I sound like I need to wear a helmet indoors. What the feck is wrong with me? But she is still not saying anything, and now I’m trying to figure out what the feck is wrong with her. I tally all stupid things I’m saying and thinking right now, as if this is some sort of a job interview.
“Anyway, is she there?” I clear my throat.
“No,” Debbie Jenkins clips.
More silence. Rory Jenkins despises her mother, and I’m starting to see why.
“May I have her number, please?”
“Malachy…” She lets out an exaggerated sigh. “Listen, I know you and my daughter had…a thing. We’re not as distant as she’d like people to believe. Rory is inexperienced, impressionable, and hopelessly romantic. I’m sure it got blown into this huge something in both your heads, but let’s admit it, just between the two of us—it doesn’t exactly have a future, does it?”
I’m torn between telling her to feck off and pleading my case. If I thought it didn’t have a future, I wouldn’t be calling.
She continues, “She moved out. She’s in college. She’s dating—”
“Dating?” I snap.
“Mmm-hmmm.” Debbie lights a fag on the other side of the line. “A very nice guy, too. In fact, I’m sure she won’t mind if I send you the pictures she took of you. They’re lying somewhere around her room. She never took them with her. Would you like that? For safekeeping?”
I can feel the napkin with our contract burning a hole in the back of my jeans. I take it everywhere, like I expect to see her, out and about in Tolka or Dublin, and wave it in her face.
See? Remember? We’re supposed to be together.
My pride urges me to tell Debbie she can shove the unwanted photos of me where the sun don’t shine, but ego is a luxury broken hearts cannot afford.
“Please do,” I mutter.
I start to give her my address, but she tells me she’ll send them to Father Doherty. I actually prefer it that way, because my house is the farthest from anywhere else in the village, and I’m prone to having my mail lost.
“How is she doing?” I ask again before she hangs up.
I can’t help myself, even if I’m starting to believe Kathleen about the whole one-night-stand thing. So what if Rory suggested long distance? She was caught in the moment. The magic wore off quickly for her, that’s for sure.
“I told you, Malachy. She’s fine.”
“Can I call you and make sure she’s okay from time to time?” Hang up the phone, you sorry pile of shite.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Debbie says apologetically. “It’d be for the best if Rory leaves Ireland behind her.”
“Okay.”
“Bye.”
I received the pictures Debbie Jenkins sent me earlier today. I’ve dropped by my granda’s house every single day since our phone call, waiting for them. It took them two months to arrive. Two months of me being a celibate, moody eejit. Two months of me breaking every rule in our stupid contract.
I looked for Rory on social media, but she doesn’t have any profiles. Or if she does—they’re not under her real name.
I subscribed to her college’s newsletter because it sometimes shouts out students, and seeing her name makes me happy. (She’s won two photography contests and helped film a short student movie.)
But nothing could prepare me for the moment I flipped the pictures over (fine quality, by the way) and saw the captions she’d put on the back of them.
Picture one, of me singing/busking:
He was a terrible flirt, and he could be soooo cheesy!
Picture two, of me standing on the threshold of The Boar’s Head, posing for her like Marilyn Monroe.
He talks too much, and sometimes doesn’t make any sense.
Picture three, both of us in bed, my bed, after I gave her three hundred orgasms and a part of my heart.
He tries way too hard in bed.
The worst thing is, shortly thereafter at The Boar’s Head, I took the napkin out and compared her handwriting on the contract to the words on the back of the pictures. Sean, Daniel, and I all concluded it was the same handwriting. So it’s not like her mother could have faked this.
Daniel drums the table. “Well then, I think it’s safe to say you can move on with your life now. She sounds like a world-class slag.”
“The thing is, she is not,” I slur.
I pick up my fifth…sixth pint and chug it down. Kathleen is sitting across from us with her friends again. Sean is staring