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14
When Róisín and Darragh were growing up, they’d come home after school and the first thing they’d have was a cup of tea. Da would be watching the telly and bark out something like, ‘It’d be awful nice to have a cup of tea,’ and Mam would start the kettle and he’d act all surprised and grateful when she put a mug on the table in front of him. Just the four of them. Maeve considered herself too grown up for that sort of thing. She’d be up in her room, listening to her Walkman with the door closed. Mam would only ever pop back in with biscuits. Da loved a tea but he couldn’t live without his biscuits. Mam would set out the tin and tell Darragh and Róisín they could have one each, but Da would nod towards it and make a shushing sign until they snuck an extra few while she wasn’t looking.
Róisín is standing outside a café when she sees the familiar packaging through the dusty window of a convenience store. The café is called The Bald Man. She went in looking for a job and now she’s out on the sidewalk, staring into the convenience store next door. Bourbon creams. They’re not the ones she grew up with but they’re close enough to hurt. The bell rings above her as she steps into the shop and she’s met with the smell of bleach and turned fruit. The aisles are so narrow that she has to turn sideways to navigate through them. A television hanging over the register shows lottery numbers being chosen through a film of static. Róisín shoulders her way past shelves of shrink-wrapped ramen packages and bottles of cooking sauces to a shelf near the window displaying the tea biscuits. There’s a printed-out, postcard-sized Union Flag pinned to the top of the shelf and a small label which reads, From Across The Pond. The lottery announcer calls out a new set of numbers and someone’s life is changed forever.
Bourbon creams were always her favourite. Jammie Dodgers were a close second, to be fair, but Darragh claimed them as his when he was four and she didn’t want to be thought of as a copycat. Beneath the shelf of biscuits is a shelf with boxes of Authentic British Tea. She thinks of the pitiful sachets of Lipton waiting in a jar at home and takes a box of Lyons.
Between the woman at the register and Róisín, there’s a thick plastic dividing wall with a cut-out at the counter. Róisín sets down the biscuits and box of tea and slides them forward. The woman scans them.
‘Lyons are Irish, by the way,’ Róisín says.
‘That’ll be $12.65, please.’
The woman watches the television as Róisín puts the cash onto the counter. Without looking away from the screen, the woman taps on the plastic divider, drawing Róisín’s attention to a sign that reads Card Only. Róisín slaps a card onto the counter, just far enough for the woman to have to reach for it.
The Bald Man was the fifth café Róisín had visited this week. Three weren’t hiring. One only needed someone for a few hours a week. The Bald Man was a kind of Copenhagen-style café with plants everywhere and lo-fi music and six-dollar coffees. She eyed the shiny espresso machine behind the counter while the manager asked her questions and then asked when she was available to start.
‘Right away,’ she said.
The manager handed her the paperwork just as a customer approached. Róisín read the form, flipped the page, flipped back. All of those boxes asking for bank details and a Social Security number, all of those letters and numbers that she was unable to provide. She left the clipboard on the counter and snuck out while the manager was busy pulling a shot of espresso.
The payment-processing machine gives a resounding ‘no’ in the form of a beep and the woman holds the card up to the light.
‘It’s a prepaid card,’ Róisín explains. ‘A prepaid debit card.’
‘What?’ the woman asks.
‘It’s a prepaid debit card,’ Róisín repeats.
The woman shakes her head and leans forward, holding a hand up to her ear.
‘Prepaid. Debit,’ Róisín says.
‘I’m sorry, I can’t understand what you’re saying.’
The woman swipes the card through the machine and the payment is rejected again. She groans as she leans over to get something from beneath the counter and returns upright with a heavy-looking set of metal scissors. ‘It says I’m supposed to cut it.’
‘It’s prepaid,’ Róisín says. She taps on the plastic divider. ‘It’s a prepaid card, it’s just out of money. I can run around the corner to fill it.’
The woman’s eyebrows scrunch together and she shakes her head. ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t understand you,’ she says. The scissors squeak as they cut the card in half. She sweeps the two halves into the trash and turns back to the television.
‘Why don’t you just come back home?’ her mother asked her on the phone.
It was a simple question that Róisín had trouble answering.
‘If you’re dead-set on having it and that’s not something we can talk you out of–’
‘Sinéad,’ her father started.
‘All right,’ her mother said. ‘But I can make up the box room into a nursery, is all. You’d be home for Christmas. We would take care of you.’
‘I don’t know.’ This quiet life. Her apartment had never felt so empty, so cold.
‘Going to raise a baby in that kip all on your own, are you, Róisín?’ her mother asked. ‘Answer me when I’m talking to you.’
‘Sinéad,’ her father said again.
Her mother sighed. ‘At least think about it, would you?’
‘I will. I will think about it.’
‘You can hardly raise a child on a coffee shop salary, Róisín. I don’t think you’ve thought this through, is all,’ her mother said.
‘Unlike you, is that right? Having Maeve at seventeen, you really thought through that decision carefully, did you?’ Róisín said.
