Free Ashes of Fiery Weather by Kathleen Donohoe Page B

made a fresh pot of coffee and Norah stopped and poured herself a cup. She’d never thought to make coffee at home, but here everybody drank it. Helen stood in the kitchen doorway and told her that though certainly she, Helen, was not one to give romantic advice, she had one thing to say.
    Norah held her steaming mug and waited, curious, already rehearsing the story for Sean. She and Sean had a running joke about Helen being in love with Mr. Fitzgerald.
    â€œI know Delia O’Reilly from the neighborhood, more or less. Well enough to know that if it comes down to it, she raised Sean right and he will do the right thing by you. But isn’t it better not to begin like that?”
    â€œThis isn’t Ireland, Aunt Helen. You don’t have to rely on prayers alone.” If Norah could have done it unnoticed, she would have crossed her fingers as she said the last bit.
    Helen nodded and retreated.
    But after that, Norah started thinking about the future in earnest. Whereas she’d been deliberately steering her thoughts away from her return to Ireland, she began imagining herself stepping off the plane, greeting her parents, walking in the front door of the house. In each scene, she felt acutely the emptiness beside her, in the place where Sean would be.
    â€œYou’re not going back,” Sean always said.
    â€œI’m only here for a little while.”
    â€œJust tell them you’re staying.”
    To stay in America for no reason except that she wanted to? Sean had gone to war against his mother’s wishes. How could she explain that with the boys gone and Aoife married to a man who had his own business, it was expected that she, Norah, would bring in the son-in-law who would take over from her father?
    A brave daughter would have written a letter saying that she wanted to try some other kind of job, or take college classes. Travel, like Sean was always talking about. Boston, Maine, Florida, California. She might have said outright that she had a real boyfriend. An American. An American who was Catholic, but whose mother was divorced. An American who hadn’t seen his father in twenty years.
    About his father, Sean would say only that his parents had met right after Pearl Harbor. They’d married; his father had gone off to fight in World War II, came home. Eileen told Norah his name, Luke, and that when Sean was four, he’d left Delia for an Englishwoman he’d met during the war.
    Norah did ask Sean if he’d ever tried to contact Luke O’Reilly.
    â€œWe’re right where he left us,” Sean said with the same expression he gave Norah when she tried to ask him about Vietnam, although he turned aside those tentative questions with even less patience. “I was there, now I’m back,” he’d say.
    Norah was sure a better girlfriend could have gotten him to talk about it. When he rocketed out of bed, drenched with sweat and sometimes shouting, she didn’t do anything but crouch by the bed, afraid his mother would break through the barred door.
    Delia only ever knocked, though, and never hard enough to dislodge the chair Sean had jammed beneath the doorknob. He would snap that he was fine. Sometimes he leaned his forehead against the door as he said the words.
    His mother would go away. Norah would climb back in the damp bed and wait for him to leave the window where he always went to stand. Early on, she tried to hug him, but he would shove her away, once hard enough so that she stumbled back into the desk. It left a bruise on her lower back. Sean never apologized or even mentioned it. She didn’t know if he remembered. She learned to lie down and wait, and when he returned to bed, sometimes he wanted to go right to sleep, but often he didn’t.
    Those nightmare times, she never asked him to use a rubber, as he called them. She thought of Aoife, who assumed a baby couldn’t result because she had fantastic plans. But how could she have?