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have to come. I’ll pine without you.’
Erin looked at him affectionately. Whatever was wrong with the rest of her life, she’d struck it lucky when she’d met Greg. Other guys might bleat on about being the bigger earner and about how she had to go where his job took them, like women following soldiers following the drum. But even though Greg earned more than Erin, it had never made any difference, either to how they spent their money or to the balance of power in their relationship. If Erin insisted on staying in the States and the only job Greg could get was putting out the trash for McDonald’s, then Greg would become the best trash man in the country – he loved her that much.
That love, and the sense that he would always be fiercely loyal to her, were the traits that had made her finally stop running. When she met Greg Kennedy, Erin realised that you could experience the sensation of coming home with a person too, and for her, wherever Greg was, was her home. It helped, of course, that he was utterly gorgeous. Erin was a tall woman but Greg could pick her up as if she were no heavier than a child. When he’d carried her over the threshold of the apartment on their return from honeymoon, she’d felt like a heroine in a fairy tale.
Erin made the decision. Nobody could ever accuse her of not being up for a new challenge. ‘What the hell?’ she said. ‘That forty bucks might go further in Cork than it will here. And you’ve been talking about going home since I met you. Let’s go for it.’
By the time Greg’s new career move was sorted out, the job losses had started at their old company. Erin sold their car, which would, she said wryly, keep her in pantihose until she got a new job. They packed up the apartment, had lots of leaving dinners with friends, sorted out change of address cards and bank accounts. They were both wildly busy and neither of them had time to feel morose over leaving the city they’d called home for so long.
Then, a week ago, something odd had happened. Erin had been standing in Stuker’s Dry-Cleaners waiting in line to get a pile of suits back. Her purse slung over one shoulder, she was ticking off items in her red Things To Do notebook when the enormity of it all hit her and she felt her lungs compress, as if all the air had been squeezed out of them. She’d stumbled and almost fallen as her legs gave way beneath her.
‘Sit, missy, sit,’ said the sweet Korean lady who ran Stuker’s. She eased Erin into a plastic chair, which, even in Erin’s dazed state, seemed weird, because Erin was five feet eight and the Korean lady was barely up to her shoulders.
‘You pregnant?’
Erin laughed in genuine amusement. Thankfully, there was zero chance of that. Before their marriage, Erin had been utterly straight with Greg and told him that she wasn’t sure she’d want children after what her mother had done to her. It wasn’t that she didn’t like kids, but she wasn’t certain she was mother material. And he’d said he understood. Another reason to love him, she knew, because she was sure it was hard for him to accept her decision.
Now she shook her head at the kind Korean lady. ‘Not a chance. I’m just dizzy,’ she said. ‘Low blood sugar.’
The rest of the line, familiar with medical problems from lactose intolerance up, went back to waiting. Rendered almost invisible because she was slumped in a plastic chair like a well-heeled dope-head, Erin let the panic flow away from her body until she was able to examine the problem from a distance.
She was going home and she’d never really planned to. Oh yes, she’d talked about it. What person didn’t? Home was like some magical and unchanging world of childhood for so many of her and Greg’s friends. Scottish, Australian, Irish, Italian, every nationality possible – everybody talked about their homeland as though viewing it through misty, uncritical eyes. Not only was the grass greener at home but life was simpler.
‘Different times,’ everyone would sigh when they had enough drink inside them and the mournful music of home was playing on the CD player.
Erin had long suspected that those who did return home drove everyone in Italy or Australia mad by telling them how wonderful America was and how they missed it and how the roads/hospitals/coffee were better there.
She, on the other hand, never indulged in shows of nostalgia for the country of her birth. Not that anybody ever noticed. With a name like Erin and her swathe of rippling copper silk for hair, she seemed as Irish as they came. People assumed she quietly longed to be sitting in an Irish pub on Paddy’s Day, proudly wearing a clod of shamrock and sighing mournfully into her Guinness. They didn’t know she felt she’d recklessly thrown away her Irishness the day she abandoned her family.
When their friends heard that she and Greg were leaving the States, they all said the same thing: ‘We knew you would.’
Erin felt like remarking: ‘You knew more than I did, that’s for sure.’
The line in the dry-cleaner’s was gone but Erin didn’t have the energy to leave the plastic chair and pick up her stuff. She was going home and she didn’t know how to face the guilt.
Greg fell asleep halfway through the new Spielberg movie. Erin, who’d been watching the latest Nicole Kidman offering on her tiny screen, leaned over and gently removed his headphones. She pulled the grey airline rug over his shoulders so he wouldn’t be cold and moved his empty water glass onto her own tray in case he knocked it over, smiling at the realisation that she only gave in to her mothering instinct with Greg when he was asleep.
Conscious of getting dehydrated, she drank some more water, and settled back to watch the movie but her concentration had been broken.
As the plane flew through the night, Erin cast her mind back to her last hours at home. She remembered the stricken face of the woman she’d always called Mum but who was, in fact, her grandmother, when she’d shouted that she was leaving because they’d lied to her all her life. She remembered leaving many of her childhood treasures behind when she fled the house because she’d wanted to demonstrate the depth of her rejection. Most of all, she remembered the pain she’d felt when she found out that the most important people in her life – her mother, her father and her sister – weren’t who they said they were. Thanks to Erin’s shocking discovery, all her family relationships had shifted. Dad was really her grandfather, bolshy Kerry wasn’t her sister but her aunt, and the long-absent sister Shannon, the wild one who never came home but sent postcards from exotic locations when the mood took her, was really Erin’s mother.
The first thing that struck Erin as she and Greg followed the Cuchulainn driver out of Cork airport to the car park was how warm it was. There was no sign of the beating rain that was part of her memory of home. Instead, a soft spring breeze shimmied over her face, like a silky scarf just out of the dryer. The acid bite of Chicago’s wind chill seemed a lifetime away.
‘Lovely day,’ said Greg appreciatively, filling his lungs with clean air after so many hours in the stuffy cabin.
The second thing Erin noticed was that the driver was refusing to fit the chatty Irish cabbie mould. There was none of the blarney she had expected, no third degree as he tried to work out where they were from, had they any family in Cork or did they know so and so in Chicago, which was the kind of thing Erin remembered from home. Oh well, she shrugged. She’d changed, so it was only fair to assume that Ireland had changed too.
Eager to see a bit of the place, Greg asked for the scenic route, so instead of taking the most direct road to Dunmore, which bypassed the centre of the city, the driver drove them along Patrick Street, pointing out places of note.
Erin tried to look at the sights but kept getting distracted by stylish people, who could have stepped off a Manhattan sidewalk any day. This, she didn’t remember.
Sure, there were the usual few ould fellas in jackets so dated they could have taken part in a centenary of clothes exhibition, but for the most part, the citizens of Cork looked…well, marvellous.
When they finally drove through the hills to reach Dunmore, it looked marvellous too: very cute in a picture-postcard way, like the upmarket towns she and Greg