Free The Visitors by Patrick O'Keeffe

look into his face, though his was a handsome face, narrow with strongjawbones, pale, with tiny red veins that spread out along the cheeks—you remember things that are of no use, you remember things that are of no use, he used to say to me—but I listened, I had no other choice but to listen to him, and I watched the fields and the meadows, the cows and the houses that drifted past so slowly, and I thought I was never going to be home and free from that car and him and his voice—
    —I imagine that’s your new friend at the corner, my dear, wearing the baseball cap, Zoë said.
    Her finger was pressed against the screen. I reached my hand up and wiped dust from it. The backpack was at his feet. A loose bunch of flowers lay atop it. The shirt was tight across the shoulders, but it otherwise fitted him.
    —Mister Mysterious Walter, my dear—
    —And flowers for his aunt, my dear. How sweet is that—
    —He stole them from the park, my dear. He’s late, and I gave him that shirt—
    —I never imagined you wearing a cowboy shirt, my dear—
    —When I was a teenager in Dublin, a girl bought it for me. It was a bit of a joke—
    —Did she buy you a horse, too?
    —No horse, my dear, or spurs, in case you are curious.
    —Don’t be rude to him because he’s late.
    —I was hoping I’d seen the last of him, my dear—
    I was sitting on the edge of the bed and lacing my shoes. Zoë was pressing the screen door open. The tote bag swung in her other hand. She tapped the screen with her nails—the bare, skinny arm extended, the palm flat against the screen.
    —Let’s not keep him waiting, James. He must be nervous about seeing someone he hasn’t seen in so long.

5.
    At the end of June, Michael located the well down the paddock from the front of our house. The next week he brought a small JCB and drilled. Two weeks later he dug the foundation for the pump house. In early July, he brought a cement mixer, hitched to the back of his Nissan van. Pipes of all shapes and sizes, cement blocks, bags of cement, wood, and heaps of sand and gravel were delivered from the creamery store. We covered them with sheets of plastic against the rain, though that was a summer of sunshine.
    When the seven-by-seven foundation was set, Michael and a bricklayer built the walls. Michael plastered the walls himself. I remember walking out our front door, out to turn in cows, or cut wood for the range, and I’d stand in my mother’s flower garden and listen to Michael whistling tunes on his ladder, and it wasn’t until I moved to Dublin that I heard those tunes again, and there I also heard the words. Songs by Patsy Cline, Cole Porter, Billie Holiday, and Frank Sinatra that the locals sang late on Saturday nights.
    That first day, my mother told Michael to be sure to tell Nora the moment he got inside the door that evening to not bother with his lunch. My mother would make his lunch, she had to make lunches for us anyway, and because of the fine weather, there were plenty of tomatoes, scallions, and lettuce. My father grew these beside my mother’s flower garden, along with potatoes, onions, parsnips, carrots, strawberries, and raspberries. Michael sat on a cement block and ate my mother’s sandwiches and drank her tea from his white enamel mug.My father sat with him, unless we were making hay, and if that was the case, Michael helped out.
    Two or three days a week, Michael brought Kevin, and they started to stay late in the evening. There was a problem with how the well was lined, a leak, something like that, I forget, but I remember hearing them nailing down the frame of the roof while we milked the cows. After they were milked, my mother and sisters made supper, which Michael and Kevin sometimes stayed for, and after supper my father and Michael smoked Sweet Aftons by the range and drank bottles of stout, while Michael retold his jokes and we watched television, and when this one program we liked to watch was over, my parents told us to