‘No,’ her mother said. The line grew quiet. ‘That was different,’ she said finally.
‘Different how?’
‘Different because I had family around.’
Róisín sucked on the inside of her cheek.
‘Your father and I have some savings we could put towards a ticket. Give me the word and you can be on the next flight home. Consider it, at least. There’s no point in being proud.’
The walls of her bedroom were plain. There was a crack in the paint that ran like lightning alongside the doorframe. There was a radiator on the wall next to her bed and a blotch of discoloured paint above it from years of steam. Brown, like a malignant tumour, like the whole place was rotting from the inside.
‘I will consider it, Mam,’ Róisín said.
‘You will?’
‘I will,’ she repeated.
‘You ought to. I’m serious, now.’
‘I will, I said I will, so.’
There is a convenience store on the corner of Róisín’s street run by a father and a son. There is a room behind the counter and they often leave the door open so that the father can watch his son at the counter while he sits with his feet up. Sometimes, while she’s shopping, she’ll hear the father yell out and the son will emerge from behind the counter, stride to the freezer in the back and return with an orange cream popsicle. The father will say something else, something softer, while the son turns his attention back to his phone screen.
Róisín’s first apartment had two bedrooms and five tenants. She shared a bed with a woman named Melissa for six months before finding her current place. It’s further out and the estate agent asked her twice if she was sure she wanted to live in that neighbourhood but it is a space entirely her own. Since she moved in over two and a half years ago, she’s been coming to this convenience store at least once a week. Neither the father nor the son show any signs of recognition when she walks through the door. She does not know either of their names. This is the closest thing she has to family here.
There is a wall of shelves where she usually finds the prepaid debit cards, below the unlocked SIM cards but above the dusty boxes of disposable mobile phones. Róisín doesn’t have an American bank account, which means that she doesn’t have an American bank card. She has an Irish bank card, which is associated with an Irish bank account. The first few weeks she found the balance was going up. Nothing major, obviously, the odd twenty here and there, a fifty on occasion. The deposits showed up on her monthly statements stamped with the address of the closest bank branch to her parents’ house in Ireland. She never mentioned the deposits when they spoke on the phone. At the end of a call, her father would ask if she had enough for food and that, and she’d say yes, and he’d say something like, ‘That’s good,’ and that would be the end of it. Then she told them that she wasn’t coming home for Christmas. Then she told them that she wasn’t coming home at all. The deposits stopped.
Money – as in physical, printed paper – turned out to be quite an inconvenient thing to manage. Most places didn’t accept it, for one. So she’s been coming here, to this convenience store, every week, to refill a prepaid debit card. That little piece of plastic was small enough to fit in her pocket and it unlocked the world. Utilities. Phone service. Online shopping. It was possible to live here so long as she had those raised numbers on that plastic card. Now, as she stands in the familiar space of this convenience store staring at an empty shelf, she feels that world of possibility close up around her.
‘Do you have any of the cards left?’ she asks at the counter.
The son is hunched over his stool. He doesn’t hear her.
‘Excuse me,’ she says. ‘Do you have any of the cards left? The prepaid ones?’
The father shouts something from the back room and the son looks up. He sets his phone down and rises from his stool. ‘The what?’
Róisín points to where the prepaid cards are supposed to be stocked.
The son follows her finger and shakes his head. ‘We had to take them off the shelves.’
‘Why?’
The son hops back onto the stool and shrugs. ‘I don’t know. They changed the rules, I guess. It’s a liability or something.’
The father laughs at the television. He looks up, catching Róisín’s stare. She offers a smile. He unwraps a popsicle and turns back to the screen.
‘Do you know where I can–’ she starts to ask, but the son’s already back on his phone.
She closes her eyes and focuses on the sound of her breath moving in and out of her body, like a tide advancing and receding, the whooshing noise the water makes as it scrapes against the sand. She removes the phone from her coat pocket and selects Aaron from a list of contacts. Everything will be fine, she tells herself. She presses the call button and holds the phone to her ear.
‘Your call cannot be completed as dialled,’ the automated voice says. ‘Please hang up and try again.’
She steps out into the cold and waiting world. She shuts her eyes and focuses on her breath. She imagines a beach. This is what being alive sounds like. Everything will be fine. Her breathing goes ragged and the ocean churns, the waves crash onto the shore, spitting up fistfuls of spume like oceanic shrapnel. She dials Aaron again.
‘Your call cannot be completed as dialled,’ the voice says.
It urges her to give up before trying again.
15
His mother is in the dirt when he walks up the front lawn of his childhood home, his bag heavy in his hands. Her knees are in the soil, her fingers wriggling in the earth. The taxi driver yells at Aaron from his window and honks his horn – all this racket because the driver was too fucking stupid to check that Aaron had any cash before they arrived and now that horn is all he’s got.
‘I’m planting table iris,’ his mother says. She hasn’t looked up once during this taxi driver exchange.
