Osprey Island

She knocked at the door of the Squire cottage with her elbow, her hands full. She could not have been more than two minutes behind them, but when Lance opened the door it seemed that something had already happened. Squee was at the table in the exact spot he’d occupied when Roddy was there half an hour earlier. There was a bowl on the table in front of him. In the bowl were two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The table was covered with milk and bloated Cheerios, which looked like piles of cat vomit. A trail of milk led to a spoon that lay where it had landed on the opposite edge of the table. Squee’s shirtfront was spattered, and droplets fell down his face as though he were crying milk tears. He did not even move to wipe his face with his hand.

Lance held the door as if he couldn’t decide whether to invite Brigid in or slam it in her face. He looked at her a good long moment before he said, with both pride and righteousness, “We don’t need your charity here.” It was something he’d likely heard on television.

Brigid took her own long moment before responding. She fixed Lance with a stare that was impassive and feisty at the same time. And then she plowed right past him and into the room, depositing the chips and cookies on the table. “If the charities are doling out food of this sort,” she said, ripping cans from their plastic tether and placing them one by one into the empty fridge, “it’s hardly a bloody wonder your country’s full of fatties with rotted teeth.”

Lance, still standing at the open door, relaxed his posture and now stood with his weight bearing down on the knob, watching her. “I like you,” he said. “I always knew I liked you right off.”

Brigid glanced around the room. “Do you have a fag?” she asked. “A cigarette?”

He jerked his head toward a pack and lighter on the windowsill. She retrieved them, then gestured out the door he still held ajar. “Shall we?” she said, and he gallantly motioned her through ahead of him.

On the porch, they sat in chairs and smoked in silence. It was too sunny out, and the smoke seemed to bellow from their mouths in an affront to the light, as though they were asserting themselves in opposition to it.

Lance rubbed his eye with the heel of the hand in which he held his cigarette, and for a moment the smoke seemed to pour from the top of his head. He squinted as if trying to make out something far off on the horizon. They finished their cigarettes, then lit up again. After a while, Lance said, “She was so pretty . . .”

Brigid waited, quiet.

“Beautiful,” he said. “Tiny—a tiny, tiny little thing. But built too. Perfect . . . first time I remember seeing her was on the bleachers at some game. I was fifteen years old, and I took one look at that girl and I knew I was gonna spend . . .” He let it go. He couldn’t say the words. He saw Lorna, and he knew. There wasn’t much more to it than that.

After a time Brigid said, “May I ask a question, then?”

Lance didn’t speak, but gestured grandly in front of him as though to indicate a stage that was all hers.

“You’ll not yell at me, will you?”

“Not you, angel. Why would I do a thing like that to you?”

“You do it to the others,” she offered.

“You’re not them.”

Brigid held on to her words for another moment. “Sitting here, you know, having a chat, you—you come across as rather an understandable sort of a man.” She paused. “It’s not my place to speak. Only it seems as though life might be a terrible lot easier, you see?” She spoke all these words to her hand and the cigarette it held. “You know, if you were kind like this, with the others . . .” When she finished and heard no response from Lance, no sudden movement to force her attention to him, she finally turned to look and see what she’d done.

Tears he was trying very hard to hold back were pooling out of his eyes despite him, and he was bearing them stoically. When he could speak he managed to say, “That’s just what Lorna’d ask me . . .” And then he couldn’t say any more. Lance’s arms were laid across the armrests of the peeling whitewashed Adirondack-style chair in which he sat, and Brigid instinctively, and compassionately, reached out a hand and laid it across his forearm. He stiffened, shut his eyes. It made Brigid feel strange, and a bit frightened. She thought, This is a man whom no one touches.

THE REST OF THE IRISH GIRLS were still down in the dining room playing cards amid their PB&J detritus when Suzy returned from lunch. They’d managed (actually, Tito’s butterscotch pudding had managed) to get Mia to stop crying, but the second she laid eyes on her mother coming through the sliding glass door Mia burst into tears, bounded from her chair, sending her rummy hand scattering, and rushed at Suzy, who squatted and caught her just as Mia let out a terrible sob.