Free The Crooked Branch by Jeanine Cummins Page B

about him leaving. I glance at the clock on the DVR. It’s only twelve minutes past five. Leo won’t be home for hours. I think of the two veal chops in the fridge. I think how much I like hot Brian, how he’s probably going home to order a pizza, how inappropriate it would be for me to invite him to stay for dinner. I bite my lip. I’m lots of things I don’t like now, but I’m not an idiot.
    “Nah, I’m good.”

Chapter Four
    IRELAND, SEPTEMBER 1846
    B efore Ray left, they harvested and threshed the oats, and sold enough to John McCann, along with the hog, to make rent. They sold him the cow as well, and used some of that money to buy Raymond’s ticket. So that left a decent stock of oats, cabbage, and turnips, a small sum of money, and the three hens, to last until the promise of Ray’s American dollars. Across Ireland, hunger was falling into famine, but the Doyles were managing better than most of their neighbors. Ginny and her family were getting off lucky.
    His last night, Raymond and Ginny stayed awake while the children slept. They didn’t speak. They hardly moved. It was more wrestling than lovemaking, really. That’s how tightly they clung to each other. They were like a hard knot, fixed at the eyes, his elbow locked round the nape of her neck, her thighs clenched round his hips. She gripped his hair, his shoulder blades, his knuckles. Her fingers would remember him, every inch of him. They stayed like that until the dread dawn. When he finally spoke, his voice was a promise.
    “I will never let you go.”
    They were all up early, and when Raymond was dressed and ready, he lingered by the cottage door. He had been insistent that there would be no American wake, that his neighbors would not gather to see him off, that his family would not mourn his going. So Ginny tried to honor his wishes by hiding the worst of her terror from him.
    “I’ll be back in the summer, sure, when the crop comes good,” Raymond said to his wife. He kissed her mouth, and then he held his nose against her neck. He breathed her in, the scent of her. Their children stood around them in silence. Husband and wife tipped their foreheads together for a moment, and when Ray leaned away, he only nodded at her, and she nodded back. She turned away quickly, before he could notice her tears.
    “You’ll be a good girl, Maire, you’ll help your mammy,” he said then, giving his eldest daughter a squeeze around the shoulders.
    “I will, Daddy, of course,” Maire said, and her eyes were shiny, but she never betrayed herself any further than that. She was solid.
    The two littler girls were blubbery and sad. They clung round their daddy’s neck, and begged him not to go, but he kissed their cheeks and landed them down on the floor with a thump and a tickle.
    “If you’re good, I’ll bring ye back something from America,” he said. “But not if there’s tears.”
    Poppy did her best to dry her face with the back of her hand. “Like sweeties?” she asked. “Or a doll?”
    “Something like that,” Ray said, but Maggie couldn’t be won over so easily. The big, sloppy tears were still rolling on her pink cheeks.
    “Go on,” Ray said, swatting her backside. Maggie scampered away to her mother.
    Michael was the worst. He was inconsolable.
    “Why can I not go with you?” he asked his father for the hundredth time. Ray was down on one knee, and Michael stood in close to his father. “I’m big enough to work.”
    “You’re big enough to work the farm, all right,” Ray answered him. “That’s why you have to stay, son. Your mother needs you here, to keep things ticking over until I can get back. We can’t leave the girls all on their own, right?”
    Michael shook his head. He was nearly ten now. He hadn’t cried in two years. He wanted to show his father how grown he was. He wanted Ray to be proud of him. But in this moment, it was all too much. He crumbled in against his father’s broad chest. He fell in like a rag