“YOU’VE GOT a date with Fergal?” Hannah almost squealed after I told her about my run in at the pub. Aunt Gwendolyn was at the church having a bingo night. She’d invited Hannah and me along, but Hannah was quick to turn down the offer. “I just spared you three hours of mind-numbing boredom,” she’d told me as she fixed a frozen pizza for our dinner. “The most exciting thing that happens there is an old lady occasionally gets two bingos in a row.”
“Why would I want to miss that?”
“Now, tell me about your date with Fergal,” Hannah said, taking a pizza cutter and slicing the steaming mass of bread and melted cheese and pepperoni.
“It’s not a date,” I protested, almost 100 percent sure of that fact. “He’s just going to show me around the city since he lives there and I’m a foreigner.”
“The poor, handsome American, all alone in a strange city, being led around by the equally handsome local. It’s all very romantic, isn’t it?” Hannah’s voice had taken on a dreamy quality.
“Whatever you say.” I rolled my eyes, picking up a large slice of pizza, nearly drooling at the dripping cheese, despite having eaten the big lunch at the pub. I sat there for a moment, enjoying the taste, superb even though it was a simple frozen pizza one could buy at any grocery store.
“So,” I said, a question springing to mind, one I knew I would regret asking but would ask anyway. “Is Fergal gay?”
Hannah dropped her slice of pizza, cheese hanging from her mouth. “So you are interested in him?”
I should have kept my mouth shut. “I didn’t say that. It’s just the way that you’re talking about the two of us being romantic together on a date and such, so I just assumed that you were implying something about his sexuality.”
Hannah finished off her slice of pizza and wiped the grease from her fingers on a napkin. “Or you’re just reading what you want to into what I said. Okay, fine, yes, Fergal is a man of the homosexual persuasion. He likes boys. Well—he likes men, nothing inappropriate or untoward, or anything like that. Then again, I’m not sure if sodomy is technically illegal in this county.”
So he was gay. I didn’t know if that information made the situation better or worse. I could lie to Hannah all I wanted, but I couldn’t lie to myself; I was feeling a pull of attraction there. We had similar interest in books, he was handsome, and he had that amazing Irish accent, so much thicker than my family’s. Every time he spoke, the fluttering increased.
Oh God, I was going to be an awkward mess come Saturday. A bad thing, knowing this was definitely a bad thing. I considered myself a very socially aware person; I was outgoing and fun, usually, but as soon as emotions got involved, especially when it came to someone I might be attracted to, I turned into this bumbling, awkward idiot.
“Now that you know he’s gay, does it change your evaluation of the outing? Will you reclassify it as a date?”
“You think that two gay men can’t be out together without it being a date?” I challenged, crossing my arms over my chest.
Hannah blinked, alarmed by my implication. “What? No, I didn’t mean it like that. You know I didn’t! Damn it. Fine, I’ll drop it. For now.” She grabbed the last slice of pizza and held it aloft for a moment, her meaning clear: the pizza was more important.
I thought about it for a moment and felt bad that I’d made solo plans so soon after I’d only just arrived—did she think I was bowing her off? “Sorry I didn’t ask you before I made plans. Maybe you could join us, if you’re not busy.”
Hannah waved my offer away as she devoured the pizza. “No need. Brendan will be in town this weekend, so I’ll be busy.”
I raised my eyebrows, interest piqued. “Brendan, huh? Who is Brendan?”
“My boyfriend,” she answered. “I’m getting a beer. Do you want one?”
I nodded, and she retrieved two from the refrigerator and passed one to me. “You said he’ll be in town. Is he usually not in town?”
“He’s from here originally—well, Ballymore Eustace—but he works in London.”
“How long have you been dating?”
Hannah narrowed her eyes at me over her beer bottle. “Are you just asking me about Brendan so I’ll stop asking you about Fergal?”
I shrugged innocently. “I mean, if you don’t want to talk to me about Brendan, you don’t have to. I just want to know about your life—grow our bond as a family.”
Hannah finished off her beer in another long drink and sighed. “Fine. We’ve been dating for four years.”
“Four years? That’s a long time! How did I not know about this?”
