Authors: Kate Kerrigan
City of Hope (39 page)
I imagined the ground beneath us alive with busy, burrowing rabbits, frantically hopping over one another, panicking about John and me. The idea of the two of us sitting quietly in the still day with all this mad activity going on underground made me laugh. It was as if there were two worldsâtheir world and oursâand I liked that. “If it came out now, I'd only want to kiss and cuddle it,” I said.
John looked embarrassed; he picked up a stick and sliced the air with it. “I'd chop its head off and skin it and cook it into a stew.” I started to cry. Once I started, I couldn't stopânot because of the rabbit anymore, but because I was embarrassed to be crying in front of John and I was afraid that he wouldn't like me; that I would ruin everything. “I'm joking,” he said. “I wouldn't ever do that to a rabbit, Ellie, sure I wouldn't, stop crying now, Ellie, don't cry.” I did stop, but I remember thinking how boys were different from us, and that I should be more careful how I carried on if I wanted us to stay friends.
When the sun was directly above us in the sky, we ran over to his house, where Maidy had our dinner waiting for us.
I loved eating in that house. My own mother was frugal with food, not for lack of money, but because she had no fondness for it. My father ate in the presbytery in town in the middle of the day and she felt there was no need to go to trouble for me alone. Her meals were meager, modest portions organized in shallow piles that never touched one another and made the plates look huge. In contrast, Maidy Hogan shoveled piping hot, sloppy stews onto our plates until thick, brown gravy spilled over the edges of them onto the table. There was never any room left for the potatoes, so they went straight onto the scrubbed wooden tabletop where we piled them with butter, often still watery with milk from the churn, then tore them apart and ate them with our hands. Afterward we'd have apple tart, or soda cake with butter and honey.
Maidy was as round as her cooking was good, and Paud was wiry and still strong at sixty. He worked hard to provide food for her, and she made sure that the meal she prepared with it was worth the work. I ate like a savage at that long, wooden table. I ate until I thought I would burst inside out, until I could barely move and would have to sit teasing ants with a stick on the front step, waiting for my stomach to settle. The first time I ate with them, Maidy asked, “Does your mother not feed you at all?” I stopped eating, blushing at my greed, my spoon still poised. She patted my head as apology, encouraged me to continue and never said anything again.
John always cleared the table and cleaned up after dinner; that was his job, wiping the grease and crumbs from the table and sweeping the floor beneath it, then washing the four plates in a bucket of water warmed on the fire and polishing them dry before placing them carefully back in the cupboard. I was never allowed to help. The Hogans made me a part of their family, yet they treated me like a treasured guest always. They loved me like a daughter, but they never overstepped the mark and made me into one. They had a talent for knowing the right way to be with people.
Late in the afternoon, John would bring me back to my own house. Although I was still full of Maidy's food, I ate a silent meal with my parents. In the gray twilight then we would kneel and say the rosary. The coldness of my father's praying voice settled on me as a vague fear. An ache for life burned in my stomach.
London-reared of Irish parents, Kate Kerrigan worked in London before moving to Ireland in 1990. She is the author of the novels
Recipes for a Perfect Marriage
and
The Miracle of Grace
, published in the UK, and
Ellis Island
and
City of Hope
, the first two novels in a trilogy. She is now a full-time writer and lives in County Mayo, Ireland, with her husband and sons.
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“With echoes of
Angela's Ashes
and even
The Notebook . . . Ellis Island
is a feel-good story about love, freedom, belonging and the meaning of home.”
â
Stylist
“An enjoyable romantic tale that you'll want to devour in one sitting.”
â
SHE
“A moving portrait of love and marriage through the eyes of two women. . . . The author looks closely at love as a romantic ideal and poses the question: Can a woman learn true love?”
â
Sunday Express S Magazine
“An intelligent, droll and heart-warming read. . . . Kerrigan is a lovely writer and her book breaks from the traditional mould of chick-lit.”
â
Sunday Tribune
(Ireland)
“This book is one to keep. Anyone who reads it will return to it, time and again, either for the story or to seek out one of the many old recipes.”
â
Ireland on Sunday
Cover design by Emin Mancheril
Cover photographs (top) © by Myles Wickham/Arcangel Images;
(bottom) © by The Mariners' Museum/Corbis
Author photograph © by Sarah Deragon
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book was originally published in 2011 by Macmillan and in 2012 by Pan Books, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, London.
CITY OF HOPE
. Copyright © 2011 by Kate Kerrigan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK PUBLISHED
2013
.
ISBN 978-0-06-223728-6
EPub Edition JUNE 2013 ISBN: 9780062237293
13 14 15 16 17
DIX
/
RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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