Good Eggs

by Rebecca Hardiman

  “Publicly?”

  “We can have it handled quietly but I can’t promise it won’t get around.”

  Millie buries her face in her hands, once one of her better features, now twin claws road-mapped in thick, wormy veins. Dainty, her Peter called them, ladylike.

  Her son sighs, knocks on the table gently with his right fist, then rubs his pate to and fro, his most obvious gesture of high stress.

  “They’re willing to come to an agreement… but there are some conditions.”

  “Anything.”

  “You’ll have to admit to the wrongdoing, apologize to Donnelly. And show in good faith that you’re trying to overcome your problem.”

  “Yes, yes, I can do that.”

  “You’ve got to stop this. You understand, Mum? This. Must. Stop.”

  Millie lets her head fall, with enormous relief, into her hands.

  “What would I do without you?”

  “There’s one more thing.” He coughs. “We’re going to have to set up a home aide to come into Margate.”

  “A what?”

  “Someone who pops in, a companion—”

  “Into the house?”

  “No, into the horse stable. Yes, into the house. Jesus. The alternative is to face the charges in court and take your chances. And since they have actual footage of you tucking Donnelly’s knickknacks into your bag, I don’t much like your chances.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that, Kevin. A stranger in my own home?”

  “Just a few times a week. Twenty hours.”

  “Twenty hours!”

  “It’s a three-month probation period, starting right away, as soon as we can find someone—Mick’s sister does some sort of recruiting, she might be able to help on that front. If you fulfill your end, the charges will quietly go away.”

  “I don’t suppose that’s negotiable?”

  “That is the negotiation, Mum. You’ve committed a crime. You have no leverage here.”

  “I don’t mind the apology bit, that’s fair enough. But the companion…”

  “Better than the alternative.”

  Millie bends to collect her spoils and slowly lines them up on the table, one after the other, a menagerie of ridiculous items she neither wants nor needs. If anything, she considers herself antimaterialistic. There’s only a handful of possessions on this earth she gives a toss about—the long-ago photo of Kevin that Peter had first shown her, the missalette from Baby Maureen’s funeral, Peter’s engagement ring, an heirloom emerald-cut emerald flanked by diamonds and worth a pretty penny, as a matter of fact.

  “Shall I have a word with Sergeant O’Connor then?” says Kevin.

  “Alright,” she says, “yes, okay. We can get that all sorted when I’m back from America.”

  “No, Mum,” Kevin says, looking away. “I’m afraid America will have to be postponed.”

  5

  The only creatures to greet Kevin as he pushes open his front door and sweeps into the cluttered front hall—mucky shoes, an abandoned bowl of Corn Flakes, fuck’s sake!—are Grace’s two tabbies, Beckett and Cat, neither of whom much like him. They meow and brush competitively, incessantly, against Kevin’s trousers. He sighs: more living things need him, and so soon. Aideen has failed to feed the cats. Aideen has also failed to answer her mobile, which he’s tried three times prior to ensconcing his miraculously mute mother back in Margate, only to get Aideen’s rude voice mail: “It’s me. You know what to do.” Beep. On the third call, Kevin had said, “And you know what to do.” He got zero satisfaction from tapping the “end” button on his mobile violently. You can’t even slam down a phone anymore. He envisions his daughter upstairs sulking right now, obliviously plugged into her laptop, that talentless silly-boy drivel blasting her fragile eardrums.

  Kevin bends to pet Beckett and the cat nips his hand. He swats at the little brute as it scampers away, then calls out, “Aideen, Nuala, Ciaran!” His ceilings are at least fourteen feet tall and every room is cavernous. In order to be heard at the Gogartys’, you must scream. He has, it occurs to him, the very thing he always vowed not to: a household of screamers.

