Apologize, Apologize! - By Elizabeth Kelly Page 0,116

beautiful, she was referring quite specifically to someone who compensated in forehead for what was missing in chin.

I introduced myself, but she seemed barely to notice. Her lips were chapped, and she kept chewing them nervously. Her face was raw and peeling, as if it had been washed once too often in harsh detergents. Her hands were twisting frantically as she fingered a small wrapped package in a cloth sack.

“It’s my mam’s birthday,” she explained.

“Oh, that’s nice,” I said, offering to carry her bag.

“Um, yes, I guess. Will you excuse me while I use the telephone for a moment?” she asked, pointing to the booth next to us.

“Go ahead,” I said as she took her place inside the open booth and started loudly dialing.

“Mam, it’s me. . . . Yes, Mam, we’re running a bit late. . . . Running a bit late. About thirty minutes.”

There was silence, then she resumed, her voice growing more emotional and tense, soaring skyward until its sustained pitch circled overhead like the flocks of marine birds.

“Mam, please try to understand, it’s a question of petrol. The boat’s refueling and we can’t get aboard just yet. . . .” She started sniffling as she was apparently listening, suddenly interrupting with a wail, “Mam, do I have your faith? Do I, Mam? If I don’t have your faith, I have nothing, Mam.”

She hung up the phone and, weeping, came and stood next to me, dabbing at her eyes, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Are you all right?” I asked dumbly, feeling at a total loss. Everyone around us was ignoring her obvious distress. The Irish have a high tolerance for hysteria.

“I’m fine. Will you please excuse me again?” Her manner was awkwardly formal.

She went back to the phone and redialed her mother.

“Mam, I have your birthday gift, and I will bring it to the back door and then leave.” She was shaking her head vigorously. “No, I won’t come in. I will bring your gift and your papers to the back door, and I will lay them down gently, then I will turn around and leave.”

Now she really started crying, and loud. “Mam, if you had any idea what I’ve been through . . .”

I was standing with my arm around her as she cried, waiting as the drizzle became a torrential downpour and a rusty fishing boat called the Old Fart docked not far from us. I looked on astonished as people began to board.

“This can’t be the ferry?” I said as Mary Margaret, clutching her bag, nodded and wailed anew.

I walked along the solitary beach at Inisheer, leaving Mary Margaret at her sister’s house—my last sight of her, the two of them were sobbing in each other’s arms in the front yard—and all the while I was asking myself, Whose faith do I have?

When I got back to the cottage, Aunt Brigid was waiting with dinner. Pop never showed up. “Oh, don’t give it a second thought, Collie,” she said later that night, taking a knowing sip of tea, sitting in her rocking chair in front of the fireplace, overweight calico cat called Dorothy purring in her lap. “He’s no doubt gone into Dublin to seek the company of a hotel. You know how your father loves a good hotel. He learned it from my father, who used to run away to the Gresham Hotel whenever he got upset. When your aunt Rosalie announced her engagement, he took an ax to the shed, smashed it to the ground, and then vanished for a week, eventually coming home loaded down with monogrammed towels. Why, we’re still using them today.”

She had an experienced laugh, and it made me feel reassured—both of us choosing to believe that “hotel” in this case was an actual location and not a synonym for Guinness.

The next day, there was a note from Aunt Brigid taped to the door when I got back late that night from my day trip to Galway. Pop had called and wanted me to join him in Dublin. He was staying at the Gresham and “enjoying it very much by the sound of it,” Aunt Brigid wrote in expansive script punctuated with multiple exclamation points, followed by a cartoonish ellipsis—three oversize circles. My heart palpitated, tapping out its own Morse code, each beat signifying growing alarm.

When it came to Pop, even punctuation had the power to terrify.

Navigating rural Ireland’s narrow roads wasn’t my idea of fun, so I hopped the bus in Lisdoonvarna and settled in for the