The Lace Makers of Glenmara - By Heather Barbieri Page 0,68

listened to the children’s voices, musical as the notes of a pipe band: Rory, Riordan, Ronan, Sinead, and Sorcha. The babies she and Cillian had made together, Sorcha first, the reason they had gotten married. Moira had been home from college that summer—she’d been studying for her teaching certificate—dropped out soon after, but she didn’t mind, she’d missed the coast, home, him.

Cillian had a boat then, a future. All that gone now. He complained of an old injury from his days as a rugger—another career that didn’t pan out—worse now that he was older. He tried to hire on with other crews, but there weren’t many venturing out anymore. He’d had a lead on a job to the north earlier in the month, but then a swarm of jellyfish decimated the salmon run. Not that he would have gotten the position anyway. He had a temper. He drank. He wasn’t reliable. He had his good qualities, sure, but word had gotten around, as it always did in the end.

And so Moira tried to make ends meet, cleaning houses, cleaning anything for anyone that was dirty, bringing the children along when they weren’t in school. Some people hired her because they needed the help, most because they felt sorry for her, because she had a husband who didn’t provide for his family. It was as if he didn’t know how. His mother had done everything for him while he was growing up, at least in a material sense. He’d been the only son in the family, a rugby star in school, catered to, adored. And then his father died when Cillian was seventeen, and his mother went off to Dublin and married a contractor, started a new life. They lived in the Algarve now, bought the grandchildren toys that broke within minutes or were too expensive to maintain, the scooters and bikes outside, a small junkyard, needing to be hauled away, fixed, something, the house too, the kitchen tap dripping, the fridge clunking, everything falling apart.

Moira put the soup on to simmer. Sorcha had dealt with the dishes, as Moira had asked her to do, but she’d forgotten the laundry. Moira thought about calling her in to finish the job, then changed her mind. The girl already did too much, saw too much. She was only twelve. She hardly ever went out and played with the younger ones, let herself be a child.

Moira hummed to herself, straightening cuffs and collars, crossing sleeves over chests, bending trousers at the knee, smoothing the worn cottons and knits and linens.

“What’s this, then?” Cillian’s voice was quiet in her ear. Where had he come from? He hadn’t been on the couch when she walked in. Maybe he’d been in the garage, dabbling with another half-finished project, and heard her when she’d come up the drive, waited until she’d been lulled into complacency.

She felt the size of him behind her, filling the room—he was a big man, still built like the athlete he’d once been, though more flaccid now in the belly. He could move stealthily, as if he weighed nothing at all, when he wanted to. She froze, a creature seeking camouflage—a chameleon in Madagascar, an arctic fox in Alaska (The children had been studying them at school. “Will we go there someday, Mam? Will you take us?” the little ones asked. “Someday. Someday,” she said)—finding none. Only walls so gray it seemed as if the ceiling would rain on them any minute, the weak-hinged cabinets, banged one too many times, the light fixture spitting and flickering above, the wiring all wrong, casting a long shadow behind them, him looming over her, the scene a page torn from one of Rory’s comic books depicting a harrowing episode before the hero arrives.

“Just the lace,” she said.

He dangled the lingerie in front of her face, straps looped like nooses, big enough to slip around her neck, tighten. “Who’ve you been tarting yourself up for?”

“No one. I told you. It’s just the lace.”

“Sure, sure it is.”

Outside, the finches shook the hedgerow, quarreling over nigella seeds, last year’s pods desiccated, shattering. Riordan shrieked from the field. He’d been found. He was it now. He counted: One, two, three, four…

“Cillian, please.”

“What’s this got to do with handkerchiefs and tea towels, I’d like to know?” She’d lost count of how many times he’d raised a hand to her. “What happens behind closed doors stays behind closed doors,” he told her, and she agreed, because these were private matters, weren’t they, misunderstandings.