Free Tender by Belinda McKeon

that none of the journalists in the office around her would hear. She covered her mouth with her hand. “There’s no way I could get away.”
    “What do you mean?” he said impatiently. “There’s a breaking Longford Missile Crisis, is there? I thought they only let you write the Births and Deaths?”
    “It’s not work,” she said, as quietly as she could. “It’s just home.”
    James said nothing.
    “Hello?” she said, a little desperately. “I mean, I’d love to. I just wouldn’t be able to get away for—”
    “Catherine,” James cut across her. “Not this again. Not this complete shite about your parents. I’m tired of listening to you talking this nonsense. You’re not in primary school anymore. You can do what you want.”
    “I can’t just up and go to your house for the weekend. What would I tell them?”
    “Why do you have to tell them anything?”
    “I just have to.”
    “So you tell them that you’re going up to Dublin. You live in Dublin, remember? You’re just visiting Longford for the summer.”
    “No I’m not.”
    “Sorry? What are you telling me? You’ve decided not to go back to college?”
    “No. You know what I mean. I mean, yeah of course I live in Dublin, but this is my actual home.”
    “Catherine,” James said sharply. “You have a flat in Dublin. As far as your parents are concerned, you have a reason to be in it this weekend. Tell them—I don’t know—tell them it’s Amy’s birthday.”
    “I stayed up the weekend for Amy’s birthday in May.”
    “Lorraine’s birthday, then. Lorraine’s engagement party. Lorraine’s funeral. I don’t care. Tell them whatever you have to tell them. Tell them that you’re getting the half six train to Dublin, and get yourself to the train station. Then wait for the train passing through from Dublin and get on it. I will be on it. I will be keeping a seat for you.”
    “I don’t know, James. Someone might—”
    “Pat Burke? You’re not using the Pat fucking Burkes of the world to get out of this, Reilly. I want to see you on that train. I will see you on the train. In fact, just to make absolutely sure that you get on the train, I will see you on the platform in Longford. Never before in the history of this country has that sentence contained such excitement and anticipation.”
    “I don’t know,” Catherine had begun to say. But James had hung up.
      
    When she got off the phone, she went into the kitchen, where Anna was filling in a coloring book at the table while their mother stood at the sink, rinsing lettuce and radishes for a salad.
    “You were talking on the phone an awful long time,” Anna said without looking up from her page.
    “Was I?” Catherine said, glancing at her mother’s back.
    Anna nodded, a twist of distaste suddenly taking over her face; it looked almost grotesquely adult on her little features. “How the hell can you have that much to say to anyone?”
    Catherine burst out laughing; it was so clearly a mimicry of something their mother must have said while the phone call was going on. Now her mother said Anna’s name sharply, but she did not glance with a grin at Catherine, her eyebrows raised, the way she did whenever they both heard the child say something funny or precocious or endearing. She kept her back turned, looking out the window at the lawn, or at the meadows, or at the hedgerow or at the sky; at the young calves, bucking and leaping, or at the plastic swing, drifting, or at the white garden chair, upturned by Anna or by a gust of wind. Catherine had left a book out there, she remembered; she went out to bring it in.
      
    In truth, it was not just the question of how to get to Carrigfinn for the weekend which bothered Catherine; it was also the question of what going to Carrigfinn for the weekend meant. Days with him. Nights with him, without the company—the buffer—of the girls. That day in Dublin, the Pat Burke day, they had hugged goodbye at the station, and Catherine