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until she had also been shown the original payment. As well as doing this, she greeted certain customers by name, motioning them forward and insisting that Eilis break off whatever she was doing to serve them.

“Oh, Mrs. Prendergast now,” she said, “the new girl will look after you now and Mary will carry everything out to the car for you.”

“I need to finish this first,” Eilis said, as she was only a few items away from completing another order.

“Oh, Mary will do that,” Miss Kelly said.

By this time people were five deep at the counter. “I’m next,” a man shouted as Miss Kelly came back to the counter with more bread.

“Now, we are very busy and you will have to wait your turn.”

“But I was next,” the man said, “and that woman was served before me.”

“So what is it you want?”

The man had a list of groceries in his hand.

“Eilis will deal with you now,” Miss Kelly said, “but only after Mrs. Murphy here.”

“I was before her too,” the man said.

“I’m afraid you are mistaken,” Miss Kelly said. “Eilis, hurry up now, this man is waiting. No one has all day, so he’s next, after Mrs. Murphy. What price did you charge for that tea?”

It was like this until almost one o’clock. There was no break and nothing to eat or drink and Eilis was starving. No one was served in turn. Miss Kelly informed some of her customers, including two who, being friends of Rose, greeted Eilis familiarly, that she had lovely fresh tomatoes. She weighed them herself, seeming to be impressed that Eilis knew these customers, telling others firmly, however, that she had no tomatoes that day, none at all. For favoured customers she openly, almost proudly, produced the fresh bread. The problem was, Eilis realized, that there was no other shop in the town that was as well stocked as Miss Kelly’s and open on a Sunday morning, but she also had a sense that people came here out of habit and they did not mind waiting, they enjoyed the crush and the crowd.

Although she had planned not to mention her new job in Miss Kelly’s over dinner at home that day unless Rose raised the matter first, Eilis could not contain herself and began as soon as they sat down to describe her morning.

“I went into that shop once,” Rose said, “on my way home from mass and she served Mary Delahunt before me. I turned and walked out. And there was a smell of something. I can’t think what it was. She has a little slave, doesn’t she? She took her out of a convent.”

“Her father was a nice enough man,” her mother said, “but she had no chance because her mother was, as I told you, Eilis, evil incarnate. I heard that when one of the maids got scalded she wouldn’t even let her go to the doctor. The mother had Nelly working there from the time she could walk. She’s never seen daylight, that’s what’s wrong with her.”

“Nelly Kelly?” Rose asked. “Is that really her name?”

“In school they had a different name for her.”

“What was it?”

“Everyone called her Nettles Kelly. The nuns couldn’t stop us. I remember her well, she was a year or two behind me. She’d always have five or six girls following behind her coming from the Mercy Convent shouting ‘Nettles.’ No wonder she’s so mad.”

There was silence for a while as Rose and Eilis took this in.

“You wouldn’t know whether to laugh or to cry,” Rose said.

Eilis found as the meal went on that she could do an imitation of Miss Kelly’s voice that made her sister and her mother laugh. She wondered if she was the only one who remembered that Jack, the youngest of her brothers, used to do imitations of the Sunday sermon, the radio sports commentators, the teachers at school and many characters in the town, and they all used to laugh. She did not know if the other two also realized that this was the first time they had laughed at this table since Jack had followed the others to Birmingham. She would have loved to say something about him, but she knew that it would make her mother too sad. Even when a letter came from him it was passed around in silence. So she continued mocking Miss Kelly, stopping only when someone called for Rose to take her to play golf, leaving Eilis and her mother to clear the table and wash