“Rowan,” Sean repeated with a sneer. “What kind of given name is Rowan for a little girl? It’s a family name, not a first name.”
The little girl’s brow furrowed. Quietly she said, “It is a tree—a strong, magical tree.”
“’Tis an Irish surname. It’s for a family, not a little girl,” Sean insisted.
“Sean,” Paddy said, “she’s just a kid. Leave her be.”
Before Paddy could stop her, the little girl stomped forward to Sean’s knee, placing her face not one foot from the old man’s nose; her defiant brown eyes bore down on him. The old man shuddered and slid quickly away from her.
“Rowan is a good name! It’s my name,” she said. “And you—you are not nice!”
Sean sat there for a second, gaping into those piercing mahogany eyes, mouthing a retort that was stuck between his teeth. As he tottered to his feet, Paddy pulled Rowan back into his arms. Sean pursed his lips and silently walked past people sitting at the tables, who were now watching him with great interest. The old man opened the pub door, but before he stepped out into the night, he turned back to the nasty little Yank.
“Rowan is no name for you!” he spat and then tottered outside.
“Yes, it is! It’s witchwood. Strong and magical!” The little girl’s reply was cut short by the slamming door.
Sean stood in the clear, cold air of early evening, flustered. There had been several townspeople seated at the tables, watching him argue with the little girl. They had even seen him slide away from her accu satory gaze. The episode would be all over town in ten minutes.
“Bloody Yank,” he breathed and pulled his old woolen coat tighter around his crooked shoulders, feeling the eighty-three years of his life pressing down on his crackling spine a little more. Glancing up, he watched a mistle thrush flitter in the twilight, racing the night. Indeed, it was late upon its wings. It spiraled twice before disappearing behind the church’s spire.
The sky was clear and the evening star was bright above him in the deep lavender heaven. Though the soft wind was scented of salt and seaweed, the quiet belied a brewing storm to the south. Sean smelled it as a certain earthy scent—a fragrance of plowed fields upon an ocean breeze was not a good thing.
“How long?” he whispered, tasting the wind. “Tomorrow. No, the day after. Two nights you’ll be before you blow in. I’ll tell Paddy tomorrow.”
As he headed home, Sean thought of the nasty little Yank and her defiant eyes. He skipped through all the things he should have said to her as he made his way out of town, but soon it was that his mind filled once again with the gold of the fire, the burst of the sun through his little window, and halos.
“Brendan.”
CHAPTER 3
Garter
Garter. 1. The simplest pattern, created by knitting or purling every row, never mixing the two. 2. Doing the same thing over and over again, making progress in time, but never moving forward in spirit.
—R. Dirane, A Binding Love
Holding the glass before her, Rebecca noted the golden color of the liquid in the dim light. It was fuzzy, and she couldn’t tell if it was her weariness or the cider in her empty stomach that made it so. As she turned to ask Maggie where supper was, she noticed a man to her left who, she was certain, had not been there before. He seemed to be in his late thirties and wore a dark leather coat and a white T-shirt, and his eyes were so black she couldn’t see his pupils. But mostly she looked at his hair. It was for that reason that her mouth was open but nothing came out.
His hair color was neither the deep red-brown of auburn nor the bright orange of a true carrottop; rather it was a rich, velvety red with golden highlights. The loose curls spiraled off his head, twisting below his ears, both of which were pierced. Upon his face was a neatly kept matching moustache and beard that had a very thin stripe of gray to the right of his lips caused by a scar, the tip-top of which Rebecca could see peeping out from beneath his whiskers.
“Becky, this is Fionn.” Rebecca heard Maggie’s voice in the distance.
“Fin?” Rebecca repeated softy.
“Yes, Fionn,” she explained. “You know—Sharon, John, Fionn.”
“Oh!” Rebecca exclaimed as she shook herself from her stupor. “Fionn!”
Fionn was Sharon’s childhood friend—the one she didn’t marry. John was the one she did. Smiling, Rebecca held out her hand. Fionn did not smile. He glanced at her open palm and Rebecca believed she saw his lip curl slightly. Peering down to his left hand, she found that he held something very important to her—namely Rowan.