  Kevin contemplates, with mounting tension, all that he must do in the coming hours—update Grace on Mum’s latest dip into petty theft, though she’s in Dubai, which means it’s probably next Wednesday there; ring up Mick for a line on finding a caretaker; wrap the growing mountain of over-the-top Christmas presents amid the current family goatfuck; and get some greens down his children’s gullets. One of the only exceptions to Grace’s generally relaxed parenting philosophy is an insistence on the children’s high and varied vegetable consumption. Which is fair enough. Born and raised in England, Grace was the loving, scholarly, eldest of five children living with their indefatigable single mother (dad fucked off to a married-but-separated bankruptcy lawyer in the next estate). Theirs was a junk-food household in which crisps stood in for carrots and the thought of eating meat prepared in any way other than fried was scandalous (even the bread was fried). Watching years of her mum in the kitchen and then out of it, juggling a patchwork of low-wage jobs, fueled Grace’s drive; a career, she saw, was paramount.

  The first time Kevin met his future mother-in-law, in fact, she was trying to press a plate of chips and sausage on him. It was late for Grace’s mum, but not for Kevin and Grace, just in after a few pints at her local in Surrey. They were on break from college in England where they’d met, and had hours of night to go. Grace had come up from behind her mum in the kitchen and wrapped her arms around her and remained like that. As if familial affection wasn’t a quick peck or a clap on the back or an almost embarrassing thing to be got through. It was natural as breathing and something to linger on. They were all like that, the whole lot of them. Grace told her mum not to mind Kevin one bit because her boyfriend—that was the first time she’d said it—was more than capable of making his own bloody food. “Am I?” he’d said, pulling a panicked face. His mother-in-law had laughed, she was an easy laugher, like her daughter. What an excellent quality, he’d thought, a direct and effortless access to joy. Later, Grace had whisked her brothers and sisters off to bed and brought him into the lounge and shut the door and put on a film—Weekend at Bernie’s—though they never got past the first scene. It became code. You want to watch Weekend at Bernie’s?

  Now Kevin lumbers into the kitchen and pours a generous glass of Malbec into the last clean receptacle available, a plastic dinosaur sippy cup still somehow in rotation. Gradually he becomes aware of a dim, faraway noise, a thudding, like a plank of wood being knocked repeatedly. Kevin heads toward the back of the house where the pounding grows louder. It’s Nuala standing outside thrashing her fists against the back door. As he unlocks it, he starts in with “I told you lot to stop—”

  “Daddy!” she screams, lunging into his arms. She’s frigid; her nose is alcoholic-red and streaming. She simultaneously cries and talks; she is a mess of blubbering wet.

  “Slow down, pet, hang on,” he says, patting her back and ushering her into the house. “Take it easy.” How many women, he wonders, must he comfort in one day?

  But then, here’s his Nuala, the most cheerful and confident of his crew, clinging to him just as she used to, like they all used to. So he holds her. She feels insubstantial, so light, in his arms. He forgets how young and innocent, how tiny and unworldly, how vulnerable his children are, and then he thinks: what kind of a total gobshite forgets this? Her shampoo smells disturbingly of manufactured coconut and he wonders about its toxicity. He kisses Nuala’s head once and then again.

  “Oh my God, I was outside forever,” she squeaks between spastic gulps of air. Kevin brings her through to the kitchen, gets out the cocoa and the sugar and puts milk on the boil.

  “Poor darling,” he says. “How did you ever manage to lock yourself out?”

  “Aideen did it!”

  Kevin slaps the countertop with his palm. Which hurts.

  “And she came at me with the fire poker,�
� says Nuala. “She actually tried to burn me.”

  “Bloody hell! You shouldn’t have to…” He squeezes her shoulder. “Where’s Ciaran?”

  “Neighbors’.”

  He exhales. “And where is Aideen now?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, “and I don’t care.”

  The need to avenge his victimized daughter—nearly burnt and then put out of the house in arctic weather!—coupled with the need to hunt down her assailant, to project blame for this chaos onto his clever, complicated, perpetually miserable teen is so powerful, it practically fells him on his ass. He vaults up the staircase taking two, three, steps at a time with his lean runner’s legs and bounds toward her door, strictly verboten to all Gogartys without a ridiculous series of knocks and gentle requests for permission to enter.

