Birds of America by Lorrie Moore Read Free Book Online

peering out at her from the toilet seat like a cuckoo in a clock.
    There were things one should never know about another person.
    Later, Abby decided that perhaps it hadn’t been her mother at all.
    Yet now here she and her mother were, sharing the tiniest of cars, reunited in a wheeled and metal womb, sharing small double beds in bed-and-breakfasts, waking up with mouths stale and close upon each other, or backs turned and rocking in angry-seeming humps.
The land of ire!
Talk of Abby’s marriage and its possible demise trotted before them on the road like a herd of sheep, insomnia’s sheep, and it made Abby want to have a gun.
    “I never bothered with conventional romantic fluff,” said Mrs. Mallon. “I wasn’t the type. I always worked, and I was practical, put myself forward, and got things done and over with. If I liked a man, I asked him out myself. That’s how I met your father. I asked him out. I even proposed the marriage.”
    “I know.”
    “And then I stayed with him until the day he died. Actually, three days after. He was a good man.” She paused. “Which is more than I can say about some people.”
    Abby didn’t say anything.
    “Bob’s a good man,” added Mrs. Mallon.
    “I didn’t say he wasn’t.”
    There was silence again between them now as the countryside once more unfolded its quilt of greens, the old roads triggering memories as if it were a land she had traveled long ago, its mix of luck and unluck like her own past; it seemed stuck in time, like a daydream or a book. Up close the mountains were craggy, scabby with rock and green, like a buck’s antlers tryingto lose their fuzz. But distance filled the gaps with moss. Wasn’t that the truth? Abby sat quietly, glugging Ballygowan water from a plastic bottle and popping Extra Strong Mints. Perhaps she should turn on the radio, listen to one of the call-in quizzes or to the news. But then her mother would take over, fiddle and retune. Her mother was always searching for country music, songs with the words
devil woman
. She loved those.
    “Promise me one thing,” said Mrs. Mallon.
    “What?” said Abby.
    “That you’ll try with Bob.”
    At what price? Abby wanted to yell, but she and her mother were too old for that now.
    Mrs. Mallon continued, thoughtfully, with the sort of pseudowisdom she donned now that she was sixty. “Once you’re with a man, you have to sit still with him. As scary as it seems. You have to be brave and learn to reap the benefits of inertia,” and here she gunned the motor to pass a tractor on a curve. LOOSE CHIPPINGS said the sign. HIDDEN DIP . But Abby’s mother drove as if these were mere cocktail party chatter. A sign ahead showed six black dots.
    “Yeah,” said Abby, clutching the dashboard. “Dad was inert. Dad was inert, except that once every three years he jumped up and socked somebody in the mouth.”
    “That’s not true.”
    “It’s basically true.”
    In Killybegs, they followed the signs for Donegal City. “You women today,” Mrs. Mallon said. “You expect too much.”
    “If it’s Tuesday, this must be Sligo,” said Abby. She had taken to making up stupid jokes. “What do you call a bus with a soccer team on it?”
    “What?” They passed a family of gypsies, camped next to a mountain of car batteries they hoped to sell.
    “A football coach.” Sometimes Abby laughed raucously,and sometimes not at all. Sometimes she just shrugged. She was waiting for the Blarney Stone. That was all she’d come here for, so everything else she could endure.
    They stopped at a bookshop to get a better map and inquire, perhaps, as to a bathroom. Inside, there were four customers: two priests reading golf books, and a mother with her tiny son, who traipsed after her along the shelves, begging, “Please, Mummy, just a wee book, Mummy. Please just a wee book.” There was no better map. There was no bathroom. “Sorry,” the clerk said, and one of the priests glanced up quickly. Abby and her mother