by Bryce Taylor
"Too ostentatious?" she asks with another wide grin.
"Yeah, on the whole I think you can make do with this one," I tell her.
Jesus, I'd forgotten what it was like to drive a car like this. We are out of the winding streets of the village and on the main road in what feels like moments and I have flash of where we could go.
"Do you own your new house yet?" I ask her.
"Yeah, just this week," she says.
"Do you have the keys?" I ask her and am not at all surprised when she shakes her head.
"I think it is unlocked though," she says, "the agent said I could just pick them up in the hallway."
I raise an eyebrow.
"I was going to pick them up tonight," she says defensively, pauses. "Or on Thursday with Daniel."
Only Leigh would spend close to a million euros on a house and not even bother to take a look.
"Too busy?" I ask wryly.
She shrugs, turns her head to look out the window and I have a sudden sense of discomfort.
"How much are you still working at the hospital?" I ask her and wish I hadn't when I immediately see the answer written across her face.
She shrugs and crosses her arms.
"I like to work," she says defensively.
"So full-time?" I clarify.
"I'm happy," she says seriously, her eyes on mine and I see that it is true and also that I don't want to dissuade her from her coming here.
So, I smile ruefully at her and keep driving and ignore the fact that Leigh is working seven days a week if it means that two of those days are spent here in Mallow close to me.
We spend an hour, more, wandering around the house and the gardens. Leigh is watching me sideways and her expression brightens at every comment I make, at the beauty of the poplars growing up the drive, at the light streaming through the cracked windows, at the dark wood that has somehow withstood two harsh winters of abandonment and just needs a little love to come good.
At the potential of what could be done.
When Leigh smiles, when she looks happy, my heart breaks just a little.
Leigh's hand accidentally brushes mine and we both jump jerkily. Me at the unexpected feel of her hand touching mine, at the shock of it and her for what reason I don't even know. If she was someone else, anyone else, I would say that she was in love with me.
I know that Mam and Katie both think it. But I am not sure, because Leigh is so completely different in every possible way to the rest of us. She truly could be here no other reason than the thought took her, that Daniel is a challenge, that she wanted to live somewhere so completely removed from her beloved sunny Sydney beaches that she came here to Ireland and then to Mallow instead.
But instead I worry that she doesn't at all feel what I do for her. I want to be bold and just tell her that I am in love with her but I'm afraid she will leave.
Finally, we are back at the car and I turn to her.
"The demonstration please," I tell her.
She frowns and sighs but doesn't try and say no because she has already told me yes.
"Get in," she says unhappily, holding the door open for me.
I feel the slightest amount of trepidation when she uses the touchscreen console and adjusts my seat uncomfortably too far forward, wedging me in and child lock's the doors with a solid thunk.
She is suddenly serious, focused, a reminder of that one time I saw her in surgery.
She leans over the back and takes a notebook from seat and then turns to me.
"Ok," she says, "I'm going to tell you all of the things that are very important for you to do to understand Daniel."
I nod, not understanding all the theatrics.
With that she taps one more button and I jump at the sound of blasting music from speakers, some sort of Russian language folk music, she holds the notebook up to her face, covering all but her mouth.
I can see she is talking and I can hear the occasional half word between notes but the music is so loud, so discordant, so foreign to my ear that I'm straining to understand what she is saying.
Without the context of her facial expressions I can't decipher the topic.
The frustration of the noise and the tightness of the space are suddenly getting to me, too much in here with me.
I instinctively go to open the door and too late remember that she locked them.
Suddenly infuriated when I see that she is still talking, ignoring my panic I pull the notebook roughly from her hands and see a gentle look of understanding on her face.
She reaches out, turns the music off, unlocks the doors and returns my seat back.
I let out a long breath.
"Jesus," I breathe out, seeing the lesson in its entirety.
Leigh, thankfully never someone to need to rub it in and she sits in silence but when I pull up in my driveway she gets out, stands awkwardly in front of her car. Watching me with worried eyes in case I've been offended by her actions.
I take two steps, wrap my arms around her unthinkingly.
"Thank you," I whisper, finding my voice hoarse. "Thank you for everything."
Hey arms tighten around me, her head bending to mine and we stand there for a long minute, me not wanting to let her go, her no doubt too polite to push me away.
"What are you going to do with the field out the back of the house?" I ask her conversationally to keep her right here for another minute.
She shrugs.
