Ashes of Fiery Weather (6 page)

Sean glared at Eileen, then jabbed a finger at her. “I get half your tips.”

“Fair enough.” Eileen disappeared into the crowd. Seconds later, she popped up behind the bar.

“Hmm. I heard they weren't even talking,” Marian said.

“Did they break up or something?” Norah asked.

“Break up?” Marian snorted. “No, that's his sister.”

“His sister?” Norah repeated. They weren't remotely similar.

Eileen handled her end of the bar as expertly as Sean, who moved down so that he was taking the order of the blond girl beside Norah and Marian. The blond leaned forward for the occasion, pressing her cleavage against the bar. She ordered a gin and tonic and a vodka and cranberry.

“For my girlfriend,” she said hopefully.

Marian made a small noise of disgust in the back of her throat as Sean started to make the drinks.

“Sean,” Marian said. “Hi.”

Sean glanced at her. “Hey, what's up?”

Norah flinched at the flatness in his tone. She willed Marian to notice and be quiet, but Marian said, “Work was crazy today. St. Patrick's Day is like Christmas Eve in Santa's workshop for us.” Clearly, she'd rehearsed the line.

A flicker of a smile crossed Sean's face. “I bet.”

“I have this couple celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary and they want to go to Belfast. I keep telling them that might not be a good idea. Better than asking, Do you want to get killed?”

“Crazy shit going on there, yeah,” he agreed. “Ten,” he said to the blond, who then handed him a crumpled twenty.

“I don't think you've met Norah?”

“Don't think so,” he said.

“She works with me at Irish Dreams. She's Irish.”

Norah nodded, and Amred Lehane said, “Ah, Helen's niece!”

Sean gave the blond her change. She fanned the bills and carefully placed them on the bar. Sean gave a quick nod of thanks and turned away from her and looked at Norah.

“From Ireland Irish?” he asked.

Norah nodded. “I came over in January. It would have been a little sooner but my sister was having a baby, so we all figured I should wait.” She stopped and directed her gaze at the bar.

“Well, Irish, what can I get you?” Sean asked.

Norah raised her head to see Sean looking at her expectantly, not annoyed but smiling.

She ordered four pints of Guinness. If he poured them right, she'd have a few minutes near him.

“Where in Ireland are you from?” he asked as he flipped two glasses upright.

“Galway,” she said. “Ballyineen. You've probably never heard of it.”

“Not on any maps?” he said.

“I don't know. I've never had to look.”

Sean laughed, and after a second Norah smiled as though she
had
made a joke.

“My mother is Galway on both sides, she thinks. Way back, though,” Sean said.

After two and a half months, she'd gotten used to the way Americans insisted on telling her where their families were from, as if she might nod and cry, Oh, yes, the O'Malleys from Mayo! The McCanns from Kerry! The Delaneys from Roscommon!

“Where in Ireland was your father's family from?” Marian asked. “Mine's from Cavan. That's the smallest county.”

Sean shot her a look that Norah couldn't quite read. But he answered as he filled their next two pints. “Sligo. So my mother always said.”

“And she's a fountain of information,” Eileen called.

“Shut up,” Sean said back, but without rancor.

Eileen laughed. “Up Sligo!” she shouted at the bar in general, getting more than a few shouts back.

“What brings you to America?” Sean asked. He set the finished pints in front of her and Marian.

“It's a bit of a long story.” Norah handed him a twenty, hoping it was the right bill.

Sean smiled as he accepted her money, and Norah's stomach dropped the way it did when she took the subway by herself, certain she would be lost in spite of the careful directions on the folded piece of paper tucked in her pocket.

“Do you know when you're getting on the fire department?” Marian asked. “Anna told me you and her brother took the test.”

“No, no word yet,” Sean said.

“Firefighting is in Sean's blood,” Amred said. “His grandfather died at a fire.”

“He had a heart attack at the scene,” Sean said. “Amred likes to make it sound like he jumped out a window with a kid in his arms.”

“He rescued a woman once who was, ah, expecting,” Amred said. “And a heart attack counts. Firemen are always having heart attacks.”

