I believe it could be said that my parents were equally looking forward to their entire stay in The Town, up to this point, as they were to the last few days of their visit when my houseguests overlapped. Sheri, my former wife, and a dear friend of ours, Bridget, were slated for arrival four days prior to my parents’ flight out of Dublin.
The people who know and love us can totally understand why Sheri and I are still so close after our divorce. Those who don’t get it either do not know us and our history or are no longer in our lives. For readers who cannot possibly know the history that the two of us share, I simply ask that you suspend your disbelief for the sake of this tale. Just know there is still respect and true love in our relationship even though we are no longer married. That said, yes, the woman to whom I was married for nearly seventeen years—and from whom I had been separated for over five years and divorced for three—was coming to visit me in Ireland, and my parents were ecstatic to see her.
It had been about six years since Sheri and my parents had last seen one another. Cards and calls were regularly exchanged, but even though I lived only eighty miles from Sheri, and Da had visited me a couple of times since our separation, they hadn’t had the opportunity to spend time together. It was too bad, really. Like true, old friends, though, we all knew we were in for half a week of craic.
I could tell the ’rents were excited by the way they went about helping me prepare the sleeping closet for the impending arrival. The chest of drawers was dragged around to block a cupboard door. The cupboard was only big enough to store the new linens and towels I’d purchased for the guest room, so blocking its door didn’t do any harm and freed up enough space that the bunked beds could be un-stacked. Can you see a woman, nearly fifty, climbing into the top bunk … after a session down the pub?
Though there would be room enough between the two beds to sidle between the freshly un-bunked beds, making them up was impossible. The beds were re-stacked, made up, and then re-un-bunked with fresh sheets, cases, and quilted blankets. Considering the age of both mattresses and pillows, I was pretty sure the sheets, cases, and quilts would be the softest and most cushioning of the entire ensemble. From my experience with my bedroom’s furnishings, I could say so with some authority.
Though the incoming flight was scheduled to arrive around midday, the ’rents were not joining me for the pick-up. There was no way that we would all five (plus Sadie) fit into the skate-ball bag. Remembering how Sheri used to pack made me wonder if I, the two ladies, and the fruits of their over-packing were going to fit. Even Sadie’s small displacement was suspect, so I set off for Shannon alone on the brightest, sunny day we’d had since my arrival.
Sheri and Bridget had flown from Seattle to Shannon via Copenhagen, Denmark. They had, therefore, been in an airport or on a plane for nearly twenty hours. You wouldn’t have known it. They both looked good; Sheri always looked good. But I could tell that it was still the middle of the night for their bodies. As the sun was well over the yardarm, and they needed nourishment, I decided that a quick pub stop for lunch on our way home would be called for.
One thing just about every pub in Ireland can be counted upon to deliver, along with a good pint, of course, is soup and a decent toasted sandwich—a “Toastie.”
Often the soup is vegetable soup and if it is, it’s far more common that what arrives in your bowl looks more like an infant’s pap than soup. Don’t get me wrong; these soups can be incredibly complex and nuanced in flavor. Yet no matter the flavor, I just can’t get past the texture of a soup that can fully support a spoon in standing position. I therefore opt for the de facto national dish of Ireland: the ham and cheese toastie with onion and tomato.
I said that “just about every pub in Ireland can be counted on” for a decent toastie. On this day, with sun shining bright and two beautiful women travelers on their first trip to Ireland, I found one of the very few that cannot.
While I found the establishment suspect from the moment we walked in the front door, I knew when we spotted it that we would soon be out of options, at least for several miles. That the place was all but empty at the tail end of the luncheon hours should, possibly, have been an indicator. However, it would be nearly an hour before we were in the vicinity of another. By that time lunch service would be over. The time, coupled with Sheri’s forecastable descent of attitude when her blood sugar got too low, made this our only serviceable choice for a lunch stop.
