I scan the crowd as we enter the Hippodrome, but can detect nobody who might be Vera.

And how would I know her anyway? Iris doesn’t have any photographs of her. None that she displays in her house, at any rate.

I don’t even know what age she is. Somewhere north of seventy, I imagine. Iris has always been scant on detail where her mother is concerned, and now I’m wishing I’d never phoned her. Left well enough alone. I’m not an interferer as a rule.

Que sera, sera, my mother used to say. Let sleeping dogs lie, was another.

Least said, soonest mended.

The Hippodrome appears to be a casino, and we have a total of twenty-one minutes to spare, which, Iris declares, is enough time for a drink at the bar.

She is not supposed to drink. The doctor says it interferes with the medication. Same goes for Dad. And I’m the designated driver so...

Iris slaps the bar with the flat of her hand. “Hendersons all round if you please,” she says to the young man with the dark hair and the careful smile behind the bar. His narrow face bears the strain of leftover teenage acne which he probably thinks will never leave. I want to lean across the counter and tell him about Kate, who thought the same thing until her twenty-third birthday.

“Just a small one for me,” I call out as the young man begins his ministrations but he doesn’t hear me—Brendan says I speak too quietly—and the drinks, when they arrive, are much larger than a drink a designated driver should be drinking.

“Here’s looking at you, kid,” Dad says, lifting his glass from the counter and holding it towards me and Iris.

“Here’s looking at you, kid,” we say back to him, because it always makes him smile, and when he smiles, the disease backs away from his face and he looks like himself, just for a moment.

I’ve never been to a casino before. Iris has, of course. Dad can’t remember if he has or not. I’d say not. He was always a pint of plain in a public bar kind of a man. It was Mam who was more into trying different things. Going different places. At least, she talked of trying different things and going different places. In the end, she didn’t do much of either.

It still astonishes me that it was her heart that gave out. It wasn’t Dad’s fault.

She looked after him for ten years and then her heart gave out.

“She wouldn’t have felt a thing,” the consultant said afterwards. How could that be true? My mother’s heart—her big, wide heart—stops beating after all the years. After all the things she managed to do. All the things she managed to endure. All the things she never complained about. All the things she accepted. After all that, her heart stops beating and she doesn’t feel a thing.

Iris lifts her glass to her mouth and tilts her head back until the glass is drained. “Come on,” she says, “let’s play blackjack.”