So there lay her daughter face down in the rose garden, all sprawled out in her outrageous beauty with her face in the dry, well-weeded earth. Her drool was soaking a dark pool by her cheek. This is how she’d landed on her way home at God knows what time from another booze-soaked late-night party.

Lucy had put the coffee down and pulled the hose around. She’d pressed the lever and let rip with a furious blast of water, at first hot from lying in the sun in the rubber hose and then freezing cold as it came from deep below the ground, from the well out back they had dug when they’d stopped renting the place. The water smashed down on Deirdre’s head and back and legs. She thrashed like a centipede. She rolled over a few times and then sat up on the grass, long wet hair plastered to her cheeks, a freak screaming as though her outrage would make the water stop, dirt and vomit dripping down her nose, mouth open like a tunnel. Lucy let blast right inside her dirty mouth, pounding Deirdre’s face clean and drowning her cries, drowning her fury.

Declan opened an upstairs window and poked his head out, followed by David at his bedroom window to see what was happening so early on Saturday morning. And they had hung there like gargoyles watching Deirdre jump to her feet, screaming at her mother, You’re killing me! You’re killing me!

And Lucy screaming back, I’m gonna have a heart attack. I’m gonna have a heart attack. You’re killing me with your stupid life. What about my life? Doesn’t a mother count?

And Declan bellowing, Can’t you girls just stop it? Can’t we just have a nice morning?

David rolling his eyes and going back to bed.

Lucy had followed Deirdre over the lawn with the hose as she staggered in circles, putting her hands on her body as her mother shot her with the water, screaming for her to stop but not leaving, not running into the house or down the driveway to the highway and hitching into the city like she had done before. Not this time. She was dancing around like a kite on a string, the water the current that moved her.

Lucy had let go the lever, the water instantly disappearing and Deirdre’s screams with it. The wrath that had boiled up in Lucy just as quickly settled, leaving her weak and trembling, as though the tide had come barrelling in with each wave tossing cumbersome years on her shoulders before it receded and left her so weighted. Her heart pounded as though it was trying to leave her body. She and her daughter stood like lawn ornaments, staring at each other, the morning birds chirping loud and clear in the sudden silence, a cow mooing in the pasture.

Deirdre seemed to shrink into a little girl, that same little girl who’d come home from the park crying, disturbing little stories coming off her lips, stories Lucy didn’t want to hear. Lucy rubbed her eyes and put her hand on her chest, catching her breath. A slight breeze had come up, and Lucy had watched her daughter’s skin go bumpy and cold in the already hot June day, wondering where she had gone wrong or if it was just the genetics. It was the last summer Deirdre had come back from university — it was the last time she had come home.