Free Fit Month for Dying by M.T. Dohaney Page A

splash it over you to fight off the BO.”
    I remind her that I have to go back to St. John’s in the morning, and I repeat Greg’s invitation before he left: that she should consider coming back with me and staying with us for a few weeks.
    â€œNever!” she says. “Like I said to Greg, much as I’d love to be close to Brendan, much as I’d love to see that child every day of me life, I couldn’t live in St. John’s. I’d smother to death in there. Houses piled on top of one another, scrunched together. Cramped up like hens on a roost. Hills so steep ye have to tack like a schooner to get up them.”
    She waves her hands to take in the fields and cliffs and beach that stretch out beyond her kitchen window. “Here I can breathe. Here I can have a clothesline stretching halfway across the meadow if I wants to. I can let me drawers flap in the wind fer days on end. Can’t do that in St. John’s, certainly not on those lots as small as a postage stamp. Yer drawers would be flapping up against yer neighbour’s window.”
    I understand her need for space and fresh air because I spend my days in a building with sealed windows, recycled air and a foyer filled with trees that have a perpetual hangdog look. I once told Greg that if the save-the-seals gang wanted a real cause they should hijack the trees in my foyer and carry them back to Botswana or whatever exotic homeland they’re pining for.
    â€œAll jokin’ aside, girl,” Philomena says, as if long before this moment she has given a lot of thought to the subject, “there’s no place like home. Nothing like yer own bit of sod.”
    She sets aside her partly eaten jam-jam, dusts the crumbs from her hands and says, “Now, girl, I’ve been meanin’ to talk to you about somethin’.”
    Her tone, solemn and weighty, makes me think she is finally going to agree to have a will drawn up, something Greg had been trying to get both his parents to do to no avail. What she says is even more surprising.
    â€œI’ve been meanin’ to tell you yer a good daughter-in-law. A good daughter, really.”
    Taken off guard by her compliment, I can’t think of a response. To cover my confusion I reach for a jam-jam, hoping that by the time I take a bite she will have swerved the conversation in another direction. But Philomena has another intention: to go down Memory Lane and bring me along with her.
    â€œFor the life of me,” she says, “I can’t understand now why I kicked up such a fuss when you and Greg said you were going to get married. Don’t make that much sense to me now. And it all seems so long ago.”
    â€œYou did what you felt you had to do,” I reply, absolving her. “I understood that even back then.”
    â€œI knows that. But it seemed so important at the time. And I’m wonderin’ now, wondered fer some time in fact, but especially now that Hube has died and Danny is gone back, whether it was all worth it. All that fuss about you and Greg. All that sparrin’ with poor Hube about the children goin’ to this church and not to that one. I feels so bad about that now. What the hell odds, I say to myself today, where ye goes to church, jest so long as ye goes. And even if ye goes to no church as long as yer good to yer neighbour. That’s all that counts. Jest so long as yer willin’ to haul somebody’s cow out of the muck or give some poor child a pair of mitts to keep his fingers from gettin’ frostbit. That’s all that counts. That’s what Christianity is about. Not about churches.
    â€œThat’s all very well for me to say now, but ’tis not what I could say back then. Wasn’t brought up that way, I guess. Those changes Pope John brought in during the sixties really should have made me think. But they didn’t. He turned the Catholic Church ass over kettle, I say. Even unsainted St.