the interlocking boughs of the trees, and it was difficult for the birds not to display some twinges of jealousy as he and his mother sang together:
Come day go day
Wishing my heart it was Sunday
Drinking buttermilk all the week …
Pat rounded off the verse with a sweep of his arm and a declamatory: “Whiskey on a Sunday!”
It may be that if he had been forced to remain in his place of confinement for even one more single day it would have had the required effect on Pat McNab by Mrs. Tubridy, but opening the door and revealing herself standing in a shaft of light in an almost apologedc manner was not perhaps, in retrospect, the wisest course of action for his self-appointed behavior modifier. As indeed neither were any of her repeated insistences that it had been incumbent upon her to embark upon the course she had.
“I had to be cruel to be kind, Pat,” she said softly as Pat set down some hours later the piping hot meal she had requested he prepare for her.
“It’s all right, Mrs. Tubridy,” he replied, the combination of sadness and marble-cold stoniness in his voice tragically inaudible to her ear.
Mrs. Tubridy sliced some meat and placed her fork at an angle to her cheek, looking upward and smiling in the way she did before saying, “You know—you’re a very handsome boy, Paudgeen. I mean, Pat, of course!”
“Thank you, Mrs. Tubridy.”
The smile slowly metamorphosed into a smirk as she laid down her fork and said, “Come here.”
Very gently, Pat felt her fingers close about his upper arm. They reminded him of a pound of Castlebar sausages.
Mrs. Tubridy coughed—politely, of course—and said, “After you’ve cleaned out the yard, we can have biscakes and tea in the parlor. Just you and me. All right?”
“Yes, Mrs. Tubridy,” Pat said, “after I’ve hosed down the yard.”
“You’re hosing it down, are you?” replied Mrs. Tubridy. “Well—after you’ve that done, we can sit in there together.”
Had Mrs. Tubridy been possessed of telepathic powers, it is highly likely if not even more so that things would have worked out much differently. For she would have clearly seen that what Pat was thinking as he was discussing the hosing of the yard and the repairing to the parlor with her in reasonable, civilized tones was, “Yes! And after we have those two things done, what you can do is drive me mad the same as you did your dead husband!”
And would have attached a logic, and, perhaps, a meaning, to the six words of his succeeding statement, which, as it stood, made absolutely no sense at all. The statement being: “Except that you won’t, Mrs. Tubridy!”
Initially, its seeming eccentricity elicited a tiny flicker of amusement from Mrs. Tubridy’s cheek. As she nibbled her meat and said, “What’s that, Pat?” satisfactorily receiving the reply, “I said except you won’t be hosing the yard, Mrs. Tubridy, because I’ll be doing it all by myself!”
Would it have ended significantly differently if the aforementioned “telepathic powers” or even the slightest approximation of them had been in evidence? Who can possibly say? All that must remain, for posterity, in the realm of pure conjecture.
What is not in the realm of conjecture, however, is that, as he was removing Mrs. Tubridy’s plate to ferry it in the direction of the dustbin that evening, her eyes twinkled with an unusual abandon and gaiety as she said, “You know what I was thinking, Pat? I was thinking that maybe—why, one night, we could get ourselves a litde brandy? Or whiskey, maybe? Just the two of us!”
The sight of a postmenopausal if not indeed elderly lady inflating steadily—to the point of absurdity, in fact—to a degree where she is a palpable danger to others is not immediately what we would expect to be the direct consequence of what is essentially an unremarkable suggestion, or would be in other circumstances. But these were not other circumstances, as the glint in Pat McNab’s eye as he hoarsely cried, “Mrs. McNab! I don’t know what to say! How can I ever thank you, Mrs. McNab!” ought to have indicated to the older woman, and most certainly would have if had she been alert. Which she wasn’t, perhaps due to the quantity of food she had consumed, but for whatever reason, a shortcoming which was now about to lead inevitably to what might be called “The Fate of Dolly Tubridy,” soon to be formerly of 36 Mounthelmet Gardens, Gullytown.
If anyone, a neighbor, or anyone just