  Tonight, he charges in. The room is an accurate representation of his daughter’s age or state of mind or both. Other than a shrine to Clean-Cut in pristine condition, disorder reigns. Cluttering the floor: a stick of deodorant fuzzy with carpet fibers, various inside-out denims and socks, a Dunnes Stores shopping bag, from which spills a handful of bras acquired during a recent mother/daughter shopping venture, which, as so many recent outings tend to do, had run afoul. Beside Aideen’s bed sits a mug of cold tea, a milky skin stretched taut across it, and a plate of this morning’s toast crusts—Aideen, in her growing hermitry, has taken to eating meals in her room.

  Kevin checks every other room in the house, each inspection more frantic than the last so that, in his hurry, he stubs his thick bullet of a toe hard on the iron frame of Gerard’s bed and gives himself over to a loud, satisfying “Goddammit!” He bounds down to the basement—sometimes Aideen hides out down here on a moldy beanbag chair reading in the crawl space where they keep the luggage and where he’s asked her a hundred times not to be. But there’s no sign of her.

  He returns to the kitchen, breathing heavily now, and snaps up his mobile. He tries Grace’s phone and then Gerard’s—Aideen sometimes confides in her older brother—but no answer. Kevin worries about Gerard—his general lack of ambition given the cutthroat state of the world, especially when there are so many pubs to frequent—but he’s eighteen and Kevin mercifully no longer needs to keep track of him.

  He can reach no one.

  Kevin delivers Nuala, fully recovered, a mug of cocoa. Pacing, he gulps his wine, lays out the facts of his shite day: he’s had to collect his mother from the police station; the whereabouts of his wayward daughter are unknown (at least he hasn’t totally banjaxed things up, he thinks grimly, at least the other three are safe, alive); his wife, as usual, can provide neither advice nor support—she is pontificating from a podium or courting international clients at a hush-hush private club or eating fried samosas in a desert tent.

  As he peels open the last tin of cat food, his mobile rings.

  “Did something happen up there?” It’s Mum.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Aideen’s here but she won’t say a word.”

  “Aideen’s at your house?”

  “I’m only delighted to have her. Any chance you could come down and have a look at the TV? We could use a bit of distraction. What’s the film about the American prostitute with the teeth who goes shopping? What’s it called, Aideen?”

  “Can she stay with you tonight?”

  “She won’t want to, Kevin.”

  “Tell her she has no choice. She caused a whole kerfuffle down here and I need to clear the air.”

  “Pretty Woman, yes that’s it. Brilliant girl.”

  Kevin puts down the phone and heads directly to his desk, where he finds the application for Millburn School.

  6

  After Kevin dropped her home, Millie had retrieved the bottle of sherry normally reserved for special occasions (though special is clearly not the apt adjective here—“ghastly,” say, or “horrific” may be better descriptors). Into the kitchen went Millie to fetch a glass when she’d spotted the red answering machine light aglow and listened, with a shudder, to its single, dreadful message.

  “You wouldn’t per chance have that spare travel pillow you mentioned that I could bring aboard? Don’t bother yourself at all, but if you put your finger on it, that’d be grand.”

  Jolly Jessica. Millie had forgotten about JJ, the driving force behind their New York City trip, who, half a year ago, had triumphantly written “Big Apple” in red Biro on the December 20 box of her Famous Irish Writers kitchen calendar below a moody portrait of Brian Friel. What a mockery of their months spent poring over hop-on hop-off bus tour pamphlets and Broadway listings with the travel agent in town, two silly old biddies telling each other over coffee and cribbage how ludicrous it was, then having the courage to make it possible—only to have it, in fact, become impossible once more! It was enough to reduce Millie’s already depleted spirits to despair, full stop.

  Imagine regaling JJ with the sordid details of her shoplifting spree, the shameful arrest, the interrogation room! It had been difficult enough attempting to stay low in the back of the police car. Thank Christ she’d worn her fedora. JJ’s opinion of her would irreversibly plummet. Jessica Walsh is a woman who regularly delivers nosegays to the ailing at Our Lady’s Hospice in Harold’s Cross, who’s always giving Millie artsy, homemade trifles—velvet pouches with “M.G.” stitched onto them, picture frames crafted from shells she collects along Sandymount Strand. If you were the sort to drop a half penny on the pavement, Jessica would be the sort, despite her girth and tendency toward asthma, to lumber after you with it. That’s Jessica, a good egg. Which leaves Millie no choice. She’ll have to lie. She begins concocting some muckety muck about Doctor Such and Such insisting that air travel is unsafe, given X tablets he’s just prescribed for Y condition, and that they’d have to hold off until she’s adjusted to them, say March, when her probation period is over.