"It could be a good spot for a go-kart track," she says and I can't help it, my arms tighten, hold her closer. She grins against the side of my face.
"At least that is what Daniel put there in his lego plans," she adds.
I have to grit my teeth, clench my jaw tightly so that the words, 'I love you', that are boiling up from deep inside don't come out.
Leigh leans back, wondering if something is wrong.
"You are such a fecking idiot," I manage to grate out before hugging her tighter.
I can feel Leigh's confused look over the top of my head but she stands there in my driveway hugging me back and that is all that matters.
"Come in," I tell her, "I've made stew for dinner."
She wavers for a moment until I tug on her hand.
"It's not optional," I tell her.
She grins at me, amused that she is always being told what to do by me.
I'm about to say something that I know I'll regret, because there is a cascade of unstoppable emotion and words building up, a weight of a leaning brick wall on my back.
"Leigh," calls Em and I turn to see her running up the drive, coming from the neighbour's house.
I wave to Anna from across the fence, she smiles at me and at Leigh and I think I really should have her over dinner sometime too. That I should thank her more often for all she does, but I can't help but hate her a little for her two beautiful children and still very much alive husband.
I snap out of it when Em throws herself into Leigh's arms, Leigh rocking back on her heels, obviously not expecting such a warm welcome. I wasn't expecting Em to give it either, after all she hasn't seen Leigh since the day her father died.
"Leigh," Em says, not letting go of Leigh's hand, pulling her up the drive. "Come see, I'm making a model of the solar system, it's like the one I saw on Nina and the Neurons."
Not unlike other times, I have to wonder what on earth I'm going to do with such a precocious almost four-year old.
Here in this town.
So many depressing thoughts that somehow don't have the effect they normally do and I'm smiling at Leigh being dragged inside my house by Em.
By the time dinner is ready, Em has explained what she knows of the universe, Leigh has explained why Pluto is no longer a planet and together they are making a to scale model new model of the solar system, the sun a frozen pea in the kitchen and Neptune a teeny tiny dot on scrap piece of paper sitting at the very end of the driveway.
"Where are the rest of the planets?" I ask them, only seeing four planets in
total.
"They are so small you can't see them," Em tells me, her eyes wide.
Em chatters all through dinner, with absolutely no filter and I think ruefully that I know where she got that from.
"Do you think Daddy is out there?" Em asks Leigh, segueing from a question about if you could count all of the stars in the sky to this one without pause.
I'm about to interrupt, to tell her that we can visit Daddy's grave on the weekend.
"My mother died when I was a little older than you," Leigh tells Em. "I've always been able to feel her with me but I've never been able to work out what that meant."
"Your Mam died?" Em asks, her eyes wide.
My eyes are wide too, that I never knew this either.
"Yes," says Leigh simply.
"Your Da?" she asks.
"No, he didn't die," she says.
"Were you very sad?" she asks.
"Yes, I was very sad," Leigh tells her voice wavering a little at the end.
"Are you still very sad?" Em asks.
"Enough questions, Em," I tell her, finally noticing Leigh's pale face.
"It's ok," Leigh says firmly.
She turns back to Em.
"Yes, sometimes I'm still sad," she tells Em. "I miss her."
"How did she die?" Em asks.
"She was killed in a car accident," Leigh tells her.
"Oh," says Em, "my Da was dying forever, he had cancer in his brain."
She sighs, thinking about this.
"I miss my Da too," she tells Leigh quietly.
There is a trickle of a tear running down my cheek and I know if I say something out loud I'll cry.
Instead I gather the dishes and Leigh glances up, wanting to clean up since I cooked, but I shake my head at her, wanting a few minutes alone and she nods. I kiss Em's head and retreat to the kitchen.
"I never met your Da," Leigh tells Em.
"You didn't?" Em asks with all the incredulity of a small child who can take in the enormity of the solar system but not the fact that Leigh never met Diarmuid.
I hear Em slide off her chair.
"Mam, can I have your phone, I need to show Leigh some pictures of Da," she says.
I nod and Em runs off to get it out of my bag, goes and pulls Leigh to the couch by the hand and proceeds to show her through the album of all the photos I have of Diarmuid on my phone. From childhood all the way through to the ridiculous selfie he took on my phone the day before he died.
A sing-sing quality to her voice as she tells Leigh of each picture, elaborate made-up stories of her Da. I suddenly know what she is doing with my phone every time she looks at it.
I stare at the pile of dishes and think it can wait for an hour, take myself to the couch and sit next to Em who suddenly stops, looks up at me with a worried expression.