The soup—vegetable, as I could have divined—was at least not the expected slurry. Rather, it was condensed beef/vegetable, straight from the tin. The publican was also serving as the lunch shift cook. It would not surprise me to hear that he had run to the market and fetched the tin off the shelf moments after we inquired after the day’s soup selection. Our toasties arrived at table still in the miniature equivalent of the “brown-in-the-bag” turkey roasting plastic my mother once tried for a thanksgiving dinner with limited success. Okay, like most of her turkeys, with no real success.
On no level could our first Irish lunch together be considered a success. I may not ever know the reason why, but I would spend most of the next ten days as an unsuccessful hybrid host-friend-tour guide. Perhaps it was this failed repast, or that she’d brought the best defensive wingman who ever flew, or some other transgression for which I was certainly, if only partially, at fault. The clouds and stiffening breeze that awaited us outside the pub foretold more than just a weather change.
* * *
The welcome that met us at the cottage was warm in many ways. Da had loaded enough turf into the fireplace that you’d have thought he was expecting our arrival from the Arctic. The hug shared by Da and Sheri was warm enough to make someone who didn’t know them or the situation less than comfortable. Sheri is nine years my senior and I was born when my father was only eighteen.
Do the math: Sheri was older than me by the same margin that my father was older than she. It was often the joke when the two of them were together that, were my mother to kick and I to do something stupid, they’d probably have enjoyed dating. It’s not really as icky as it sounds now that I read what I have just written. If you knew us, you’d see the humor in it. Since you don’t, I’ll simply have to once again ask your disbelief to be suspended. It’s just how we are.
I too was greeted warmly—more warmly than I’d imagined I would be. Sadie bound out the Dutch door when it was opened as the skate-ball bag slid to rest. She leapt into my lap while I was still in the driver’s seat and buckled in. By the time I could unfasten my safety belt and hoist her to the ground, my ears, face, and any hair that extended from under my cap were fully anointed by what would henceforth be known as “Sadie Kisses.” While she was interested in the newest additions to our household, she paid them only socially required notice and figure-eighted my legs all the way inside the cottage. She stopped only long enough to stamp at the sheep who had gathered to welcome us. Much to her satisfaction, they scattered en masse.
I was surprised at the depth of her loyalty to her new pack leader. We’d been together for only eleven days and now we’d added two more faces to what she must have begun to see as her new pack. For all the assaults to her canine sensibilities, Sadie was seeing me, or at least treating me, as the constant and her alpha. Just before we stepped out of the coming storm and into the peat-scented dry sauna that was now the cottage, Sadie stopped and turned to the one sheep that did not scurry and gave her a good stamp with her front paws. When the ewe only flinched, Sadie wiggled herself in place and stamped paws yet again. Once more, with feeling.
The sheep ran and Herself turned and looked at me with pride, as if to say, “I’ve got the sheep under control, Da. You’re the Alpha dog, but I’m the Alpha Bitch.”
I bent to pick her up and carry her into the house and was rolled right onto my back by the force of her advance. Rather than sit and look at me—turtled as I was—like the day we hiked for our spare key, she jumped onto my chest and showered me with Sadie Kisses.
* * *
Miller’s restaurant was quickly becoming everyone’s first dinner upon arrival. By evening, as we left the place, the wind that had begun to freshen after our dismal lunch had become what the locals call “desperate,” and it finally ushered in the winter rain my Seattle friends had foretold. Though they had all spurned my offer to take any of them along with me when I decided to strap on the skate-ball bag for the descent into town, my lodgers all required my chauffeuring services to return them to our near capacity abode.
Even without Sadie and luggage, there was no shoehorning our entire party into our wee conveyance. Da offered to be in the first sortie and stoke the fire with the new sack of hard, Czech coal we’d purchased at a filling station the next village over. My mother joined him, and while there may—may—have been room for one more, Sheri and Bridget agreed to tuck themselves into a nearby pub for one. I’d gather them after getting the auld ones in for the night.