“So are old men,” Sean said.

“He was still fighting fires?” Norah asked.

“He was a captain. He was outside managing the scene,” Sean said.

“My father remembers the day he died,” Marian said. “He said the bars around here were all packed. Everyone came out to toast him. Gentleman Jack Keegan.”

“Things were different back then,” Sean said to Norah. “Firemen lived near where they worked, because they weren't allowed to live on Long Island or anywhere out of the city. The boroughs only.”

“The neighborhood,” Norah ventured. The neighborhood was something she couldn't quite get her head around. There were no marked boundaries, no signs, yet everybody seemed to understand where one ended and another began.

“Exactly,” Sean said.

Marian looked down at her clasped hands.

“Sean! Come on, man. I'm fucking dying of thirst!” a man shouted from the far end of the bar.

“Good!” he shouted back. He looked at Norah. “Talk to you later?”

Norah nodded and Sean moved on.

Norah and Marian took two pints each, and Marian let her take the lead through the crowd. She glanced back and saw Sean angling a glass beneath a tap. Aoife would have gone for him, Norah was sure of it.

Irish Dreams was closed on Mondays, since it was open on weekends. Norah tried to think of things to take her out of the apartment on Mondays, to give her aunt a few hours alone. Norah went to the library or on idle walks through Prospect Park. Once she'd made the mistake of accepting an invitation to go to the movies with Marian, but when she went by Marian's to call for her, the grandmother wasn't feeling well, or said she wasn't. They ended up spending an incredibly dull afternoon playing rummy with the old lady, who cheated.

The Monday after St. Patrick's Day, late in the afternoon, Norah arrived back at Helen's and immediately sensed her aunt's disappointment. So Norah asked if she could go into the office. There she could use a typewriter to write a letter home. They'd all be impressed. Helen gave her the keys eagerly, but as soon as they were out of her hand, she seemed to regret it. Three times she told Norah to be sure to lock the door when she left.

Norah did owe Aoife a letter. She hadn't answered the last one, which was full of boring paragraphs about the baby. Noelle was lovely, but she didn't care for sleep, Aoife wrote. The two of them together saw every sunrise. She'd be glad when Norah came back home. None of her friends who were still home had children yet, and they didn't visit much. Norah had read this with mounting anger. Aoife made her go to New York because she'd ruined her own chance, but her sister hadn't thought for a second that Norah might make a life for herself.

She hadn't written to Hugh Quinlevan lately, which was almost embarrassing because, before she left, he'd told her he thought he might be in love with her, and she'd thought, Why not propose, then? She'd get to stay home. Imagine if he had.

At her desk at Irish Dreams, Norah's gaze was fixed on the front door. She tried to think of a way to tell Aoife that she liked working at the agency, speaking all day to people who were excited to be fulfilling, yes, a dream that they'd had for years. Americans were so funny in the way they spoke of Ireland, as though it wasn't a real place and they'd be taking a plane into their imaginations.

She would write that she was making friends without mentioning the dull specifics of Marian. Let Aoife wonder.

Norah had just set her hands on the typewriter keys when the redhead appeared, first peering in the window, then grinning and rapping on the glass. She pushed the door, and when she found it locked, she mimed opening it. Norah jumped up and did so, a queer feeling in her stomach, as if she'd been waiting for something exciting to happen since she'd arrived in America, and it just had.

Eileen O'Reilly came in. “I hope you don't mind. Your aunt told me where you were. Which is actually perfect, because I wanted to ask you about a trip to Ireland.”

“I'm not a travel agent,” Norah said. “We're closed today, actually.”

“I know. You're the secretary or something. But you must have some idea of stuff. I didn't feel like coming in when Maid Marian was here.”

Eileen made a quick face and flung herself down in the chair beside Norah's desk. “We all thought she was going to be a nun.”

“A nun? Why?” Norah asked.

Eileen shrugged. “She just has that look. And she used to work for the convent on Cross Hill Avenue.”

Helen had told Norah about the cloister, St. Maren's. The motherhouse, Helen said with something like pride, had been in Ireland. Galway, in fact. In Ireland, the order had died out in the decade after the famine.