Not wanting to make me sad, knowing that she shouldn't talk about Diarmuid in front of me.
I swallow.
"You know," I tell her, "this picture, this is your Da and me in Amsterdam. We were supposed to be going home but we'd got a cheap flight and it was cancelled. We spent the day in the park and watched people playing bike polo."
"What is bike polo?" Em asks.
I smile down at her and tell of the game.
That Diarmuid had been so enamoured by it that he had convinced one of the players to let him have a go. He'd fallen off, scraped a chunk off his knee and undeterred got back on and promptly crashed again.
"Did Da hurt himself?" Em asks.
"Mostly his dignity," I tell her laughing, "and his jeans."
Em scrolls to the next photo and smile to see a drunken Diarmuid and Katie and me, at a pub in Barcelona, the worst Irish bar in town that we had sorely regretted going to. I can clearly remember the expression of Katie's very much sober and annoyed boyfriend of the time taking the photo, if not his name.
"What about this one?" Em asks.
I tell her of walking up the Montserrat, all of us getting horribly sunburnt. Talking well past Em's bedtime, till finally I promise her that we will continue this tomorrow.
Leigh does the washing up whilst I put Em to bed, reading her a story.
"I miss Da too," I tell Em softly as I kiss her goodnight.
"I know," Em says with sleepy gravity.
I huff a short laugh.
"I love you Emily, Bo-Emily," I tell her.
"I love you," she says drowsily.
When I return to Leigh, my kitchen is immaculate, Leigh obviously keeping herself entertained by straightening out the clutter on my bench.
She glances around when I do.
"Sorry," she mutters.
"Thank you," I tell her.
"I should get going," she says but she doesn't make a move.
"I didn't know that your mother died," I tell her.
Leigh shrugs.
"It's not something I talk about much," she says uncomfortably.
"I'm sorry I didn't know," I tell her softly.
Leigh looks back at me, startlement in her blue eyes.
"Do you remember her?" I ask her.
Leigh shrugs, nods.
"I guess," she says.
"Sorry," I say, realising I'm asking questions I have no right to ask.
Leigh smiles, works her jaw, trying to work out what to say.
"It's ok, I'm just not used to talking about my childhood," she says eventually.
I nod.
"I could really use a drink," I tell her eventually.
Leigh smiles sympathetically but says nothing, obviously thinking of her drive home.
"Or a cup of tea?" I ask.
"Love one," she says, sounding relieved.
So, we stand around in the kitchen for an hour or more and haltingly Leigh tells me a small part of her childhood. She asks of Diarmuid and somehow even without a drink in hand I do manage to tell her some small parts of him and as I wave her goodbye I realise I don't feel as bad as I should.
In fact, I don't feel bad at all.
27) The pub
Days and weeks and months flow by, an endless river of time, grey skies punctuated by moonbeams and sunshine. Em is my solace and my joy, but Leigh, Leigh is the flash of gold shine, the unexpected pleasure of occasional happiness, of forgetting how endlessly shit my life can be.
Em and I begin going over Mam's house on Monday afternoons. We colour in and read stories at the kitchen table, close enough to Daniel to listen in but not forcing him to interact with us.
Sometimes he tells us about the house and the work that is being done.
The week that the workmen let him use the digger is possibly that happiest of his life and when I ask Leigh about it she says even she was surprised, she hasn't planned it, wouldn't have thought to because of the noise and the dirt and the people.
We, all four of us, play solitaire, four separate sets going together around the dining table and it is the most like a family we have ever been and I wish that Diarmuid was here to join in.
Then I go on Saturday mornings too, swapping with Mam who comes to my house and she and Em do the kind of normal things a child does with her grandmother, they make pancakes and go to the park and read stories.
I decide to start studying by distance, a ludicrous fine arts degree, one measly subject at a time and Daniel works on his lego and I work on my school work in blissful silence, silence that I haven't been treated to in years. I enjoy these Saturday's more than I thought possible, the quiet industriousness of Daniel's company.
But all that pales in comparison to Thursdays, because on Thursdays I have Leigh.
That one afternoon a week at the pub that neither of us, not once are ever late for, ever miss a moment of. I can't help but think that Leigh who is still holding down her hospital job must often have so many more important calls on her time, that she is still here with Daniel and Mam and me makes no sense at all. That you would never, could never know from her demeanour that there was ever anything else more worthwhile or important than this.