25 Years

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “Now then.” After she’d handed him his coffee, Mrs. D sat in the chair opposite his and consulted a list written out on the back of an envelope. “First things first. Who will be meeting Eileen at the airport? I’ll want to go of course—” Mrs. D didn’t drive “—and I’d thought that after all these years Deirdre would want to go too, but no, everyone’s already making too much of her sister’s visit, Deirdre said to me last night. ‘My sister’s not bloody royalty.’” Mrs. D’s face flushed. “Always has been jealous of her younger sister that one, wouldn’t you think though at forty-eight she’d have grown out of it? Forty-eight.” She shook her head and then, her brow furrowing, she eyed him. “If Deirdre’s forty-eight…how old does that make you then, Kieran?”

  “Forty-six.” Kieran downed half his coffee, his thoughts already moving on to what he needed to do after he’d finished up Mrs. D’s bathroom. It was the second week in December and Clonkill Lodge, the small hotel he owned and operated, was fully booked for the holidays. Between now and Christmas week when the guests would start arriving he’d so many things to do it made his head swim. He drained the rest of his coffee and stood to leave, but Mrs. D raised a finger to stop him.

  “Just a minute, Kieran…I’ve something to show you.” She reached for the brown handbag that, in all the years Kieran had known her, was always at her side, and drew it up on her lap. Head bowed, hands moving frantically, she’d soon accumulated a small pile of paper—receipts, shopping lists, envelopes—on the table in front of her. “Forty-six you say, well you don’t look it and neither does Eileen. It’s the last picture she sent me I’m looking for. I didn’t show you already, did I? She looks lovely. She’d pass for thirty. Of course it was taken from a distance, now where…well, never mind. Have some jam roll.”

  “I’m fine thanks, Mrs. D.” Kieran again stood to leave. “When is it Eileen gets here then?”

  “The day after tomorrow, half past ten. I’ve a hair appointment at eight—Josie’s opening the shop early, she’s good like that. I thought I’d have a little color put in. Kieran, will you eat some jam roll? If you don’t I’ll eat it myself and I don’t need—”

  “I’d be happy to meet her,” he said. He had the van he used to transport guests to and from the airport—which would allow Mrs. D to come along—or there was his Triumph, which might be more in keeping with Eileen’s style although it had seen better days and lately was inclined to be temperamental. He began to slowly back toward the door, although he knew Mrs. D well enough to suspect she’d yet to arrive at the real point of what she had to say to him.

  “I’ll be honest with you.” Mrs. D’s face had turned dreamy. “What I’d really like is to hire one of those big limousines to meet her at the airport. She’d get off the plane and there would be a chauffeur to open her door, with a glass of champagne in his hand—”

  “Don’t forget the red carpet,” Kieran teased, familiar with Mrs. D’s frequent flights of fancy. Twenty-five years later, he could still hear Eileen going on about her mother’s proclivity for kicking everything up to the next level. “If I won a million pounds,” Eileen used to complain, “my ma would be saying, ‘Ah, it’s a pity it wasn’t two million, there’s so much more you could do with that extra million.’”

  “I hear they have limos with hot tubs in them,” he said straight-faced. “That might be nice after her long flight.”

  Mrs. D eyed him dubiously. “Wouldn’t that cost an awful lot though?”

  “Not as much as one with a swimming pool.”

  “You can laugh, Kieran,” Mrs. D said, on to him now, “but Eileen’s used to the best.”

  “So I’ve heard.” A few thousand times. Kieran winked at her and tried again to go back upstairs to finish painting.

  “Now Kieran, one last thing,” Mrs. D said, her tone suggesting that she was finally getting to the point. “I don’t know how to put this any other way than to just spit it out. Eileen has a gentleman friend.”

  “Donald Trump, is it?”

  Mrs. D looked puzzled.

  “The talk around town is that they just got engaged,” he said. “And he’s giving her a Learjet as a wedding present.”

  Mrs. D gave him a long look and then enlightenment dawned. She was not amused. “I wouldn’t be saying this, Kieran, if I didn’t think the world of you, but I don’t want to see you get your heart broken.”

