “It wasn’t about the potatoes.”
“You can live without potatoes,” the man said. “So you wanted to use my paints?”
I assumed that was a misunderstanding born of Eamonn’s self-professed shaky command of the language, but I was surprised when he just nodded. “If you wouldn’t mind,” he said, gesturing over at me. “She’s an artist, too. I was wondering if she could use your paints just for a few minutes. I’d pay you whatever your normal price for a picture is. Double that, even. It would only take—”
He glanced over at me. “How long would you say? To paint me one of your fairies?”
My stomach swooped. Panic, that he’d want me to paint something when I hadn’t painted anything in years, and those specific fairies in over a decade. Trepidation, that of coursenowhe’d see just how full of shit I’d been, talking about research for some art project when I clearly didn’t know what I was doing.
A little bit of something else, that he’d remembered. That he’d want one.
“It’s really okay,” I said. “I bet his seascapes are amazing. You should get one of those.”
