There isn’t a soul back home who hasn’t heard of those long years of scarcity. Everyone in County Down called that time the Great Famine. Gram, who defiantly spoke Gaelic until her dying breath, called it An Gorta Mór. The Great Hunger, as if to say it wasn’t the lack of food that is remembered but how that stretch of years made people feel. Ravenous and empty and wanting.

“Yes. I’ve been told ’twas a terrible time,” I replied.

The woman then asked if I’d immigrated to America with my whole family.

I thought of Mason, my brother who came to America first and sponsored me, and who is now living somewhere in Canada with a woman he fell in love with. “No. Just me.”

“You came all by yourself?” the woman said. “I think that’s very brave. And you’re so young!”

I smiled at this because some days I feel as though I’ve already lived several lifetimes and others as though I haven’t lived any kind of life at all, that I’m still waiting for it to start. Or waiting for it to start over.

I answered I was twenty, nearly twenty-one.

“What lovely cheekbones you have, and such beautiful black hair,” the woman continued. “I didn’t know Irish had black hair. I thought you were all redheads and blonds and auburns.”

And then the woman asked what was bringing me all the way from New York to San Francisco.

So many reasons. I gave her the easy one. “I’m getting married.”

The woman offered me her congratulations and asked what my future husband’s name was. As she did so, I realized I was itching to have someone older and wiser tell me I was making a sensible choice, an understandable one, considering how hard and complicated the world is.

“His name is Mr. Martin Hocking. Would you like to see his picture?”

The woman smiled and nodded.

I reached into my handbag and pulled out the photograph Martin had mailed to me. He was dressed in a vested pinstripe suit, his wavy hair gelled into place and his trimmed mustache partly covering his lips. He wore a fixed, charismatic gaze that I’d gotten lost in every time I looked at it. I’d had the photograph for less than two weeks but I knew its every inch.

“My, oh my! But he is handsome,” the woman said. “Such striking eyes. He looks like he could see into your very soul.”

“He’s . . . he’s a widower, newly arrived to San Francisco from Los Angeles. He has a little girl named Katharine. He calls her Kat. She’s only five. Her mother died of consumption and the child has had a rough time of it.”

“Oh, how sad! Aren’t you a dear to take on the role of mother and wife all at once.” The woman reached for my arm and laid her hand gently across it in astonishment, empathy, and maybe even admiration. And then she wished upon me every happiness and excused herself to find a porter to get a cup of tea.