that were due you and beat out the people who’d inevitably try to take away what you’d won for yourself.
The coffee urn in the Lodge kitchen was empty, Jock was nowhere to be found, and it was Tito’s favorite thing in the world to pretend he didn’t speak enough English to understand what Lance wanted when he pointed at the urn, made the international symbol of drinking from a teacup, and shouted, “Coffee! Is there any coffee? Make. The. Coffee.” Tito just smiled, shook his head, waved a hand by his ears to indicate either incomprehension or deafness, and continued to chop his garlic, swaying slightly, as though the music inside his head was so lovely he couldn’t bear to tear himself away.
Lance slammed through the swinging doors into the dining room toward the bar to pour himself a Coke from the fountain. At a table near the windows a group of the Irish girls were gathered, some sitting, some presiding, spreading peanut butter and jelly on napkin-white bread they pulled from a bright plastic sleeve. Brigid was there, looking spacey and sullen and, Lance thought, sexy as shit. And there amid the twittering, officious, bored, giggling, hyperactive girls were Squee and Mia, seated at the table, getting fussed over and catered to as though they were some Egyptian king and queen, child rulers of a great dynasty.
Lance approached the table. Movement among the girls tapered, then stopped as they noticed him and turned to look. Brigid half raised a hand in greeting and Lance nodded in her direction, then made motion with two fingers at his son, like a coach calling his player off the field:
There was a heavy pause, as though everything—the future—was about to be decided. And then Squee slid off his chair and walked toward Lance with the look of a cartoon character who’s been hypnotized and brainwashed by aliens. Lance let Squee pass before he stepped up to the table himself, the girls parting as he approached. He took two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from what they’d prepared, then turned and followed his son.
About one second after the back kitchen door slammed shut, Mia burst into tears. And about one second after that, Brigid stood up and hurried away, leaving the others to stare after her and then exchange among themselves the looks of maternal suspicion and judgment they practiced like disciples of a biddy schoolmarm.
Brigid went through the kitchen, ignoring Tito’s eyes on her, then stopped by the door and watched through the screen as father and son went up the hill and into their cottage. She opened the walk-in, grabbed a package of Oreos from one shelf and a six-pack of cola from another. She carried these with her into the pantry, where she took a large bag of potato chips not marked for individual sale, before she started back to the screen door, shooting Tito a look just daring him to say a single word.
She knocked at the door of the Squire cottage with her elbow, her hands full. She could not have been more than two minutes behind them, but when Lance opened the door it seemed that something had already happened. Squee was at the table in the exact spot he’d occupied when Roddy was there half an hour earlier. There was a bowl on the table in front of him. In the bowl were two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The table was covered with milk and bloated Cheerios, which looked like piles of cat vomit. A trail of milk led to a spoon that lay where it had landed on the opposite edge of the table. Squee’s shirtfront was spattered, and droplets fell down his face as though he were crying milk tears. He did not even move to wipe his face with his hand.
Lance held the door as if he couldn’t decide whether to invite Brigid in or slam it in her face. He looked at her a good long moment before he said, with both pride and righteousness, “We don’t need your charity here.” It was something he’d likely heard on television.
Brigid took her own long moment before responding. She fixed Lance with a stare that was impassive and feisty at the same time. And then she plowed right past him and into the room, depositing the chips and cookies on the table. “If the charities are doling out food of this sort,” she said, ripping cans from their plastic tether and placing them one by one into the empty fridge, “it’s hardly a bloody wonder your country’s full of fatties with rotted teeth.”
Lance, still standing at the open door, relaxed his posture and now stood with his weight bearing down on the knob, watching her. “I like you,” he said. “I always knew I liked you right off.”
Brigid glanced around the room. “Do you have a fag?” she asked. “A
He jerked his head toward a pack and lighter on the windowsill. She retrieved them, then gestured out the door he still held ajar. “Shall we?” she said, and he gallantly motioned her through ahead of him.
On the porch, they sat in chairs and smoked in silence. It was too sunny out, and the smoke seemed to bellow from their mouths in an affront to the light, as though they were asserting themselves in opposition to it.
Lance rubbed his eye with the heel of the hand in which he held his cigarette, and for a moment the smoke seemed to pour from the top of his head. He squinted as if trying to make out something far off on the horizon. They finished their cigarettes, then lit up again. After a while, Lance said, “She was so pretty . . .”
Brigid waited, quiet.
“Beautiful,” he said. “Tiny—a tiny, tiny little thing. But built too. Perfect . . . first time I remember seeing her was on the bleachers at some game. I was fifteen years old, and I took one look at that girl and I knew I was gonna spend . . .” He let it go. He couldn’t say the words. He saw Lorna, and he knew. There wasn’t much more to it than that.
After a time Brigid said, “May I ask a question, then?”
Lance didn’t speak, but gestured grandly in front of him as though to indicate a stage that was all hers.
“You’ll not yell at me, will you?”
“Not you, angel. Why would I do a thing like that to you?”
“You do it to the others,” she offered.
“You’re not them.”
Brigid held on to her words for another moment. “Sitting here, you know, having a chat, you—you come across as rather an understandable sort of a man.” She paused. “It’s not my place to speak. Only it seems as though life might be a terrible lot easier, you see?” She spoke all these words to her hand and the cigarette it held. “You know, if you were kind like this, with the others . . .” When she finished and heard no response from Lance, no sudden movement to force her attention to him, she finally turned to look and see what she’d done.
Tears he was trying very hard to hold back were pooling out of his eyes despite him, and he was bearing them stoically. When he could speak he managed to say, “That’s just what Lorna’d ask me . . .” And then he couldn’t say