“One of Sharon’s best friends and all I’m offered is a handshake?” he mumbled, his black eyes staring at her. His expression reminded Rebecca very much of the look in Sharon’s eyes when she was wholly disappointed. Quickly, Rebecca withdrew her hand and glanced over to Maggie.
But it was Rowan who said, “Mama, it’s Fionn.”
“Y-yes, Rowan. Maggie said that,” Rebecca replied, a frown deepening on her face. “You know Fionn?”
“Sharon told me about him. Like she told me about Tom,” Rowan replied.
“What are you doin’ in here?” Fionn asked.
“I beg your pardon?” Rebecca asked.
“You don’t have time to be sittin’ around a pub and drinkin’. You have work to do. Two months of summer you have and a small grant. So small you couldn’t even stop over in Dublin to see your best friend who’s about to pop out her first.”
“Now wait a min—”
“Time to go. The wee one’s tired,” Fionn stated, and, turning around, he deftly moved through the crowd, Rowan in tow.
“That’s my daughter!” Rebecca protested, following Fionn through the pub. She bumped the Southern woman and two of the Spanish men.
“Bye, Becks,” Maggie called after her. “See ya later.”
Rebecca waved as she passed the German couple. By the time Fionn stepped out of the pub, she was on his heels, reaching for Rowan’s free hand. Just when she was closing her palm, a tall man with a brown ponytail walked up to her.
“Becks!” John said with a broad smile, taking Rebecca by both of her hands and kissing her right cheek.
“Hi, John,” Rebecca said, her eyes watching Fionn lead Rowan over to a motorcycle.
“Good to finally see ya in person,” John added. “Got your luggage all packed. Ready to go home?”
Turning toward a very small car parked in front of the pub, John opened the passenger-side door. With a bark, a large brown Labrador retriever barreled out, flying toward Rebecca, who jumped in surprise.
“Trace!” Fionn commanded.
The dog froze.
“Sit.”
The dog sat, its tail wagging furiously as it gazed at Rebecca in warm welcome.
“The dog is Trace,” Fionn said by way of introduction. “John, you take Becky and Trace. Rowan can go with me.”
“No, I’d rather Rowan stayed with me,” Rebecca countered, taking a step in Fionn’s direction.
“With the dog and the luggage, she’ll never fit. Best if she goes with me,” Fionn replied, straddling a large motorcycle and engaging its engine.
“On a motorcycle!” Rebecca exclaimed. Her father had been a fireman and he’d told her so many stories of motorcycle accidents, that he’d left her with a lifelong terror of them.
“Oh, please, Mama!” Rowan pleaded, jumping up and down.
“She’ll never fit in the car,” John confirmed.
“She doesn’t have a helmet,” Rebecca said, the pitch of her voice rising.
Fionn plopped a helmet on Rowan’s head. The little girl giggled.
“I’ll drive slowly,” he said.
“I don’t like motorcycles,” Rebecca said. “They’re not safe.”
“There’s one car on the island, Becky, and that’s it.” Fionn pointed to the small vehicle. “The sky’s as clear as your smile and there’s not a drop falling from it.”
Rebecca scowled.
Fionn cocked his h
ead as he looked at her. “Well, as clear as your smile is in all your pictures with Sharon, anyway. Trust me. Nothin’ bad’s gonna happen.”
“Please, Mama?” Rowan pleaded, the helmet tottering on her head as if she were a bobble-headed doll.
Rebecca sighed. “You’ll drive slow?”
“Like I was pedalin’ on a Sunday afternoon.”
Reluctantly Rebecca nodded.
Fionn slid Rowan into the saddle behind him. “See you at the house,” he called as he pulled away from the curb.
Rowan turned around and waved at her mother. At the end of the street Fionn revved the engine and sped around the corner with a little screech, the tiny red taillight disappearing in a flash.
Rebecca gasped. “He said he’d go slow!” she yelled, her heart speeding up and pounding against her ribs. Suddenly it was all just too much for her—the long day of travel, the whirl of new people, everything going as fast as that motorcycle racing out of sight with her daughter.
