Page 31 of Christmas with the Irish Devil
At four, Mother finds me in the study and stands in the doorway with her hands in the silk pockets of her dress and her face arranged in the way she saves for weddings and wakes.
“She does not love you,” she says without preamble.
“That is not your concern,” I tell her.
“Everything that threatens this house is my concern,” she replies. “A woman who can leave in the night with your heart in her apron pocket qualifies.”
I look at the painting over her shoulder, the one of my grandfather standing with his hand on a horse’s neck, a man who loved something uncomplicated and lived long enough to pay for it. “I am not asking your permission.”
“You never do,” she says. “And yet you look at me as if I could bless it and make it clean.”
“I look at you because you are my mother,” I answer. “And because I respect the things you know.”
She steps farther into the room, the light behind her making a faint halo along the line of her hair. “She will not be bought,” she says. “And you do not know how to give without keeping an invoice in your pocket.”
“I am learning,” I say.
“God help us all,” she replies, and leaves.
Dusk comes early. The city lights lift their faces out of the river and shine at one another across the bridges. Aoife meets me in the hall in a dark wool coat that used to be mine and a scarf the color of red wine. Liam is with the tutor for the evening. The housekeeper stands very carefully with her back to us and studies a bowl of clementines that do not require that much study.
“Keys,” she says.
I hand them over with the satisfaction of a man who has rehearsed the movement in his head a hundred times. We drive with the radio off, the kind of silence that is not uncomfortableand not easy either. She watches the city through the window as if it were a book she had read as a child and is now reading again with a different ending. When I turn onto the road that skirts the pond she glances at me and then back at the dark water with the smallest, quietest sound in her throat that a lesser man would have missed.
The old convent is better at night. The lamps along the path throw warm circles on brick. The hall windows glow like an invitation written in a hand that cannot lie. I stop the car and do not move to open her door. She gets out on her own and closes it softly, as if she were choosing not to wake someone.
We walk the path without talking. The door opens as I hoped it would, not a grand swing but a practical welcome. The air inside carries faint rosemary from the garden and a bit of woodsmoke from a small stove I had set in the far corner. The bones of the place show themselves. The old beams hold. The bell over the door makes a small, clear sound that goes through her like a pulse.
She crosses to the kitchen without looking at me and sets her palm on the table where the butcher block is new and honest. She runs her fingers along the edge and then presses her thumb into the wood as if she were testing a bruise. She checks the height of the burners with a glance. She opens the walk-in and stands there for a time, half in and half out, breathing that metallic frost that means somebody cared about the venting and did not cheap out. She crouches in the corner where I left the space for the bread bench and puts her face close to the wall to study light I cannot see because she is deciding where dough should rest. She moves through the line like a person listening to a song and finding the beat.
“Say what you hate,” I tell her.
She stands and looks around and says nothing for a long while and then says, “The tile along that run will get slippery.The drain is a half inch off grade. Your guy measured when he wanted to be at lunch. Fix it. The pass needs twice as much heat if you expect to hold plates at temperature. The reach-in should be closer to the garde-manger. We will trip each other. The light is right though. You did not let them wash it out.”
“We can fix what needs fixing,” I say.
She turns toward the hall and I follow her into the dining room. The timbered ribs curve above us like the inside of a ship. The windows set into the old arches hold the pond in their frames as if it were a painting. She walks to the end and stands with both hands on the sill and looks at the dark water without blinking. I can hear how fast she is breathing, not panic, something like restraint trying to behave.
“What is it called?” she asks.
“Whatever you name it,” I say.
She shakes her head once, almost laughing without making a sound. “You would hand me a crown and say it is a salad bowl.”
“Both hold something vital,” I answer.
She looks back at the kitchen and then down at the key in her hand and then at me. “You cannot buy my future,” she says, gentler than before. “Not even when you guess its shape.”
“I am not buying anything,” I say. “I am returning a debt I cannot settle.”
She walks past me and I let the air she moves stir my coat. She goes back to the kitchen and roots in a drawer where there is nothing yet and finds a pencil I left there because I wanted to see if she would find it. She writes on the back of an old invoice, quick lines that look like a map. “Fix the drain. Move the reach-in. Double the heat on the pass. The bread bench stays. The rest we can argue about.”
“We,” I repeat, careful with the syllable.
“Do not make me regret it,” she says.
We drive home without talking because we have already said too much and not enough. The house waits with its lamps low. Liam is asleep with a book over his face. The dog that is not supposed to come inside is asleep under his chair like a bodyguard who gave up pretending. The housekeeper nods once and disappears like a ghost with good timing.