The cab grumbles back up the hill, leaving a familiar suburban silence. Now Aaron can only just hear the murmur of the nearby ocean waves and the twittering of the birds. It’s hot for a late autumn day. He expected it to be colder, especially this close to the water, and can feel the sweat bead at the back of his neck. He sets the bag down beside him in the grass and waits for her to hug him, for her to tell him how long it’s been since he’s been home.
‘Most people would think it’s American bearded iris, but it’s not,’ she says over her shoulder, wiping her forehead on the sleeve of her shirt. ‘Table iris is much harder to find.’
She continues digging. There’s something ritualistic about the motion, like prayer. She wears her engagement rings from both marriages on her fingers and the sapphires and diamonds glint in the sunlight as she reaches into the sack of bulbs beside her. They look like small onions or desiccated eyeballs, tangled roots matted against them like optic nerves. She drops one into each of the three holes she’s dug, fills them in and pats them flat.
‘I didn’t think I’d find you out here,’ Aaron says finally.
His mother scoffs and wipes her forehead again. ‘Where else would I be?’
She sits back on her heels and rests her hands in her lap. She looks to the right and Aaron follows her gaze to their neighbour’s house. There’s a flag fluttering in the ocean breeze. The black, white, green and red of the Palestinian flag. She tuts her tongue and says something under her breath and turns back to the dirt.
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘I’m not going to start this with you again after all this time.’
When he was young, Aaron would plant bulbs with his mother. Some sunny day in spring, she’d drag him out front with a magnifying glass to see the wispy green tendrils reaching up, grasping for sunlight.
His mother holds onto the fingers of her right hand with her left and draws her hands into her stomach, bending forward.
‘Do you need any help?’ Aaron asks.
‘No,’ she says to the ground. ‘You go on inside, I’ll be in soon.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure,’ she says, softer now. She digs another hole and reaches for a bulb. ‘I’ll only be another minute.’
His mother would change something about the house every other week when he and Moe were growing up. A new toaster oven. A reorientation of the kitchen table. A framed photograph moved from a bedroom to the den, only to be returned a few days later. It’s been over five years now and nothing’s changed at all. It is exactly the same as when he left. The dishwasher hums below the sink. The kitchen smells like cold coffee and sawdust. Every surface is glossy wood. His mother loves wood grain. The first thing she did when they moved in was strip the paint from every surface and replace it with lacquer. There’s a photograph from Aaron’s high school graduation fixed to the cabinet door, where it’s always been. The tape has gone yellow at the corners and the colours have warped a little. His graduation cap, once blue, is now on some spectrum between magnolia and violet. He’s smiling with fat, ruddy cheeks. His eyes are clear and white. This is a face of blind optimism and undeserved hope. Aaron considers this younger version of himself like it’s a different person, which it is. There are no flies on him.
Then he sees the picture of Moe below. It looks fresh, as if it were just tacked up. He’s got a great big smile that glows against his tanned skin, the Mediterranean warmth radiating off the paper. The months following Moe’s death were a blur. The funeral was over capacity. People filled their home for all seven days of shiva. And then after, when he hoped it was over, they were carted around from synagogue to synagogue like show ponies for months.
There was this congregation in Everett led by a young rabbi who was short and wore a pink bow tie. He had them come up to the bimah after the parshah reading and sit behind him for his sermon as though they were props.
‘Hamas means violence,’ he shouted into the microphone, gripping both sides of the podium with white-knuckled fists. ‘Violence begets violence begets loss begets grief.’
Aaron was sat between his mother and father and stayed very still. The congregation looked at them with sad eyes and cheap smiles. His mother reached for his hand and he let her take it but he did not close his fingers around hers. How dare she let them be paraded around like this. His father too. How dare they allow Moe’s corpse to be fashioned into a war drum and stand idly by while it was beaten by people who could never and would never understand the depth of their pain. There were children in the audience and, as Aaron looked over their faces, he wondered which of them, if any, would be inspired by this speech to be next in line. Israel. Canaan. The promised land. There was no limit to Aaron’s anger. And there was nothing constructive for him to do with it.
‘Look at what our enemy has taken from our community in the name of this violence. An eighteen-year-old boy whose sights were set on Harvard and becoming a doctor, who instead felt that calling to HaShem and volunteered to defend Israel from those who would do it harm. We are soon going to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish. It is typical for me to ask that if anyone has suffered a loss, and if they feel comfortable doing so, they rise. Today, I will ask all who are able to rise, because we have all of us suffered a great loss to our people in defence of our nation. We have lost a hero.’
At the kiddush lunch, people kept coming up to Aaron saying how brave his brother was. Aaron wanted to tell these people that his brother was frightened almost every day of his service. He wanted to beat them with his fists and make them understand that most of his conversations with his brother involved counting down the days until they would be together again.
‘Mino’s,’ Aaron used to say on the phone. Moe would groan.
‘I would give my left nut for a super beef from Mino’s right now. I would maybe even consider giving my right one too.’
‘What would you give for one of their homemade root beers?’
And Moe would retch. ‘I wouldn’t give my left pinkie toe. I wouldn’t give your left pinkie toe. That shit is rank.’
