The sandwiches were soft butter and reconstituted ham on white sliced pan, cut into triangles. They took me straight back to when my feet didn’t touch the floor at that same table. Ma made another pot of ferocious tea and ate her way methodically through her triangles. The way she chewed said she’d got better dentures, somewhere along the way. When we were kids she always told us her missing teeth were our fault: she had lost them having us, a tooth for every child. When the tears started coming, she put down her mug, pulled a faded blue handkerchief out of her cardigan pocket and waited for them to stop. Then she blew her nose and went back to her sandwich.

Chapter 18

18

A part of me would have sat there with my ma forever, giving the teapot a reheat every hour or so and making the occasional batch of sandwiches. Ma wasn’t bad company, as long as she kept her mouth shut, and for the first time her kitchen felt like shelter, at least compared to what was waiting for me outside. As soon as I stepped through that door, the only thing left for me to do was go after solid proof. That wasn’t the hard part—I figured it should take about twenty-four hours, max. That was where the full-on nightmare kicked in. Once I had proof, I would have to figure out what to do with it.

Around two o’clock, noises started up in the bedroom: bedsprings creaking, a wordless throat-clearing shout, that endless retching full-body cough. I figured that was my cue to leave, which triggered a volley of complicated Christmas-dinner questions from Ma (“If yourself and Holly both came, I’m only saying if, would she eat white meat or dark meat, or would she have any at all, because she’s said to me her mammy doesn’t give her turkey unless it does be that free-range one . . .”). I kept my head down and kept moving. As I dived out the door, she called after me, “Lovely seeing you, come back soon!” Behind her Da shouted, through phlegm, “Josie!”

I even knew exactly how he could have found out where Rosie was going to be that night. The only way to that info had been through Imelda, and I could only think of one reason why my da would be anywhere near her. Here I had always taken it for granted that when he vanished for a day or three, it was booze he was hunting. Even after everything else he had done, it had never once occurred to me that he would cheat on my ma—if I had thought about it, I would have figured he had an alcohol-related inability to do any such thing. My family is just chock-full of surprises.