  Kieran scratched the back of his head. “I wouldn’t worry about that, Mrs. D.”

  “Eileen won’t be the same girl you knew when she left Ireland. She’s a woman now, a very successful one. And she may, or may not, be bringing her gentleman friend.”

  “Maybe he’d like to go fishing,” Kieran said. “I could arrange that. Would he be staying here, do you suppose? I could put him up at the lodge, if needs be.”

  “Yes, well…” Mrs. Doyle’s thoughts seemed to have moved on. “I just wondered…well, you’re not still carrying a torch for her, are you?”

  “I had been,” Kieran said. “But it was an awful nuisance clutched between my teeth.”

  “This is no laughing matter, Kieran.”

  Kieran walked across the kitchen, caught her face in his hands and kissed her forehead. “That was twenty-five years ago, Mrs. D. No one carries a torch for twenty-five years.”

  She peered into his eyes. “Are you sure about that, Kieran?”

  “We’ve both moved on, Mrs. D.” An understatement, if he’d ever heard one. Between stewing over his family and constant money problems about the lodge, the idea that, after all these years, he’d still have a crush on Eileen Doyle seemed a bit of a joke. He, himself, hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since his daughter announced that she and her husband were thinking of starting a new life for themselves and the baby in the States. A new life. Taking away his granddaughter even though he could hardly start the day without stopping in to see whether she’d grown another new tooth, brilliant child that she was, or whether she’d gurgle and coo in the way he knew was meant just for him. “Besides,” he added, “I’d say Eileen’s a little out of my league now.”

  “She is that,” Mrs. D agreed. “Well, you’ve certainly set my mind at ease, Kieran.”

  With that, he returned to his painting—and found himself thinking about Eileen. Not that he’d suppose though that the Eileen he’d been reading about in the paper would have much in common with the Eileen he’d once kissed under a sky full of fireworks one long ago evening, or the Eileen who had promised to love him till salmon walked in the street or something like that. Poetry it was. He couldn’t remember who wrote it, but back then they’d both known all the words.

  He wondered if the Eileen about to make her much belated trip still remembered that line. This Eileen had a very important job as executive vice president of something or other and she was always jetting off to Hawaii or Mexico or rubbing shoulders with movie stars in posh restaurants and turning down marriage proposals from doctors and lawyers and millionaire businessmen with yachts as big as houses.

  This Eileen had all the celebrity of a rock star about her and she had no bigger fan than his daughter, Tara. In a place as small as Clonkill, people were ravenous for a bit of news and the village had been on the verge of starvation until Eileen began sending letters home about her brilliant new life. In fact without Eileen’s chronicles from America, he often thought, the local paper would have little to fill the pages.

  Tara, who had every one of Eileen’s Letters from America carefully pasted into a scrapbook, could talk at length about the gown Eileen had worn to this fancy affair, or the food she’d dined on at that. All harmless enough, he supposed, but he was of a mind that his daughter’s interest in uprooting her family had its roots in Eileen’s glowing accounts from abroad.

  He shifted the ladder and rearranged the newspapers, his mind on all the bits and pieces he’d heard about Eileen over the years— either directly from her mother, or indirectly from the news Mrs. D fed to the local paper.

  “She’s done
very well for herself, Eileen has,” Mrs. D would say to anyone who’d listen. “Unlike her sister. Very well indeed. I can’t say I wouldn’t like to have seen her settle down and have children, but, to be honest with you, I doubt she’s ever met a man who was good enough for her.” And if it happened to be him she was talking to, she’d pat his arm and say, “You’re the exception of course, Kieran, but all of that was long ago. Before she knew what she wanted out of life.”

  Kieran stroked the brush across the wall, dipped it back into the paint can and, deep in thought, sent a cascade of eggshell white splattering to the floor beneath the ladder. He glanced down to make sure nothing had fallen on Mrs. D’s pale blue tiles and there, as though he’d summoned it, was Eileen’s picture. Smiling up at him with a blob of paint on her nose.

