Foster

I see myself looking out from the back seat wild as a tinker’s child with my hair all loose but my father, at the wheel, looks just like my father. A big, loose hound whose coat is littered with the shadows of the trees lets out a few rough, half-hearted barks, then sits on the step and looks back at the doorway where the man has come out to stand. He has a square body like the men my sisters sometimes draw, but his eyebrows are white, to match his hair. He looks nothing like my mother’s people, who are all tall with long arms, and I wonder if we have not come to the wrong house.

‘Dan,’ he says, and tightens himself. ‘What way are you?’

‘John,’ Da says.

They stand, looking out over the yard for a moment and then they are talking rain: how little rain there is, how the fields need rain, how the priest in Kilmuckridge prayed for rain that very morning, how a summer like it was never before known. There is a pause during which my father spits and then the conversation turns to the price of cattle, the EEC, butter mountains, the cost of lime and sheep-dip.

It is something I am used to, this way men have of not talking: they like to kick a divot out of the grass with a boot heel, to slap the roof of a car before it takes off, to spit, to sit with their legs wide apart, as though they do not care.

When the woman comes out, she pays no heed to the men. She is even taller than my mother with the same black hair but hers is cut tight like a helmet. She’s wearing a printed blouse and brown, flared trousers.

The car door is opened and I am taken out, and kissed. My face, being kissed, turns hot against hers.

‘The last time I saw you, you were in the pram,’ she says, and stands back, expecting an answer.

‘The pram’s broken.’

‘What happened at all?’

‘My brother used it for a wheelbarrow and the wheel fell off.’

She laughs and licks her thumb and wipes something off my face. I can feel her thumb, softer than my mother’s, wiping whatever it is away. When she looks at my clothes, I see my thin, cotton dress, my dusty sandals through her eyes.

There’s a moment when neither one of us knows what to say. A queer, ripe breeze is crossing the yard.

‘Come on in, a Leanbh.’"

"She leads me into the house. There’s a moment of darkness in the hallway; when I hesitate, she hesitates with me. We walk through into the heat of the kitchen where I am told to sit down, to make myself at home. Under the smell of baking there’s some disinfectant, some bleach.