Knowing how one thing leads to another or, as Da put it that night, “Slap leads to tickle,” I was sent away from the cottage with explicit instructions to take the girls out for a proper night on the Irish town.
“Besides,” said he, “you’ve already become The Town scandal by walking around in your PJs. Why not show off with two beautiful women on your arms?”
Never one to disobey my father, especially when he was all but commanding me to get these two hotties all liquored up, I put on my drinking shoes and dismounted the hill for a few pints and a few laughs. If nothing else, Sheri and I could still laugh, and Bridget made her comic intentions known to me the very first time we were introduced at the wedding reception.
“You’d better treat her right, you, you … You Young Buck Penis!” she’d said. It took me not a short while to unravel threat from humor—two years in fact. Not until she came to visit Sheri and me at our first home together in Swampscott, Massachusetts did I finally cement her behavior to be on the side of clownishness.
Shedding cap, coat, and muffler soaked by the increasing rain in just the short distance between the car park and the public house, I found the girls at a low table about halfway down the room from the bar and the stage. A hot whiskey ornamented the place in front of each of them, a dark pint of stout, and a golden dram of something higher on the proof scale stood at attention for my arrival. The music had not yet begun, it being only 9:30. The musicians were scheduled for 9:00, but punctuality is seen as an affliction of the musical set. The place was already better than two thirds full and brimming with happy sounds.
I sat and picked up the pint in one, sweeping motion and raised it to toast my fellow conspirators.
“Bridget wants to know if we’re going to have sex,” blurted Sheri before Your One could playfully slap her for asking.
“All three of us?” I asked. “The beds don’t seem that strong, do you think?” I responded before taking three long swallows from my pint.
By the time my glass was returned to its mat, we were enveloped in the joyous, nasty laughter that we three had shared in our younger days.
“You’re all yak and no shack, Sheri,” I said, and we laughed and drank and laughed and sang along with the players, who had finally arrived somewhere after the giggling began but before the cackling.
Knowing that it was far too desperate out to walk, even if my legs would have afforded me the opportunity, I kept myself to two pints and let the girls share my “cold” whiskey as they sipped their second hot. We prepared ourselves for the weather I had come in from, but the storm had taken advantage of the time to build to a north Atlantic blow that would make even the Bering Sea proud. Even if I had kept up with the girls drink for drink, I would have been sobered by the rain, which seemed to have no particular direction of origin. Each drop’s destination seemed targeted at we three and our skate-ball bag transport.
When we turned off the laneway into the drive, we were greeted by a color about which I’d only ever read. Da had, indeed, turned that bag of rock dug from well beneath Eastern Europe into heat—and various greenhouse gasses. The glow that emulated from the living room window—past, through, and around the cotton-laced curtains—was a red-orange the likes of which we conjure in our brains when we think of sweating men, stripped to their waists, feeding industrial furnaces or locomotives by the shovelful. Partials of the air inside the room seemed illuminated by an energy that came from within. Outside the panes lit drops of rain to molten glass as they passed through the radiance.
I cut the headlamps and coasted in by the warm summons of this beacon.
Looking in the window from the storm, I saw the tired old furniture and fixtures The Princess had cobbled together transformed into a drawing room from times gone by. Faded patterns leapt from worn tapestry and shadows cast lamps as statuary and framed prints as masterworks of another day. And there on her fleece, stretched out on her belly and looking aflame as a Navaho sunset, was my dear Sadie. She had positioned herself close enough to the blaze for warmth without being too close as to overheat. She looked closer than would be comfortable for me, even if heat and MS didn’t mix like the scarecrow and a lit match.
She lay on her belly with her back legs spread out and one front bent backward, looking like a seal pup that had injured its front flipper. A bright orange seal pup. I almost didn’t want to open the door to disturb the slumbering roan, but the drops of rain were beginning to feel as searing as they looked and the wind was finding every seam in my coat.