Page 126 of The Matchmaker
I am more than surprised to see him there. As grateful as I am for what he did, I thought when he disappeared earlier that he had left, having fulfilled his Good Samaritan duty. But instead, here he sits, waiting for me.
Before I can think twice about it, I fill two cups with water from the fountain and walk right over to him.
“Hi.”
He jerks as if he’s been electrocuted and sits up straight, looking embarrassed to have been caught slumping. “Is your grandmother okay?”
“I think so. I’ll know more in a few hours.” I offer him one of the cups, and he knocks it back like a shot of tequila as I take the seat next to him. “Why are you still here?”
“Someone has to drive you back.”
“I’ll get the bus.”
He gives me a look like that’s the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard. “There’s no bus to Ennisbawn,” he says, and I burst out laughing. It’s a tired laugh, a slightly hysterical one. But I feel better at the end of it.
Jack, however, looks annoyed, like it’s at his expense. “What?” he asks. “There’s not.”
“I know,” I say, with a small hiccup. “You just reminded me of your brother.”
Jack doesn’t respond, eyeing his cup as though it contains a hundred different diseases.
“You know,” I say. “Some people might think youlikebeing the bad guy.”
“They’re right,” he says flatly. “I love being hated for doing my job.”
“You’re not hated for doing your job. You’re hated for how you do it.”
“Successfully, you mean?”
“You didn’t care,” I say simply. “We knew we weren’t going to stop the hotel. But it would have been easy enough to win us over. You just didn’t care about us enough to do it. The leaflets weren’t for us. The emails weren’t. The boards and the promises. They were all for show. All for your boss, and so you had something to fall back on when we did push back. You were never going to listen, and you were never going to compromise.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you don’tmatter,” he says, exasperated. “That’s what’s so irritating about this whole thing. Ennisbawn is nothing but a bunch of land. It’s economically deprived and too small to even be on a map. I’ve never met people who had it so bad and yet were so keen on denying millions being pumped into your pockets.”
“There’s a difference between revitalizing an area and bulldozing it over to start again. We might not have been anything special, but we were happy as we were.”
“It would have happened sooner or later,” he dismisses. “And according to your own accounts, that pub had four, maybe five years, left before it went under and that’s being generous.”
“We would have found a way. We would have kept going.”
“Why on earth would you want to if you’re not making anything?”
“Because we don’t have to!” I exclaim. “It’s a small pub in a small village. We don’t have to turn it into some money-making success. It doesn’t have to bring in tourists or make us all rich. It can just be. And I’m sure there’ll come a day when it’s not needed. I’m sure one day it will close and that will be that. But not now.”
I sit back, watching him watch me with a baffled expression.
“You still don’t get it, do you?”
“No,” he says, and he says it so forcefully, sotruthfully, that I give up trying to convince him otherwise.
“Maybe you’re right,” I say, and I remember what Nush had said to me the other day. “Maybe Kelly’s isn’t special. Maybe it really is just four walls and a roof. But its people are special. We make it special. And we’ll fight for it. Always.”
“Well, I suppose you need something to do living out there,” he mutters, and I almost smile.
“You’re really not a small-town guy, are you?”
