when you were needed—I’ll say that for you.”
Fay looked at him for a long moment without saying anything. Then she spoke.
“I don’t know what you have against my mother. Finbarr and I have nothing but good memories of her. She loved your brother; she said she knew he was a gambler when she married him so she only had herself to blame. She worked long, hard hours cleaning floors and stairways to keep food on our table and the rent paid.”
“She was a vulgar woman who drank great big pints,” J. K. O’Brien said, as if that settled it.
Fay looked at him in astonishment. “She worked her hands to the bone cleaning in order to pay for what she called her ‘entertainment,’ which was to take my father out on a Saturday and buy them two pints each in the local pub. She did that to the week before she died. And he died a year later of a broken heart. Whatever you heard bad of her it wasn’t from your brother.”
He was silent now.
“So, have we finished with each other now for a month, Jim? My telephone number at work is here on this piece of paper. I don’t have a phone at home, nor a mobile.”
“Where’s home?” he asked suddenly.
The first question he had asked about her during all the days of negotiation about him and his health, his house and his future.
“I share a bed-sitter with my friend Suzanne, who works with me.”
“How much does it cost?” he asked.
She told him.
“Is it very smart?” he asked.
“No, it’s quite shabby, as it happens.”
“So, would you and Suzanne like to come and live here at a cheaper rent?” he offered.
Fay paused. “At no rent at all and it’s a deal,” she said.
“At
no
rent?”
“We’d keep an eye on you, do your shopping, tidy up the garden and cook you Sunday lunch every week,” she offered.
“I could get a fortune for upstairs. You and that bossy nurse as good as said so,” he complained.
Fay shrugged. “You
could
get a fortune, if you were normal, Jim.”
“Yes, well that’s as maybe. And what do you and this Suzannewant to do with your lives? Or do you intend to go on working in this place forever?”
“What place, Jim?”
“The place you work in, a laundry or something, isn’t it?”
He had almost remembered.
“A dry cleaner’s, but you were near.”
“Well?”
“Well, we hope we’ll meet some gorgeous fellows who will marry us and take us away from all that steam and checking in dirty garments.” Fay managed a cheerful smile as she always did when talking about what had to be endured.
“Where do you go to meet these people?” he asked, interested.
“We don’t meet them all that much, Jim. We
think
about meeting them or we meet fellows who fall short of the mark in Ibiza every May.”
“And what would you need to meet nice smart fellows?” He seemed genuinely interested.
“I don’t know, maybe to be a bit smarter ourselves, brighter, you know, better educated, coming from a nicer kind of background, but since we can’t be that, then we have to hope to be lively and knock them out that way!”
“Seriously, would you like to live upstairs?”
“Only if there’s no rent, Jim, because if you’re not going to be a normal landlord, we can’t be normal tenants.”
“But the cost of the bathroom downstairs?” he wailed.
“Will add hugely to the value of this house, Jim.”
“When can you move in?” he asked.
“Suzanne will have to come and vet you first,” she said.
“No, Fay, no. We’re going to be clipping his toenails, feeding him porridge.
No!
”
“We have a fantastic flat for free—come and see it.”
“Nothing’s for free. We know this.”
“It’s a respectable address; fellows will think we are something if we live in Chestnut Street rather than four flights up over a fast-food place. And we have a room each—think of what that might mean.”
“Will you swear you won’t let him interfere in our lives or tell us long boring stories about the past?”
“I swear,
Jo Willow, Sharon Gurley-Headley