Free Mothers and Sons by Colm Tóibín

cash so that no other bank could hand her money over to Mr Wallace. In six months, she would have enough to move to Dublin and rent a house and live in peace while she learned typing and shorthand or some other skill which would help her to get a job.
    She began to imagine herself as secretary to a businessman, taking his phone calls and announcing visitors and typing his letters and dressing beautifully, the essence of efficiency. Someone like Tony O’Reilly, or the man who ran Aer Lingus or the Sugar Company. She told no one at all about her difficulties or her dreams, even her sister andbrother-in-law. She sat at the cash register in the supermarket and at the end of each day she put the cash where no one would find it.
    H ER MOTHER-IN-LAW had still owned the shop when George wanted to open a supermarket, the first in the town. Nancy took no part in the negotiations between mother and son, but she wished now as she drove towards Bree at eight o’clock on a Friday night that she had become involved. Her mother-in-law wanted all the old customers looked after, the ones who lived out in the country who had had accounts for years and had their groceries delivered every Friday, and the others who came into the town on a Saturday and had a drink in the little bar to the side of the shop and paid their bills when it suited them. George put his foot down about the spirit grocery. He was, he insisted, keeping the licence but making the old bar into a storehouse. People would have to go elsewhere for their drink on a Saturday night, he told his mother. And they decided that they would over time phase out accounts completely and ask their customers to pay in cash. But on the question of deliveries, George had to give in. Good customers of long standing who had no transport of their own could not be left stranded, he agreed with his mother. And now both George and his mother were dead and Nancy was left driving towards Bree alone in the second-hand station wagon loaded with boxes of groceries.
    When she married George first, he spent Thursday and Friday nights making these deliveries, doing ten or fifteen a night, not arriving home until late. Slowly, over the years,however, the orders had fallen away. Some customers had moved into the town, others had bought cars. She noticed that some of these old faithful customers in recent times avoided their supermarket. Even when they met her or George on the street, they seemed sheepish and distant, anxious to get away.
    Nancy was left with seven or eight customers, mostly old people who had the same order every week and had the same comments to make on each visit. Some of them, she knew, did not order enough for her to be their main supplier, and she often thought that they were continuing to deal with her for the sake of charity. It was they who felt sorry for her. Yet they were so friendly and grateful when she came to them on Friday nights that she did not have the heart to tell them it would really suit her not to have to drive along mucky lanes to them once a week as though she were the district nurse. After George died would have been the easiest time to call a halt, it would have seemed natural for no more deliveries to be made, but that was the very time when she was foolishly determined that nothing should change, that everything should be run as before. She did not know then that George had left her at the mercy of his bank manager.
    As she drove, she went through all the names of the people she still had to visit: Paddy Duggan, who lived on his own in a tithe cottage which had not been cleaned since his mother died; Annie Parle and her soft sister from near the Bloody Bridge with five gates to open and close before you reached their old farmhouse; the twins Patsy and Mogue Byrne, who ate potatoes and butter for their dinner every day with boiled rice and stewed prunes for theirsweet. Neither of them, she thought, ever took off his cap. The six Sutherlands, a sister, three brothers