“Ah, he’s just playin’.”
“Not with my daughter, he’s not!” Rebecca declared, ready to scream in frustration.
“It’ll be fine,” John said. “It’ll only take a couple of minutes to get you home.”
“It’ll be fine!” Rebecca repeated. “That’s all you people say.”
“Which people?”
“I’m sorry. Sorry. Never mind,” Rebecca said, shaking her head. “I’m just tired.” She peered through the open car door. Her luggage was packed in the backseat, ceiling high.
“Where’s the dog sit?”
“Between us?” John offered with a grin.
Smiling stiffly, Rebecca lowered herself into the car. As soon as she had, Trace jumped in after her, crawling across her knees. She gritted her teeth.
“Come here, Trace,” John called as he slid into the driver’s seat. With effort, he shut the door as the dog wiggled between them.
Rebecca took a deep breath. “Whose dog is it anyway?”
“Fionn’s. He stays with Fionn’s parents—when he stays home at all. Mostly he runs about the island. Usually on the west side.”
Rebecca stared over at the big dog filling the small space between them. “How are you going to shift?” she asked.
“It’s a small island. We don’t go too fast around here. If we did we’d end up in the ocean.”
Panting, Trace turned his wet nose toward Rebecca and licked her cheek. She rolled her eyes and pushed the dog’s muzzle toward John. He just laughed.
As the car pulled away from the curb, Rebecca glanced up to the silhouette of the church’s spire against the night sky. Her mind raced with pictures of Rowan lying in the dark, smeared across a narrow Irish road, the motorcycle’s wheels spinning with a squeak over the crash of waves. As they drove along, she saw low stone walls lining the road like ancient, craggy monuments. They looked sharp and irregular, casting deep crevices of shadow across the fields as the headlights passed.
“What if he has an accident?” she whispered to her reflection on the glass.
“He’s not going to have an accident, Becky. He grew up here with me and Sharon. We skipped school together, missed Mass, got in trouble. We know every rock and blade of grass on this island. Nothing’s going to happen. Look, we’re here.”
A two-story cottage sat to the left, white as a lighthouse. It had a green door and a slate roof and five small green-paned windows that reflected the headlights when John slowed down, turning off the main road with a bump. Rebecca remembered that Sharon had said her rented cottage was adjacent to the owner’s own residence. As the car passed, the little garden of roses near the green door swayed. Slowly, they crept down a gravel lane. Rebecca could see far at the end of the drive a second small white house illuminated by the car’s headlights. Fionn’s motorcycle stood lonely near the blue door, and a thin wisp of smoke flowed from the chimney.
“There’s your house, Becky,” John said.
The car’s wheels ground to a halt on the gravel. Rebecca flung open her door. She was sure she heard Rowan calling desperately from the house. Trace barked, crawling over Rebecca’s lap and tumbling from the car.
“Damn dog,” she hissed, rolling out of her seat. Leaving the car door open, she raced through the dust that hung in the air in the car’s wake, certain that Rowan was calling to her. She burst through the front door.
“Rowan?” she called in panic as she flew through the tiny front room. “Rowan!”
Rounding a corner into the kitchen, she skidded to a stop. Fionn stood frozen by an open oven with a casserole dish in his hands, staring at her. Rowan sat at the kitchen table, eating a cookie and coloring on a blue sheet of paper. Rebecca blinked and cocked her head. Hadn’t she heard Rowan calling for her? Rowan glanced over at her mother.
“Hi, Mama,” she said, taking a bite of the cookie.
“Hi, Rowan,” Rebecca replied quietly, her heart still drumming against her ribs.
“Can she have biscuits before supper? She looked a wee bit hungry, and my mum’s supper here won’t be ready for a couple of minutes.”
“That’s fine,” Rebecca whispered.
Fionn slid the casserole into the oven.
“Becky needs a beer, Fionn,” John suggested as he passed the kitchen, his arms laden with luggage. Behind him, Trace came barrel ing in.
“Trace,” Fionn said.
The dog stopped in its tracks.
“Sit.”
He did.
“A beer,” John repeated, heading back out the door.
