No Way to Say Goodbye

by Anna McPartlin

  “And do you know what else?” she asked.

  “I can’t wait,” Penny responded.

  “I had a late-night caller.”

  “A late-night caller?”

  Mary nodded.

  “Go on.”

  “Sam.”

  “What did he want?” The warmth left Penny’s voice so Mary decided against confiding in her.

  “He thought I was being burgled.”

  “What a hero!”

  Mary changed the subject. “You really need to see a dentist.”

  “What am I like, Mary?” Penny made a face, exposing the gap.

  Mary smiled but didn’t respond – the question had been rhetorical, she knew.

  After breakfast they sat out on Penny’s patio, each clasping her coffee mug for warmth.

  “I forgot Ben’s anniversary,” Penny admitted, gazing up at the light blue sky.

  “It doesn’t matter. You had a lot to deal with.” The anniversary had been weeks before and it hadn’t occurred to Mary to be annoyed that her best friend had forgotten it. Penny had enough problems of her own.

  “It does matter. I’m really sorry.”

  Mary nodded. “Sam left flowers.” She hadn’t intended to mention him again that morning – it had just slipped out.

  “You’re joking,” Penny exclaimed, in wonderment. “How do you know? Did he leave a card?”

  “No. Cassie Boxer saw him. She told Rita Sullivan Flowers who mentioned it to Jessie after Mass a week after he came here.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “I know you don’t like him, but I reckon I was wrong about him.”

  “It doesn’t matter what any of us think,” Penny said, eyeing her friend. “He’s just passing through. This time next year he’ll be a memory, like the Burkenheffs.”

  “The Brinkerhoffs,” Mary corrected her.

  “My point exactly,” Penny said, smiling, “and in the meantime I hope he and Flory are very happy together.”

  By this time Mary had half forgotten his little indiscretion. What the…? She returned Penny’s smile, then changed the subject again, in her get-ready-for-gossip voice: “You’ll never guess what I heard last night.”

  “What?” Penny asked, gripped by the prospect of scandal.

  “Bridget the Bike and her husband have split up.” This was met with silence. “Someone told her he’d fathered that child in Sneem.”

  Penny inhaled sharply.

  “I know,” said Mary.

  “Bridget Browne. Oh, dear God!”

  “Apparently she discovered the truth weeks ago. They’ve been trying to work it out but…” Mary was shaking her head. “After all this time I wonder how she found out?”

  “Well, the whole town’s talking about it,” Penny said.

  “Yeah – but I wonder if it’s really true?” Mary pondered.

  “Of course it is,” Penny said, betraying a little panic. “You think it’s not?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time a rumour was unfounded.”

  “Well, she’s left him, so it must be true.”

  “Maybe. Still, I feel sorry for her. She sent me a lovely card when Ben died.”

  Penny wasn’t ready to admit her part in the dissolution of the Brownes’ marriage so, despite the emergence of guilt, she managed a smile and inquired whether or not her friend wanted more coffee.

  Later Penny was sitting in her dentist’s with a gap and a serious hangover. While she flicked through ancient magazines, she promised herself that she wouldn’t mix her drinks any more. It just wasn’t worth it. When she looked up, the woman opposite smiled. She smiled back, conscious of the gaping hole in her mouth.

  “Cap?” the woman asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hmm. I have false teeth.” She loosened them in her mouth to demonstrate.

  “Oh!”

  “Eating steak’s a pain in the face.”

  “Right.”

  “I miss them all the same.”

  “Right,” Penny said again, not sure whether the woman was referring to steak or her teeth.

  The nurse called the steak-deprived woman in for consultation, leaving Penny alone. This time she picked up a celebrity gossip magazine that was normally not to her taste. She stared at the singer Mia Johnson crying on the front page. She read the article with shaking hands – and not just because she was hung-over: in that picture, the ever-elusive Sam Sullivan was standing behind Mia. She thought about bolting but the gap in her gob forbade anything so radical.

  Once her tooth was fixed, she drove straight home and went online. Who is this man? At last she had found a story worth reporting.

  Saying goodbye to his kids was always hard but this time Ivan didn’t experience the usual trauma. This time he had someone standing by him as he waved to them. Sienna had come to mean something to him. It had been just a matter of weeks, she was a bit younger and those around him, except Mary, felt he was too vulnerable to be serious but they were wrong: he had never felt stronger. He put his arm around Sienna as he watched his children disappear and she snuggled in tight.

  “They’re nice kids,” she said.

  “They are, even if they were little bastards to you,” he said. Chris had practically ignored her and Justine had followed his lead, and when they weren’t ignoring her they were either staring at her suspiciously or replying to her attempts at communication sulkily or sarcastically.

  “They’ll get used to me,” she said, laughing.

  “They have plenty of time,” he ventured.

  “Yeah.”

  Ivan sniffed a happy sniff and they made their way to the car park.