  EILEEN DOYLE, in the full bloom of underachievement, sat with her elbows on the desk, absentmindedly chewing the nail on her right index finger as she stared blankly at the muted gray padded walls of her office cubicle and tried not to obsess about what her boss and the company president were talking about behind closed doors.

  Eileen had a lot on her mind these days. First off, she was going to be fired—all the signs pointed to it. Yesterday Brandi, her girl boss hadn’t even said good morning; this afternoon she’d snapped at Eileen for some trivial thing. The signs were there. And, as if that that alone weren’t enough to obsess about, there was the trip home, lumbering down the track toward her like a runaway train. The closer it got the more she didn’t want to go.

  Her mother’s last few letters had been full of the plans already underway for the visit, an itinerary fit for a visiting dignitary. “We all know what you’re used to these days, Eilie,” her mother had written, “but we’re out to show you auld Ireland can put out the red carpet when the occasion calls for it. And, not to push, but you wouldn’t be thinking of bringing your gentleman friend, would you? There’d be plenty of room and we’d all love to meet him. I was saying to Kieran that this is a man used to the best and Kieran said they could put him up at the guest house. It’s quite nice with all the work Kieran’s been doing on it. Only thing is Kieran needs to know soon on account of guests coming for the Christmas holidays. So let me know, Eilie.”

  Eileen had considered writing back to say she would have to cancel the trip due to major surgery that couldn’t be postponed.

  Gentleman friend. She hadn’t slept well lately. Two o’clock this morning and she’s standing in her nightgown microwaving a box of Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese. In the wee hours, lonely and wishing to God you had someone to hold you, macaroni and cheese could seem a whole lot like love.

  Spooning noodles into her mouth and telling herself that she could have, should have, swallowed her pride and married Kieran O’Malley twenty-five years ago even though she’d caught him kissing Libby Bartlett who used to be her very best friend.

  Kieran had ended up marrying Libby right after Eileen left for America. Eileen’s mother had included a clip from the newspaper that provided all the details: the pale pink silk of the bridesmaid dresses, the bouquets of matching rosebuds, the honeymoon in Majorca. All of it exactly what she’d planned for her own wedding to Kieran. Libby, of course, was quite familiar with the details since she was supposed to have been Eileen’s maid-of-honor.

  Kieran used to recite poetry to her, promising to love her until the ocean dried up, or something. And she would respond “I’ll love you till the salmon swim in the street.” Although she could never quite remember whether it was supposed to be sing or swim and she wasn’t sure that Kieran had his bit right, either. It was the year they’d studied Auden in school. The same year she started suspecting something was going on with him and Libby.

  For the longest time, she’d hated both of them. How could she not? His defection had not only hurt her terribly, it left her with doubts about her appeal to men. Discouraged her from even looking another man in the eye. The shame of it had reached across the ocean, kept her awake nights. Reduced, she was. Devalued. While they were blithely going on with their lives—a baby on the way, a new business and, of course, each other—she was living in a country that didn’t feel at all like home, pinching pennies, going off to one dead-end job after another, going out with men who had as little interest in her as she did in them. Getting older. Drying up. It wasn’t fair.

  For years, she’d created scenarios of their demise. Hatred became familiar, comforting almost in its dependability. And then Libby had died and the shock was such that all the hate transformed into a gnawing guilt that somehow she, Eileen, had made it happen. As if all of her poisonous darts of anger and resentment had finally hit their mark. She’d written numerous letters to Kieran pouring out her guilt and remorse—never sent any of them. More years passed and, in time, the guilt faded too. Now, mostly, she just had a lot of unanswered questions.

  Everything happens for a reason, her mother was always saying. Okay, but if that were true, if there was some grand design, what was the reason behind having her go off to America? Of having Kieran marry Libby instead of her? Of Libby dying so young? And the biggest puzzle of all. What, when you got right down to it, was the reason for Eileen Doyle in the first place?

  A phone ringing in the next cubicle snapped her from her reverie, and back into the present moment. She was going to be fired. What else would her boss be talking to the company president about?

