Free The Carnival at Bray by Jessie Ann Foley

convinced her to take a shot with him, and soon enough the two of them were leaning elbow to elbow across the bar, talking like old friends. This was the magic of Uncle Kevin: he always knew exactly what to say to make people fall in love with him.
    Ten minutes later, he returned to the table.
    â€œThat lovely woman I was just chatting with is none other than Rosie Horan, owner and proprietor of the Quayside bar, aunt and caretaker of one Eoin Brennan, aged seventeen, star forward on the Saint Brendan’s football team, Liverpool supporter, astrological sign Taurus, marital status, single. I did not ask whether he was circumcised: I leave that, dear niece, for you to find out for yourself.”
    This was all too much to process at once—months of speculation had now given way to a ticking off of actual facts—she even knew his last name! Maggie immediately began gnawing at her fingernails.
    â€œPlease
don’t tell me you told her you were asking for me?” she begged.
    â€œAre you kidding?” Kevin slugged back his pint. “I was a master of subtlety. You can thank me by buying me my next beer.”
    In fact, the adults drank many more beers as the night spun on. Ronnie, bored, sat at the table and quietly built a structure of bar napkins and straws. Maggie drank her Club Orange and only pretended to look bored. She felt horribly self-conscious about her clothing, her posture, her hair, and her bitten nails, beset with the knowledge that at any moment, Eoin might be looking at her.
    Around midnight, Kevin successfully cajoled the guitar player, a sylphish, crop-haired girl with shredded jeans and combat boots, to let him play a song. He slipped the girl’s guitarstrap around his shoulder, and the effect of this—the hollow wood nestled against his heart—was immediate. He stood up straighter, he grew taller, a pink urgency flickered into his cheeks. He began to sing “Fairytale of New York,” one of the few Irish songs he knew, his lips brushing the microphone, his voice strong and gravelly and full of that strange holiday sadness of twinkling lights hanging in freezing windows.
    Old couples began to pair off and spin each other around, and the younger ones lined the walls, clapping and stomping their feet and swishing their drinks. In that little pub, on that little stage by the windows, Kevin was a life force, a star. With the aid of an instrument, he could spend fours hours in a new country and fit in better than Maggie could after four months. He sang about drunk tanks and love and Christmas hopes, but in the spaces between the words of the song and in the cold shadows of his closed eyes rested all the things that he allowed to escape from himself only on the stage. Watching him, Maggie thought of their conversation earlier that day—how he had quit the band, quit his music, hadn’t picked up a guitar in months. She could see the way he picked gingerly at the strings on his uncalloused fingers. His voice wasn’t beautiful, but it had always contained a kind of arresting truth. Now, too, Maggie detected a new quality—a desperation that had not been there before. Looking around the table at her family, she knew that Nanny Ei heard it, too. Her grandmother was leaning forward, holding her cigarette aloft while the ash grew longer and longer, and she was not listening to her son like the rest of them were but watching him, the movements of his long, skeletal fingers, the closed bruises of his eyes.
    He finished singing and handed the girl her guitar. The Quayside erupted into applause and whoops, and Kevin smiled and the men seated at the bar called him over, waving their money at him in a clamor of who could be the first to buy him a pint. Maggie got up to use the bathroom. In front of the sink shesmoothed her hair and wished she’d worn more makeup than the smudgy concealer she’d dabbed onto the broken-out skin at her jawline. When she crossed the