  16. Digging for digging’s sake

  It had been two weeks since the kiss that had never happened. In that time Mary and Sam had bumped into one another and behaved politely, embarrassed and yet maintaining the façade of normality. This polite distance was annoying to both parties who, although they were unwilling to admit to feelings beyond friendship, missed each other. Sam was particularly freaked and for many reasons, the first being his near-inability to control the impulse to kiss Mary. What the hell was that all about? Not to mention his suffocating jealousy of Denis. So she slept with the guy – big deal. Her sex life, now revealed, had been a shock. Ivan had painted her as some sort of recluse and all the while she’d been boffing some travelling musician. People never cease to amaze. He worried that he was attaching feelings to her in a bid to escape from himself. A new relationship was not advisable within the first year of rehab. I’ve got enough to deal with.

  But there was something else – something he wouldn’t admit to. It was ego-related. Mary didn’t pay attention to him in the way other women did. Sam often observed them looking at him. It was difficult not to, they made it so obvious. Some just stared and giggled or raised their voices in an attempt to gain his attention. Others grabbed at him, patting his ass while making suggestions into his ear, usually when they were drunk and at their least attractive. Other guys envied the effect he had on women, but Sam was bored with it. As with many men, for him the best part of an initial attraction was the hunt, but he’d had no need to exert himself since his late teens. It was rare that he wasn’t the most beautiful man in the room and women were not ashamed to let him know of their interest.

  He wasn’t stupid enough to believe they were interested in him as a person. He had long ago come to terms with the fact that most women were far more interested in his looks than in anything he had to say. Sam was one of the few men on earth who could identify with a Playboy model. Of course, Mia hadn’t been like most of the women who had crossed his path. She had seen past his face and loved him, but she didn’t know him, not like Mary. But how the hell could Mary know me? And he knew her. I just don’t know why.

  After they had spent two weeks pussyfooting around one another, he was relieved when she asked him to meet her for dinner. He agreed straight away.

  Mary arrived at the restaurant early. She was a stickler f
or punctuality, always overestimating how long it would take her to get from one place to another. After years of arriving between ten and twenty minutes early, she had learned to ensure that she always carried reading material. She ordered a glass of house red from Roni Shea, who was desperate to talk about the Browne break-up.

  “So you’ve heard nothing?” she said, eyeing Mary while tapping her pencil against her order book in a slightly menacing fashion.

  “No more than you.”

  “It’s amazing – I mean, the child is six months old. You’d think she would have found out sooner,” she pointed out astutely.

  “Well, maybe it was the girl – what’s her name?”

  “Tracy Whelan – and, no, it definitely wasn’t Tracy. Bridget attacked her after Mass on Sunday and gave her a black eye, and Lisa Harmon says she knocked out a front tooth.” She was nodding animatedly, but speaking in a hushed tone.

  “Ah, well,” said Mary, afraid that Sam would catch her gossiping and wanting to end the conversation.

  “It all happened in Sneem. The parish priest had to pull them apart. Apparently Tracy Whelan gave as good as she got. Of course, it’s sad for the little one.” Roni’s voice softened, as did her eyes.

  “Yeah,” Mary agreed, “the poor child.”

  Suddenly Roni became awkward and businesslike, as though she’d just remembered Mary had lost her own child. She reddened and made her escape to fetch Mary’s wine. Just then the door opened and Sam entered, making an immediate impression on the girl behind the counter. Mary’s head was in her book. The girl blushed and stuttered a welcome. He pointed towards Mary to suggest he’d found his date. The girl seemed startled – as though it was impossible to imagine the living embodiment of Barbie’s Ken eating with Mary of the Sorrows.

  When he arrived at their table, Mary put down her book and smiled. He didn’t lean in for a kiss and she hadn’t expected him to. To an observer they would have seemed easy together, but after a glass of wine Mary was still not relaxed. She was glad that Sam had agreed to meet her but it soon became apparent that he was as tense as she was.

  After her initial humiliation, she had come to realize it had actually been a good thing that Denis had arrived into her kitchen when he did. If he had not she would have jumped the man whose hand had electrified hers and whose close proximity had set some sort of fire in her – and that would have been bad, because she wasn’t blind. During the time Sam had lived in her small town Mary had noticed the effect he had on women and she didn’t want him to mistake her for another who would fall willingly at his feet. She wanted to know him because he was more than pretty. His eyes betrayed a troubled soul and possibly a fractured heart. Broken herself, she had the capacity to see it in others, despite their attempts to hide it. She was drawn to damaged souls like a moth to a flame. She wanted to help him. She didn’t know how or why or even if she could, but something inside her told her to try. She also knew he wouldn’t be around for much longer and that their time together would be short. Friendship had to be enough.

  “I’m glad you called,” he said, while he studied the menu.

  “I’m thrilled you came. Besides, I wanted to apologize.”

  “You have nothing to be sorry for. I’m the one who invaded your space.”

  “Space invader,” she mumbled, and laughed nervously at her own joke.

  “That wasn’t funny,” he said, but his eyes gave him away.

  “Frig off !”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  “Well, I know what knickers are but what in the hell is a frig?”

  “It’s a replacement word for ‘fuck’.”

  “Why not just say what you mean?”

  “Well, I used to, until Nora Donnelly asked my three-year-old if he wanted an Ice Pop and he told her to go fuck herself.”

  He laughed and she laughed with him.

