On Friday evening, mam comes over to see Finn and complain about Marian. Before she arrives, I smash garlic for a dressing, tossing the salad leaves in a large wooden bowl with my hands, wiping the oil from them onto a dish towel. I cut bread into cubes, scatter them in a large pan, and place a roasting chicken on top, then cover the pan with white wine and butter. As the pan roasts, the bread cubes turn crispy and golden, and the whole kitchen starts to smell like garlic and herbs. Marian and I used to argue about cooking, in our twenties. “I find it relaxing,” I said.
“No one actually finds cooking relaxing,” said Marian. “That’s just something women say, because they think they should.”
“Right,” I said, “and you’re a radical because you order Deliveroo every night?” Marian dropped the argument then, which is not something she does, generally speaking. Mam was right. There were clues, all the time.
When mam arrives, I pour her a Bailey’s from the bottle I keep for her. “Thanks, love,” she says. “When was your last haircut?”
“Jesus, mam.”
“Are you trying to grow it longer or something?” she asks, and I sigh. Finn is kicking a ball on the back patio, and I poke my head outside, telling him to stop aiming at our windows. “Do you have a spray for this?” asks mam, running her hand over the kitchen surfaces.
“No.”
“You should.”
“Okay,” I say, thinking, Pillow me. “I need to tell you something, mam. Do you remember when the Dunlops put in a swimming pool?”
Her employers installed a heated single-lane swimming pool under their house, with slate tiles that made the water look like warm black ink. Every day, mam scrubbed the tiles around the pool, and they never once invited her to try it.
“I swam in their pool once,” I say. “I did four lengths, in my bra and knickers.”
“You never did.”
It was a frigid day in January, but the pool was warm, with thick steam floating above it. I stripped off my clothes, dropping them on the tiles, and lowered myself into the heated water.
I wanted to get back at the Dunlops for how they treated mam. All the days she worked sick instead of missing pay, all the nights they made her stay late. The Dunlops were always pleasant to me, but I could see the script running in their minds. Here I am, they thought, being nice to my cleaner’s daughter. They ended up firing mam without any notice or severance, even though she’d worked for them for fourteen years. I hope Royce does steal their painting. They don’t deserve to own it.
“I could have lost my job,” says mam.
“You’re right, I’m sorry,” I say. After a pause, I say, “Do you see what I did there, mam? That was an apology.”
“Give me strength,” mam mutters, and I understand that she will never apologize to me or Marian.
When we first moved here, mam joined a support group for Dublin widows. Marian pointed out that mam was not, in fact, a widow, and she said, “There’s no word for what I am.”
At pickup on Monday, Finn says, “Mama, did you know there was a fire drill today? It was actually during snack time. We put on our shoes but no coats and no bags.”
“Were you nervous?”
“No, but Owen was. He kept asking, Is there a real fire, is there a real fire?” says Finn, and I picture all the children lining up outside their playschool, while fire alarms ring through the empty rooms. I wonder if any of the teachers were also worried about a real fire.
We’re out of milk, I remember, and I shepherd Finn through the supermarket, holding his hand. In the chilled aisle, I reach in for the milk, cold air curling around my back, and when I turn around, Finn has disappeared. The fridge door starts to swing shut as I walk toward the back of the shop, craning up the next aisle, and the next, until I find Finn standing in front of the chocolate bars. “Don’t run off again,” I say, and he nods, gripping a Kinder hippo. “Yes, fine, after dinner,” I say. Last week, Finn made a holy show of me in here over wanting to buy a mop. “But we already own a mop,” I said, like he’d see reason.
At the checkout, I am rummaging in my wallet, talking to the woman at the till, when Finn slips away for the second time. I find him at the newspaper carousel, staring at a photograph of a terraced house in west Belfast, bombed by the UVF. The front of the house is stoved in, like someone punched it, and wires and cladding trail down its open walls. “Was it an accident?” asks Finn.
“Sort of,” I say. I don’t want to lie to him, but I also don’t know how to explain a bombing to a four-year-old. I put my hand around Finn’s shoulders, and he leans against me. At dinner, Finn says, “Is our house going to fall down?”
“What? No.”
“But that other one did,” he says, frowning. I’ve been waiting for this conversation, I realize, for years. I rip paper from a notepad and draw two islands next to each other, a large one and a smaller one. “This big one is Britain, and the smaller one is Ireland. For a long time, Britain controlled all of Ireland, but now it only controls this part, here,” I say, drawing a dotted line around the northeast corner of Ireland. “And some people want the British to leave, and some want them to stay.”
“Are they fighting?” he asks.
“Yes, they’re fighting,” I say. I don’t say: they’re bombing hotels, shooting into crowds, burning down buildings. Murdering informers.
“The soldiers are trying to hurt each other? Are they driving in cars or out on the ground?” he asks, which I attempt to answer. On the map, I draw a star for Belfast, and an oval below it for Strangford Lough. “We used to live here,” I say, drawing a dot along the lough shore for Greyabbey. “Do you remember it?”
“No.”
“Well, you were very small.”
I hold the tip of my pen to the dot, and it’s like the map floods, turns dimensional. I can see the lough and the brent geese flying over the water, and our house, and the sheep moving in the pasture behind it. “Was it dangerous?” asks Finn, not quite managing the word.
“No, not there,” I say, which is mostly true. I will have to tell him the full story one day, but not tonight, not for years.
At bedtime, we climb the stairs, leaving my map on the kitchen table under the lamp. From the stairs, I watch a draft catch the paper and shove it across the table, an invisible hand sliding it across the surface, then stopping, bringing it to rest at a different angle. It makes no sense, I think. The conflict is simple enough for a four-year-old to understand. So why won’t it end?