Free Foster by Claire Keegan Page A

were in the pram,’ she says, and stands back, expecting an answer.
    ‘The pram’s broken.’
    ‘What happened at all?’
    ‘My brother used it for a wheelbarrow and the wheel fell off.’
    She laughs and licks her thumb and wipes something off my face. I can feel her thumb, softer than my mother’s, wiping whatever it is away. When she looks at my clothes, I see my thin, cotton dress, my dusty sandals through her eyes. There’s a moment when neither one of us knows what to say. A queer, ripe breeze is crossing the yard.
    ‘Come on in, a Leanbh.’
    She leads me into the house. There’s a moment of darkness in the hallway; when I hesitate, she hesitates with me. We walk through into the heat of the kitchen where I am told to sit down, to make myself at home. Under the smell of baking there’s some disinfectant, some bleach. She lifts a rhubarb tart out of the oven and puts it on the bench to cool: syrup on the point of bubbling over, thin leaves of pastry baked into the crust. A cool draught from the door blows in but here it is hot and still and clean. Tall ox-eyed daisies are still as the tall glass of water they are standing in. There is no sign, anywhere, of a child.
    ‘So how is your mammy keeping?’
    ‘She won a tenner on the prize bonds.’
    ‘She did not.’
    ‘She did,’ I say. ‘We all had jelly and ice cream and she bought a new tube and a mending kit for the bicycle.’
    ‘Well, wasn’t that a treat.’
    ‘It was,’ I say, and feel, again, the steel teeth of the comb against my scalp earlier that morning, the strength of my mother’s hands as she wove the plaits tight, her belly at my back, hard with the next baby. I think of the clean pants she packed in the suitcase, the letter, and what she may have written. Words had passed between them:
    ‘How long should they keep her?’
    ‘Can’t they keep her as long as they like?’
    ‘Is that what I’ll say?’
    ‘Say what you like. Isn’t it what you always do.’
    Now, the woman fills an enamel jug with milk.
    ‘Your mother must be busy.’
    ‘She’s waiting for them to come and cut the hay.’
    ‘Have ye not the hay cut?’ she says. ‘Aren’t ye late?’
    When the men come in from the yard, it grows momentarily dark, then brightens once again when they sit down.
    ‘Well, Missus,’ says Da, pulling out a chair.
    ‘Dan,’ she says, in a different voice.
    ‘There’s a scorcher of a day.’
    ‘’Tis hot, surely.’ She turns her back to watch the kettle, waiting.
    ‘Wouldn’t the fields be glad of a sup of rain,’ he says.
    ‘Won’t we have the rain for long enough.’ She looks at the wall as though a picture is hanging there but there is no picture on that wall, just a big mahogany clock with two hands and a big copper pendulum, swinging.
    ‘Wasn’t it a great year for the hay all the same. Never saw the like of it,’ says Da. ‘The loft is full to capacity. I nearly split my head on the rafters pitching it in.’
    I wonder why my father lies about the hay. He is given to lying about things that would be nice, if they were true. Somewhere, further off, someone has started up a chainsaw and it drones on like a big, stinging wasp for a while in the distance. I wish I was out there, working.I am unused to sitting still and do not know what to do with my hands. Part of me wants my father to leave me here while another part of me wants him to take me back, to what I know. I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.
    The kettle lets off steam and rumbles up to boiling point, its steel lid clapping. The presence of a black-and-white cat moves on the window ledge. On the floor, across the hard, clean tiles, the woman’s shadow stretches, almost reaching my chair. Kinsella gets up and takes a stack of plates from the cupboard, opens a drawer and takes out knives and forks, teaspoons. He takes the lid off a jar of beetroot and puts it on a saucer with a little serving fork, leaves out