“What did she do there?” Norah asked.

“Who the hell knows?” Eileen said. “We all figured she was sorting their mail and answering the phone. She was all secretive about it, like she was in the CIA. We figured she might just go in there one day and never come out. I can't see her selling Irish vacations.”

“I thought the same thing,” Norah said. “But Aunt Helen gives Marian the nervous people. She said nobody would believe Marian was trying to cheat them out of their money.” Norah hesitated. “She said, ‘No charm, no swindle.'”

Eileen laughed and Norah felt a twinge of guilt. It was hardly Marian's fault that she longed for a more exciting American friend, the sort of bold, confident girl you saw in films.

“I'm wondering how much these trips cost. I tried to get my mother to buy Sean a ticket to Dublin, but she said he doesn't need to be far away from home all by himself right now, and I said, So buy a ticket for me too, and she just looked at me like I was crazy. I thought if I had a price to tell her, she might listen.”

“Why do you want Sean to go to Ireland?” Norah asked.

“He was in Nam. Marian told you that?”

“She did.”

“I bet,” Eileen said. “He always talked about traveling when he got home but all he does is work. He barely goes out with any girls. Sean always had a girl. Or three. If he's gonna travel, I figure he should do it now while he's waiting to go on the fire department.”

“But what's he waiting for? If he wants to be a fireman, why doesn't he just do it?”

Eileen laughed. “You've got to wait to be called,” she said. “You take the written test and you get put on a list according to your score. When the city's hiring, they go to the list and it's those with the highest scores who get called first. Sean got one hundred on the test. I'm not sure if he gets legacy points.”

“Legacy points?”

“For having family on the job. Sean's father wasn't a fireman—he was an asshole—but his grandfather and great-grandfather were. They might be too far back, though. When they do call him, he'll go for training. When he passes the physical, he graduates.”

Norah placed her hands on the edge of her desk. She felt that she'd just been asked to save a life. She quoted Eileen a few packages.

“Shit.” Eileen blew out a breath. “That's a lot.”

“Those prices include airfare and the tours and some meals and transport and lodging,” Norah said.

“Tours.” Eileen made a face. “Sean would probably hate being led around. I guess he could skip those.”

Norah felt a flash of irritation. If Eileen knew being on a tour was something her brother would hate, what on earth was she even doing here?

“Who's that?” Eileen pointed to the picture on Norah's desk.

“That's my sister, Aoife, and her husband and their baby.”

Eileen looked up. “What's her name?”

“Noelle Mary.”

Aoife hadn't wanted a holiday name. She said it would be like being dressed up all the year through, but Peter insisted, and as Aoife told Norah, she was exhausted, her breasts were leaking, she had stitches in her bum.

“No, no. Your sister. Ee-fa? How do you spell that?”

Norah, mystified, spelled it for her.

“An A? That name begins with an A? It's Gaelic, isn't it?”

Norah nodded.

“What about E-i-l-i-s?” Eileen leaned forward in her chair. “How do you say that?”

“Ay-lish,” Norah said.

Eileen jumped up and began to prowl the office. “I always said it E-liss. Say it again?”

“Ay-lish.”

“Ay-lish,” Eileen said. “Ay-lish.”

“Do you know a girl who's called that?”

Eileen turned from the front door. She was in silhouette against the gray light, as though she might vanish through the glass. “I was called that.”

After that, Eileen and Norah were friends, going out on Friday and Saturday nights to bars or parties in the apartments of people Eileen knew, or said she did. Norah went out on two dates but then told the guy (lads were guys in Brooklyn) not to call her again while Eileen listened in, mouthing words Norah should say. At first, Norah made a point of being home by midnight, much to Eileen's scorn. They weren't teenagers. Eventually, Norah followed Eileen's lead and stayed out later, always careful not to wake Aunt Helen when she slipped in, quietly exhilarated from the events of the evening.

Once, Marian asked her if she wanted to go see the movie
Slaughterhouse-Five,
and Norah stuttered an excuse. Marian nodded, a blotchy blush on her neck.