  If she held her breath and inclined her head just so, she could sometimes catch snatches of conversation going on behind the doors of the big office. Her cubicle was just outside, so humiliatingly close to the group of clerical cubicles that people who didn’t know she was an administrative assistant—and not just a secretary—were always poking their heads in to inquire as to the whereabouts of her boss, or to leave a message for her boss, or to ask whether her boss would be free next Tuesday or whatever. One time this arrogant jerk had actually asked if she’d get coffee. The nerve. She’d just pointed to her name plate on the cubicle wall and suggested he ask the clerical staff.

  Ah jeez, life wasn’t fair was it? What had she done to deserve this crock? No man, no children and a new boss young enough to be her daughter. Brandi, that was the girl’s name. Brandi. And she looked exactly the way you’d expect a Brandi to look. Perky little Crayola-colored suits, perky little frosted blond do and a perky little voice. “Peachy,” Brandi was always saying. “Peachy keen.”

  What was Brandi saying about her in there? Had Eileen heard her name mentioned? Eileen’s too old, that’s what Brandi was saying as the company president nodded agreement. She’s not…hip. She’s difficult to work with. She has this chip on her shoulder. She’s not a team player. And I don’t like her hair. Let’s fire her.

  The queasy bubble was growing into something larger. Eileen heard a chair move; maybe the meeting was over. She took her elbows off the desk and opened the Goals and Objectives file on her computer. Brandi was big on Goals and Objectives. Eileen’s goal had been to have Brandi’s job with the objective being to make enough money to move out of the crappy apartment she’d been renting for nearly ten years.

  Suddenly, the door to Brandi’s office opened and Eileen got very absorbed with the document on the screen. A moment later, Brandi stuck her head around Eileen’s cubicle.

  “I’m gone for the rest of the day, Eileen,” she said. “My daughter has a ballet recital.” Smiling, Brandi jiggled her red canvas briefcase, fat with important papers. “After that I’ll be catching up on a little reading. I just wanted to say, have a nice vacation.” She smiled. “Where is it you’re going?”

  Eileen returned the smile. “Hawaii,” she replied without missing a beat. It sounded more exciting than going back home to Ireland and besides, if she’d said Ireland it was bound to lead to questions about how long it had been since she was last there and why it had been so long and she could hardly explain that to herself let alone her girl boss. “Honolulu,” she added for good measure.

  “Wow…” Brandi seemed momentarily
at a loss for words. “I thought you were going… Well, cool. Good for you. Gonna have some fun, huh?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “D’you get a cute bikini?”

  “Haven’t got around to that yet,” Eileen said. And I never will, she thought.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll have a blast.” Brandi waved her fingers. “Happy holidays.”

  Hours later, the phone rang Eileen from sleep.

  “Eileen,” her mother said as though she were calling from across the street, “I’ve had a good talk with Kieran about not getting his hopes up…”

  “Huh?” Groggily, Eileen raised herself on one elbow. After all these years, her mother hadn’t quite mastered the time difference between California and Ireland. “What about Kieran’s hopes?”

  “Well…you know, he was in love with you and—”

  “For God’s sake Mom.”

  “Don’t swear, Eileen. I just wanted to say I think he’s fine, I really do, so if you want to bring your gentleman friend, well I don’t think you’d be ruffling any feathers.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “TRY TO TAKE THIS like a man, Kieran,” Eileen’s older sister Deirdre said when he walked into the kitchen of the lodge the day before Eileen’s arrival, “but Madame may or may not be bringing a gentleman friend as part of her entourage. Should she do so, I’ve ordered a case of whiskey in the event you’ll need to drown your sorrows and if that’s not enough there’s ammunition and guns—”

  “I’ve already had a version of this talk with your mother,” Kieran said, amused by Deirdre’s sarcasm despite the black mood she’d been in ever since it was learned that Eileen would be coming home for a visit. It must be a woman thing, he decided, this idea of undying love. Nothing would make the lot of them happier than to have him come charging down River Street on a big white horse and whisk Eileen off into the sunset. Well, they’d want a decent wedding first, but then it would be nothing but grand passion till the cows came home.