Page 23 of Christmas with the Irish Devil
The baby shifts. A slow roll, a heel under skin. I put the fork down and lay my palm flat, and I realize I am humming. A tune my grandmother hummed when she needed the bread to forgive her for a rushed knead. The sound fills my chest, low and sure, and the people around me move without noticing the way I steadied myself with it.
We close at ten because the town does. Felix stacks chairs like he is building a fort. Noor wraps her scarf twice and kisses the air on either side of my face without touching skin because she is careful about the baby like that. Luis calls goodnight from the alley while he salts the steps. Marta counts the drawer with the kind of attention that makes a person excellent at cards.
I scrub the pass until the steel smiles. I check the low boy doors twice, then a third time, a habit I will not surrender. I label the stock and slide it into the walk-in. I set a jar of lemon peel on the top shelf and feel ceremonial about it, as if the jar itself has earned high ground. I make notes for tomorrow’s list and add anextra line that reads, eat when you feed others, because I have to write it down to believe it.
When the last light clicks off in the kitchen, the dining room keeps its glow. I step into it and stand among the tables like a person in a forest that remembers her. Outside the window, snow has turned to a fine mist, a glitter of cold caught in the streetlight. I am about to lock the door when the bell rings and the postman steps inside, hat in his hands, cheeks flushed, his breath making ghosts in the air.
“Evening, Chef,” he says. He is not used to being out this late with a bag. “This came for you. Hand to hand.”
“Thank you,” I say, and take the thick manila envelope that is too light to be dangerous.
He tips his hat and leaves with the careful gait of a person walking across ice he knows by name. I lock the door and stand with the envelope in the half-light. It bears my name in block letters that are not mine. Kelly, no first name. The return address is a post office five towns south. I slit the top with the edge of a tasting spoon because I refuse to use my good knife on mail. Inside, newspaper. A single sheet, folded twice, a faint smell of ink that triggers the kind of memory you do not want but also do not reject, because memory is a muscle and it hates being ignored.
The Boston paper. Society section on one side, local business on the back. The photograph catches me first, then the headline. A charity gala at the Conservatory, crystal and velvet and a hundred people pretending to believe in the same version of the city. Moira O’Connell in a black dress with sleeves like armor and pearls that could bail out a parish. Declan in a suit that fits like a decision. The caption is factual and flat. The line beneath it mentions a donation to a hospital wing and the renovation of a youth center that has been promising a renovation for twelve years.
My heart does something small and unfriendly. I do not read the names of the women at his table. I am not a masochist. The business side is worse. A shipping company, a partnership, a rumor about docks that sounds like law and is not. Words he would understand at a glance. A map he could fold without looking down.
“Not tonight,” I tell the paper, and slide it back into the envelope. I walk it to the back door and lift the bin lid and drop it in. I watch it fall. I do not reach for it again.
On my way home, the town lies folded around itself, a cat in a patch of last light. The snow has drifted into tidy corners. The bakery below my apartment has finished its last batch of shortbread and set it to cool in neat lines. I take the stairs slowly because my center of gravity is not where it used to be. The baby presses a heel under my ribs and I press back and laugh because apparently we are both stubborn.
Mrs. Kowalski opens her door when she hears my key. She does not sleep before eleven because she believes early sleep makes a person vulnerable to burglars and bad dreams. She wears a wool robe and a pair of pink slippers that have had better years. She peers at my belly and then at my face and decides in a second that I need soup.
“Come,” she says. “I have broth. And the ginger candies.”
“I have eaten,” I say, but I let her put a steaming mug in my hands anyway.
“You are too thin,” she says, which is an outrageous lie, but she is old and lovely and I accept the indictment with the soup.
“You are too generous,” I say. “How is your knee.”
“Terrible,” she says. “I told the doctor he should take it out and give me a new one from a young goat. He laughed, which is unprofessional.”
“I will find you a goat tomorrow,” I say. “A small one with good manners.”
She pats my cheek with a hand that smells like lemon and starch. “You joke, which is good. You sleep, which is also good. Tell the baby to stop dancing when you lie down. I know his kind.”
“We try,” I say.
In my room, the radiator knocks twice like a neighbor. I take off my boots and stand in my socks and let the floorboards chill my feet for a second so the bed will feel warmer when I slip into it. I set water to boil because sleep is easier when your hands have something to do. I look at the recipe notebook that lives under the bowl of apples, and I do not open it because tonight I am tired enough to dream without prompts.
The baby rolls again. I sit on the edge of the bed and hum the piece of a waltz my mother used to hum when she wanted us to behave in church and when she wanted the bread to rise. I press two fingers against the point where the kick was strongest and feel the ghost of it, like knocking from the other side of a door. “You and me,” I tell him. “We are going to build a kitchen with light in it. We are going to grow herbs in a window box and complain about how the basil sulks in fog. We are going to buy a tiny tree and pretend it is a forest.” I pour hot water over tea leaves and the steam draws a line down my face like a benediction.
My phone is not on the table. I threw it away in a trash can on a road that was not on any map and walked for an hour before I remembered that modern life expects you to carry a tether. Marta bought me a cheap handset at the pharmacy with a number no one knows. I keep it switched off except when I need it for the grocery delivery or the doctor. The silence it gives me is as heavy as a blanket and as sharp as a knife. It is a relief I am not proud of. It is a choice I am.
In bed, I tuck a pillow against my side where the ache lives and promise myself I will buy better shoes before the week isout. I press my lips to the place where the baby presses his foot. I pretend I can kiss a heel through skin.
“Sleep,” I tell him. “We have scallops tomorrow. We have a town that needs soup. We have people who will come inside to get warm and forget for one hour that the world is a hungry place.” He shifts once more and then goes still, and I lie in the dark with the taste of brown bread and grief in my mouth and imagine a kitchen full of light that no one can take from me, not even the part of me that still tastes orange and clove when I say his name in my head.
The storm settles. The town sleeps. I do, too, eventually, with my hand on my belly and the oven timer from my childhood ticking somewhere in the quiet of memory, steady as a heart that belongs to both of us.
10
DECLAN
Three years later
The house is different at night when I don’t sleep. The clocks breathe louder, the floorboards remember footsteps that aren’t mine, and the sea works the shoreline with that patient animal sound that makes a man think about old choices and older debts. I move through it like a ghost that refuses to rattle chains. The ancestral wing smells of beeswax and books. The modern side smells of leather, polish, and the faint iron tang that all good rooms earn when decisions get made after midnight.