“Becky doesn’t like beer, John,” Fionn said. “Remember? That’s what Sharon says. But Becky’s in Ireland now and Ireland is part of the EU just like France and France has the best wine in the world. Look. Here’s a glass of Bordeaux that’s been breathing on the counter, waiting for Becky to arrive.”
Lifting the glass, Fionn walked across the small kitchen. His black eyes reflected the red sparkle of the wine he held out to her. Rebecca gazed from the wine to Fionn to Rowan.
“You sped off—”
“She arrived here safely without you, didn’t she, Becky?”
Fionn’s eyes were like the night sky—black and steady and clear.
“W-well, y-yes,” Rebecca stammered.
“Then no need for a moment, huh? Supper’s in the oven, the fire’s burning, and your covers are turned down. You’re home now, on a small island in the middle of the ocean where everybody knows everybody. No safer place than here.”
“No safer place,” John echoed as he passed the kitchen again, this time with Rebecca’s large black duffel.
“Drink the wine, Becky,” Fionn whispered, placing the glass in her right hand and taking her handbag from her left shoulder.
Slowly Rebecca lifted the glass.
“Relax,” Fionn said as he brushed past her toward the door.
“Mama?”
Rebecca looked over to Rowan.
“I don’t understand him.”
“His accent is very thick. You can ask him to slow down if you can’t—”
“It’s not that. He asked me if I liked biscuits and I told him I don’t, but he was talking about these,” Rowan said quietly, holding up a cookie.
“Oh. Yeah. There are different words for things here. If you don’t understand, just ask.”
“But I did understand and I don’t like biscuits, but he was talking about cookies. How was I supposed to know I didn’t understand?”
“Where you want this?” John asked, holding out a DVD camera and tripod.
“By the sofa’s okay,” she said, turning to look at him. “And thank you, John, for bringing my stuff in.”
“Hey, Trace,” Rowan called. “Want a biscuit?”
The dog stood, trotted to the table, and grabbed the cookie from Rowan’s hand.
“You want a pint, John?” Fionn called.
“That’ll be fine.”
“Beer?” Rebecca asked. “Don’t you have to go back to town?”
“You ne
ed somethin’?” John asked.
“Well—no. You—you aren’t staying in town?”
“We’ll stay here tonight,” said John.
“Here?” Rebecca asked, glancing over to the small living room couch.
“This one,” Fionn said, pointing to Rowan as he handed John the beer from the fridge, “put old Sean Morahan in his place. Didn’t ya now?”
“No!” John exclaimed incredulously.
“Who’s Sean Morahan?” Rebecca asked.
“The meanest man on earth, Mama.”
“Didn’t she just say so, to his face, in front of the entire pub?”
“No!”
“Aye!” Fionn’s eyes gleamed.
“What did he do to you, Rowan?” Rebecca asked.
“He made fun of my name. So I told him he wasn’t nice.”
“Oh, Sean’s harmless. Rowan shot back at him and he didn’t know what to do with himself,” Fionn explained.
John burst out laughing.
“Good for you, standing up for yourself, Rowan,” Rebecca said, brushing her daughter’s cheek. “But I don’t see what’s so funny.”
“Oh, sorry. It’s just that I was terrified of the man when I was small,” John explained.
“If Sean talks to you again, you let me know,” Rebecca said, opening a cupboard, searching for plates.
“He’s harmless, Becky,” Fionn repeated.
“If Sean Morahan didn’t know what to do with himself when he met my daughter,” Rebecca said, glaring at Fionn, “he’ll never know what hit him if he crosses me. Rowan, go wash up, honey. It’ll be time for dinner soon.”
Rowan slipped from her seat and was gone. As Rebecca set the table and silence filled the kitchen, her mind filled with the sight of the red taillight of the motorcycle racing away as Fionn drove off with her daughter. If there was a human trait Rebecca disliked, it was a person saying one thing, then doing another. And as she lifted the sil verware from the drawer and set it out on the table with a loud thump, she thought about how that was precisely what Mr. Fionn had just done to her.
CHAPTER 4
Stocking
Casting Off Page 3