Since she broke her promise and told Mr O’Dowd about their housing situation, Ruth and DJ had managed to maintain a somewhat uneasy truce. But it was tenuous and the slightest thing seemed to set them at each other’s throats. This morning DJ pulled on his school tracksuit bottoms, which the previous day were clean but were now covered in thick mud from his arse to his knee.
‘What on earth happened?’ Ruth asked.
‘I was out playing with Bette. I fell,’ he answered. That chin of his was back out again, daring her to have a go.
‘I specifically asked you to change out of your school tracksuit before you went to the park,’ Ruth said.
‘I forgot.’
Ruth frantically went through the laundry basket that was now beginning to take over the room, searching for a less dirty pair of tracksuit bottoms. ‘Here.’ She threw a pair at him. ‘They will have to do. Marginally better than the ones you have on.’
More scowls as he walked into the bathroom to change again. ‘Why don’t I have any clean clothes any more?’
‘I shall find a launderette today,’ Ruth replied to the slam of the door.
Things had been easier when he was younger. He accepted life as it was presented to him. His questions were easier to answer. And that was saying a lot, because he had some corkers back then.
‘Why is the sky blue, Mam?’
‘Where does colour get its colour, Mam?’
‘What happens to water when it goes down the drain, Mam?’
And now he was still testing her because last night he came home from the park with the one question Ruth found impossible to answer.
‘Where is my dad?’
She tried to shut her mind from that question. But it was becoming increasingly difficult. When she left Wexford she may not have said it out loud, but the reason she chose to go to Dublin was because that was where DJ’s father, Dean, was from. And for the first couple of years she looked for him. Everywhere. She would walk the streets each day taking a different path, pushing DJ in his pushchair. Hoping that luck would be on her side, fate would shine a light on them, and they would bump into each other. What happened after she found him was cloudy. Because if that happened, then she would have to accept the fact that he had never loved her; that their lost weekend was just a fling. Nothing more. But no matter how much it seemed just like that, neither her head nor heart believed it to be true. Dean had loved her. She knew it. She no longer looked for him, but she never lost her hope that one day he would return.
Ruth remembered the day on Curracloe Beach so clearly, it felt like it had just happened …
With an ice-cream in hand, Ruth placed her coins in the slot, then pulled back the red velvet curtain to sit in front of the turban-clad statue that would dispense her fate at the arcade. She had been on the beach reading for the past two hours, the afternoon sun now in the mid-twenties. Ireland was in the throes of a heatwave. It was a universal truth that the Irish sun would come out to play whenever schools returned after their summer break. She crossed her fingers as she heard the machine hum and vibrate as it decided her fate. Be a good one.
The machine hissed and spluttered, then spat out a card.
YOU WILL MEET YOUR SOUL MATE TODAY.
Ruth’s heart began to pound. In all the years she had used this machine, she never had a fortune about soul mates. Never! Ruth traced the words of the fortune with her forefinger. She jumped up and shook her head to banish her mother, letting dreams that she rarely dared to believe take up residence instead. All because of the card in her hand. She pulled back the red curtain and stepped out into the arcade, promptly crashing into someone.
‘Hey!’ a man shouted.
Her ice cream tumbled towards the floor followed by the fortune, which fluttered to the ground in slow motion, finally resting in a puddle of vanilla ice cream.
‘I’m so sorry!’ The man was quick to apologise, seeing the look of dismay on the young woman’s face.
Ruth’s eyes never left the card on the ground, the fortune’s black ink beginning to melt away. ‘It was my fault. I was distracted.’
‘You OK, Ruth?’ Pat’s voice shouted over from the ice-cream counter. ‘I’ll make you another. Don’t fret. On the house.’
Ruth kneeled down and picked up the sodden fortune. The man with shiny, black, lace-up shoes inched closer.
‘Was it a good fortune?’ Shiny Shoes asked.
Ruth peeked through her sunglasses, taking in the man dressed in a grey suit and red tie, which looked like it was strangling him, the sleeves of his shirt cuffed on each arm. His attire jarred with the beach. Jarred with her.
‘What did it say?’ he asked, trying to make out the words, which were now almost melted to oblivion. ‘Meet …’
Ruth replied, ‘It said that today I would meet my soul mate. I have never had that fortune before. It was a most excellent fortune.’
‘Most excellent indeed,’ Shiny Shoes acknowledged. He pulled out some change from his pocket and said, ‘Maybe it will come out again. Let me try for you.’
Ruth shook her head. ‘The odds of that happening are highly unlikely.’
He pushed his coin into the machine, then sat in behind the red curtain. And once again it hissed and spluttered, then spat out a card.
YOU WILL MEET YOUR SOUL MATE TODAY.
Ruth heard the man laugh out loud as he picked up his fortune. ‘Well, I’ll be darned. Look at that.’
Ruth looked up from the floor and their eyes met.
Ruth had found herself laughing with that strange man dressed in a grey suit on a hot September day, not just about the impossible odds that they beaten but so much more too. And because of this chance encounter, Ruth’s life was about to change and shift more than she could ever imagine.