  “I stopped swearing then.”

  For a minute or two they sat in silence over the menus. “You say, ‘Are you kidding me?’ at least once a day,” Mary told him, out of nowhere.

  “I do?”

  “Yip.”

  “Does it bug you?” He grinned.

  “A little bit.”

  He laughed. “I’ll do my best to correct that.”

  “Don’t. Nobody likes perfect.”

  They laughed together and any remaining ice thawed. He turned to look for a waitress, who appeared within a second at his side.

  Later, over dessert, they talked about movies. Sam wasn’t really into cinema but it was something to talk about that deflected from his misguided past.

  “Robert and I saw St Elmo’s Fire eight times.” They had planned to move to America based on their love affair with that film.

  Sam was amused. “You were going to move to the States because of one movie?”

  “Well, that and a photography course in NYU.” She sighed. “It would have been good.”

  “You could still do it.”

  “Yeah, right,” she scoffed. “I’d fit in beautifully.”

  “You would.”

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  “And I was ignoring your sarcasm.”

  “What about you? Why didn’t you follow your dream?” she asked.

  “How do you know I didn’t?” he asked.

  “Do you play guitar for a living?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then…”

  “You’re so sure that’s what I wanted?”

  “I am.”

  They were quiet for a moment. Then Mary asked, “Sam. What did you do?”

  “I told you I was in management.”

  “Management of what?”

  “Management of people.”

  “OK, don’t tell me. But, whether you like it or not, you can’t remain a mystery for ever.”

  “Just give me some time,” he said.

  Their night ended on her wall. They sat looking out onto a low tide of black water lit by sparse street-lights and uninhabited stranded boats.

  “I’ve made so many mistakes,” Sam said, taking Mary by surprise.

  “We all make mistakes.”

  “Not like me.”

  “We all make mistakes,” she repeated.

  He said nothing.

  “Are you free tomorrow?” she asked.

  “For what?”

  “If you can be mysterious, so can I.”

  *

  Penny had spent two weeks locked indoors. She was working on her own assignments, picking up the slack from the Cork correspondent and investing the rest of her time on personal research. She had told Mary she wouldn’t be around for a few weeks and Mary didn’t question it – after all, she was often busy. All the same, her friend must have wondered what kept her off the phone. No matter how busy Penny had been before, she’d always made time for a quick chat, but Penny knew that, over the past while, she and her best pal had been drifting. This was her own fault – after Adam had left she had pushed Mary away. She wasn’t sure why and she missed her but sometimes, despite the loneliness, it was easier to be alone. In those two weeks she spent more time working than drinking, managing to hand in her assignments on time and with little need for correction.

  Each evening she would sit at her computer on Google. It was incredible how many times Sam’s name came up. It was easy to find out he was in A&R. It was easy to trace the companies he’d worked for, and to find out how many famous acts he’d discovered. The relationship he had with Mia was not so simple to determine. Penny knew he had discovered and groomed her, but that picture suggested there had been more to it. But Google wasn’t telling. Mia’s relationship with Sam had never been made public so Penny was forced to dig a little deeper.

  She started at the beginning. She spoke to Dave, the songwriter in Sam’s second band Limbs, and he filled her in on Sam’s arrogance and his propensity for violence. He spilled his bitterness, deriding Sam’s contempt for the band’s direction. Penny would later
quote him in her article and yet, for the sake of credibility, she chose not to mention that Dave Lindman, formerly of Limbs, was working as a distributor for a large toy company, never having made it in the music business.

  In something approaching a miracle, Sophia Sheffer picked up the phone at the first ring. Since she’d lost her record deal at the hands of a vindictive Sam, she had fallen on hard times. However, she was slowly recovering and recently had scored a hit with The Rocky Horror Show on Broadway. She laid the blame for her failure as a recording artist at Sam’s feet. She could have recovered her sales, given the chance – at least that was what she believed. That she hadn’t been able to get another record deal since she’d been dropped or write any good new material to catch the eye of a hit-making producer was glossed over. Instead Sophia was determined that Penny would paint her as Sam Sullivan’s unfortunate victim. After all, she had left him for a promising record deal and as soon as he became head of A&R at her company she had been dropped. It was an easy link to make, although further research revealed that Sophia was only one of ten acts dumped that year, and of those acts she had achieved the second lowest sales. Penny spoke to Joe Merrigan, Sam’s first A&R boss, who gave her his daughter Frankie’s phone number. They both made compelling interviewees, Joe’s disgust at his right-hand man’s defection and Frankie’s heartbreak still evident after so many years. The obviously fragile-minded woman’s attempt on her own life would make for gripping reading.

  After much finagling Penny managed to speak to Leland on the pretext of having information about Sam that he would find interesting.

  As it turned out it was Leland who gave away Sam’s relationship with Mia but only after Penny took a calculated risk. “I think he’d really like to go back,” she lied.

  “I wouldn’t have that junkie back if he was the last A&R guy left with ears,” Leland drawled. Of course he didn’t mean it. Leland would have taken Sam back in an instant even though he hated the asshole: Leland knew that money talked and a guy like Sam, as fucked up as he was, was money in the bank.