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I’d never regretted staying home, working with Mama at the market when my friends went off to Uni. I knew we couldn’t afford it, and besides, I loved being here with her. I suppose I’d always thought we’d have more time.
“What am I going to do now, Mama?” I ask the empty store and am not surprised I don’t receive an answer.
After I lock up, I begin my walk home. Being close to work is one of the advantages of the flat. It’s also in a safe neighborhood, unlike so many terrible one’s Mama and I lived in over the years. When we only had my mother’s income, we’d often shared a one-room place, or had neighbors who were always getting in drunken fights or dealing drugs—and sometimes, in the worst places, all three. When Mama would go to work she’d walk me across the city to Aunt Izzy’s house—she wasn’t really my aunt, as my mother was my only family, but she was my mother’s best friend from childhood, and practically helped raise me.
But now Izzy’s moved overseas, and there’s not much left for me here.
My mind wanders, and if I‘m forced to leave, I have no idea where I would go. The idea of moving back to a neighborhood on the West side—where our last neighbor shot his son on his own front porch while Mama and I were both home in bed—makes my skin crawl. I’m not sure how my mother survived those places with a young daughter, and I’m not in a hurry to find out what might happen to me living there alone.
I return home and gather the mail, and then spread it out on the kitchen table. The surface of the table still has scratch marks from my grandmother’s butcher knife—I call it an heirloom, but it’s so old that the glue in the legs keeps shaking loose and no matter how many times I re-glue them, the table never sits flat.
My legs feel equally unsteady, and I sink into a kitchen chair and kick my feet up on another.
What would my mother say if she were here?
Cheer up, to start with.
You’re young, Sophia.
You can do anything you want with your life.
Which is all very good except most things require money….or an idea of what I might want to begin with.
Then I hear Mama’s voice, clear in my mind.
What you need is to find a good man.
I sigh, flipping absently through the adverts piled up on the table. It’s not that I’ve never had men call, but when Mama got sick, I didn’t pay them much attention. I had too many other things to worry about, too much weighing on me to try to think about romance.
And now? I live alone and work at a market, can’t afford rent, and can barely afford an ale at a pub. Where am I going to meet a man?
I look down at the table, my finger pausing over one of the adverts—a flier for an international dating site.
“No,” I say. “No way, Mama.”
It’s probably just my imagination, but in my mind, I think I hear my mother laugh.
I pull out the flier and read it. It’s less of a dating service—which I could try, but I haven’t been able to afford a computer or a phone in ages. Not since before my mother’s diagnosis. And last I remember, men expected to be able to text or chat online.
This arrangement is different. I’d fill out a profile it says, then be matched with a man in another country. Then I’d be flown out to meet him, and if we wanted, we could get married, and I could stay.
He’d pay for everything.
I let myself wander through one or two romantic daydreams about being flown to London or America by a man who has the money of Mr. Darcy and looks like Colin Firth. He’d woo me for a few weeks, and then we’d get married and live happily ever after. This quickly gives way to nightmares about being locked up in the closet by a man who’s mail ordered seven wives and then imprisoned each as she disappoints him.
Probably the truth would fall somewhere in between.
I stare skeptically at the card.
I know this is crazy. When you need an adventure, you find a job in another city, you go on a vacation, you get a pet. You don’t marry someone you’ve never met within thirty days. This—this isn’t something people do.
The card in my hand suggests otherwise. They wouldn’t be sending out bulk mail in Dublin if they didn’t see some kind of return on it.
And I can still hear my mother in the back of my mind, giggling.
Come on, Sophia. You could at least try.
I fix myself a salad for dinner—I rarely cook anymore, now that I’m only cooking for one—and head down to the library to use a public computer to apply to be a mail order bride. I’ve only got thirty minutes before they close, so I practically sprint there.
