Crosstalk by Connie Willis Read Free Book Online

supper.
    “And what about your emergency meetin’?” Aunt Oona asked.
    “I’ll cancel it,” Briddey said grimly and, in a last, desperate bid for escape, suggested she meet them there.
    It didn’t work. Aunt Oona insisted on riding with her, blathering the entire way about the virtues of that fine Irish lad Sean O’Reilly and saying, apparently without irony, what a pity it was that Mary Clare meddled so much in Maeve’s affairs. “Why can’t she just leave the poor childeen alone? Maeve doesn’t get a moment’s peace.”
    And once they arrived, they rehashed all their previous arguments against the EED over dinner, along with some new additions: that Trent had some sinister ulterior motive for wanting her to have the EED done, that it might very well be a mortal sin in the eyes of the Church, and that no self-respecting Irishman would ever do it—
    “That’s not true,” Briddey said. “Enya had it done with her fiancé. And Daniel Day-Lewis—”
    “And if Enya and Daniel Day-Lewis told you to jump off a bridge into the river Shannon, you’d be doin’ that, too, would ye?” Aunt Oona said.
    “I think she should,” Maeve said.
    “Jump off a bridge?” Kathleen asked.
    “Maeve, I’ve talked to you about the dangers of peer pressure—” Mary Clare began.
    Maeve ignored them. “If Aunt Briddey has the EED, she’ll find out what he’s like inside,” she said. “Like in
Frozen,
there’s this prince and Anna thinks he’s really nice and in love with her and everything, but he isn’t, he just wants her kingdom. And he tries to
kill
her.”
    “Which is another reason I don’t want you watching Disney movies,” Mary Clare said. “They’re entirely too violent!”
    “They’re
not
violent!” Maeve said violently. “What I
meant
was, sometimes people are different on the inside from how they are on the outside, and if Aunt Briddey has the EED, she’ll find out what he’s really like and won’t like him anymore, and she’ll find a different boyfriend—one who’s nice.”
    “She can do all that without goin’ under the knife,” Aunt Oona said, and started in on the dangers of “operations” as experienced by various Daughters of Ireland. “Sean O’Reilly’s cousin went in for an operation on her bad leg, and they cut off the wrong one!”
    I should have asked C.B. to put that SOS function on my phone,
Briddey thought.
I could really use it right now.
    Her phone rang. “I’m sorry to bother you,” Charla said, “but C.B. Schwartz just called me here at home and asked if you got the ideas for the phone he sent you this morning?”
    Thank you, C.B.,
Briddey thought. “Yes,” she said. “No, that’s okay. I’ll be right there.”
    “You don’t have to go in to Commspan,” Charla said, bewildered. “He just wanted to make sure you got them.”
    “I understand. Right away,” Briddey said, and hung up. “Sorry, I’ve got to go,” she told the family, putting on her coat. “There’s a problem at work I’ve got to go check on.”
    They insisted on going out to the car with her. “When is Trent making you do this EED thing?” Mary Clare asked.
    “Late summer,” Maeve said.
    “How did you know that?” Briddey asked her.
    “It was on Facebook.”
    “Late summer,” Aunt Oona said musingly. “Good, then it’s a good bit of time you’ll be havin’ to think it over…”
    For you to try to talk me out of it, you mean,
Briddey thought, and drove away musing,
After I’m married to Trent, I’ll never have to suffer through one of those supper interrogations again. I’ll move in with Trent and instruct the doorman to keep you and the rest of the world out and finally get some peace and quiet.
    As soon as she was out of sight, she pulled over to call Charla and explain her behavior. The family hadn’t wasted any time. There was already a text on her phone from Aunt Oona telling her about a Daughter of Ireland’s nephew who’d died from an operation on her