  At the sound of the bell, Millie had been astonished to find her granddaughter on the doorstep, an unprecedented visit from the child, of Kevin’s four, whom she knows least.

  The girl’s teeth clattered with the cold, no jacket on, mute as a lump of charcoal. Like her brothers, Aideen’s a brunette, her hair wavy and caramel-streaked in a certain light and her smile, when employed, quite fetching. It’s true that her knees tend to jut out the wee bit, causing her feet to appear not unlike two flippers, wide and cumbersome; but this too, of course, shall pass. Aideen strikes Millie as an outrageously self-conscious teen, too shy or unwilling to sustain friendly eye contact in a prolonged way. Poor duck.

  In the first hour, the girl hardly utters two words.

  In the second, Millie suggests, as though it’s just occurred to her, that she spend the night.

  Aideen, catatonic, is perched in the window seat that faces Millie’s beloved Irish Sea. The girl nods, or maybe it’s more of an inadvertent jerk of the head.

  “Hungry at’all?”

  Another jerk.

  As Millie weighs the decadence of adding more briquettes to the dying fire, Aideen stands up. “Should I sleep in Dad’s old room?”

  “Oh, it’s only early. Sure you won’t have toast?”

  Aideen’s not a big eater; if anything, she’s always been on the slightly sickly side, or maybe runty’s the word. When the girls were born, Aideen, a pound lighter than her twin, was yanked out of Grace with uncooperative lungs and goopy, glued-shut eyes, two tiny pink fists clenched at her ears. More than once Millie’s wondered whether those fists aren’t still a bit clenched.

  “Tell me what’s happened,” Millie says. “I won’t judge you. Go on, love. You’ll feel better.”

  Aideen’s face becomes something of a battlefield upon which she struggles to maintain composure against the threat of imminent emotional surrender. She sniffs and blinks. The muscles at her mouth bravely wrestle a trembling frown.

  “Can I move in with you?”

  Millie resists her first impulse, which is to leap into the air with a whoop. Here’s a bedroom, she w
ould like to say, there’s a towel, a blanket we’ll find! And though soap, say, or toothpaste or milk might be in short supply, we’ll make do. I don’t need a caretaker, Millie thinks, I can be the caretaker.

  But as touching, as tempting, as the simple proposal is, Millie knows the idea is lunacy. Kevin deems her a batty incomp at best; he’d sooner abandon his daughter in certain unlit, graffiti-laden corners of lower Sheriff Street in the wee hours as allow Aideen to move into Margate.

  “What’s happened? Did you have a row with your sister?”

  “I hate her.”

  “Oh now that’s—”

  “You have no idea what she’s like. She’s a total bitch.”

  “Aideen.”

  “You said you wouldn’t judge.” Aideen glares across the room at Millie. “Do you know about Millburn?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The boarding school?”

  “Millburn School?”

  Aideen sags back onto the seat, openly crying now. She is beside herself. Millie can remember with great clarity first laying eyes on her gorgeous granddaughters in the maternity wing at the Rotunda. Millie, always on the broody side as Peter liked to tease, had reached across to the bassinet and picked up little Aideen, straitjacketed in cotton and unbearably light. It was astonishing, like holding a swaddled bundle of air.

  Millie had kissed the infant on her translucent skin and rocked her, pacing the gloomy, dim hospital corridors, talking incessantly, of course, describing each patient who passed and the stout floor nurse with the ample bosom and cross eyes who glanced at Millie in a bossy, disapproving way that made her feel young and giddy. And why shouldn’t she have felt giddy? Here was something life rarely offered up: a chance to start fresh with a human being, the daughter of your son, before you’ve gone and fecked things up.