Hannah leveled me with an even gaze. “You mean because we talked so much before you came here?”
She had a point.
“Okay, okay, go on. Is it serious?”
“We’ve dated for four years, so I would say so.”
There she had me again. I was doing great in this conversation.
“Are you going to marry this guy?”
Hannah held up both hands in a stop gesture. “Let’s not get into crazy talk. We haven’t talked about anything like that, not yet.”
I plucked a pepperoni slice from my pizza and popped it into my mouth. “After four years, you haven’t talked about the future? I find that hard to believe.”
“Well, since we’re on the topic of the future,” Hannah said, hands on her hips, “let’s talk about yours.”
I winced. “Question withdrawn?”
Hannah shook her head firmly. “Nope. I’m genuinely curious. What are your plans?”
“Thinking ahead has never been my thing. I don’t even know how long I’ll be here, honestly.”
“And employment?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I always thought about going into teaching, but I haven’t taken the time to go back and get my Master’s in Education.” Talk of the future made me uncomfortable; it always had, no matter who it was with. The only person who could get me to even consider the future, something more than a few months away, was Mom, and that was through sheer willpower more than anything else. Dad gave up a long time ago because it always led to the two of us butting heads, and it just didn’t seem worth it.
“He’ll find his way,” Mom always said. Whenever she did, I would feel this churning guilt in the pit of my stomach and would have to take the time to consider what I wanted and where I saw myself. The problem was, I never saw myself anywhere. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t conjure up a clear image of a future for myself. Now that I had to think of a future without Mom, it was completely impossible.
“What’s stopping you from doing that?”
I hunched my shoulders, staring down at the table, both hands clutched around my beer bottle, hoping she would read my body language and see that I didn’t want to continue this discussion. “I don’t know. I guess I haven’t found the right program that I want to enter.”
“Have you looked?” Hannah pressed.
“Can we just drop the conversation about the future already, please?” I took a drink of my beer more to buy silence than for any other reason. “It’s not really something I’ve done much considering about, given recent events.”
Hannah’s face softened. I felt guilty for using Mom’s death as a weapon in that way, but it worked for the moment, at least. “Okay, let’s not talk about the future—boring topic anyway. Why don’t we see if there’s something trashy to watch on television?”
“Will there be popcorn?”
Hannah looked at me as if I’d asked her what color the sky was. “Can you watch trashy things on television without popcorn?”
She quickly microwaved a bag of popcorn while I washed up the dishes from dinner. Chores complete, we made our way into the comfortably furnished family room and took seats on an overstuffed and surprisingly comfortable couch that looked like it’d survived the First World War.
When she put the television on, the channel played a news broadcast. For a moment I was confused; I thought I was pretty familiar with Irish accents, and yet I didn’t understand a word of what I was hearing. It took nearly a full minute for me to realize the whole broadcast was in Irish.
I looked questioningly to Hannah. She must have figured I would be confused because she had no trouble interpreting my look. “It’s law that the news be broadcast in English and in Irish—a way of preserving the language. At this point it’s a losing battle, but they’re trying.”
There was something comforting about listening to the news reports in Irish. I understood a bit of what I heard. I also noticed something else that I found to be odd. “Why are all of the reporters pretty young women?”
Hannah made a weird sound, a cross between a snort and a chuckle. “The only people who major in Irish language tend to be fit girls—don’t ask me why, I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know if anyone can solve that mystery.”
The next channel she flipped to had what looked like a sitcom; Hannah must not have liked it because she changed the channel quickly, then finally settled on a broadcast of Dragon’s Den. I was familiar with the American version of the show, called Shark Tank, but had never seen the UK version. The differences were quickly apparent.
“This version is much better than the American one,” Hannah commented, resettling the bowl of popcorn on the couch between us. “The American version has so much drama, so many people crying.”
I snorted. “Not to mention terrible puns.”
We watched the show until it finished, to be followed by some police procedural show that was halfway through its season run, which meant that I understood very little about what was going on. The men were handsome, though, so it was worth being confused to hear the sexy accents from the handsome men, who seemed to get shirtless every other scene.
Man, did the Irish know how to make television.