Coming Home for Christmas (7 page)

‘That’s tough,’ he said quietly as the two F’s murmured agreement.

‘Yeah, it’s kind of ironic – my speciality is wealth management,’ she added lightly.

‘Ah well, ye wouldn’t be dealing with the likes of us, Alison,’ Frankie grinned. ‘We don’t have any wealth worth talking about, do we, lads?’

‘Yer right there,’ Fintan agreed.

‘My sister was made redundant recently, in London.’ JJ frowned. ‘Worked for twenty years with the same company, gave her heart and soul to them, and wham! Out the door without
even a word of thanks. You’re only a commodity in business. I used to tell her so when she took work home with her. “You’ll get no thanks for it,” I told her, and I was
right – and I take no pleasure being proved right either. I bet you were the same.’

‘Yeah, a bit, I put in the extra hours, but I felt it
was
appreciated,’ retorted Alison defensively.

‘Listen, my dear good woman, and take this to heart for the next job you go to, it’s every man for himself in business, and profit is the bottom line. It’s a rare thing to find
humanity in the cut and thrust of the corporate world. I have to say, from what I’ve seen in business, I’m very glad I work for myself.’ JJ eyed her quizzically. ‘Did you
have a nice pad uptown?’

‘Two bedrooms, separate kitchen and a little balcony. I loved it. I was gutted leaving it,’ she admitted. ‘I’m really hoping to get another position asap and get back to
it.’

‘The recession won’t last for ever. They’re talking recovery already. I swear to God that’s what I love about the States. It’s all so positive, even when things are
at their worst. At home it’s all gloom and doom. The media are so negative over there, it always shocks me when I go back.’

‘You’d nearly shoot yourself if you lived at home, listening to that pessimism day in day out,’ Fintan interjected as he took another cookie and scoffed it in one mouthful,
crumbs scattering all over his fleece and his bushy red beard.

‘I’m going home next week for my mother’s seventieth. Couldn’t be worse timing. I won’t be saying anything about losing my job though. My dad’s been on at me
to buy property for years, he says rent is dead money, and he’s right, I suppose. It’s too late now though,’ Alison confided. It was so odd: she felt very comfortable with the
three Irishmen, and having a conversation with them was almost a treat. She hadn’t realized just how lonely it was being unemployed, having nowhere to go and no one to interact with during
the day.

‘Well, look at it like this – if you’d bought at the peak of the boom, you’d be in negative equity,’ JJ said kindly, ‘although I have to say, in general,
I’m a fan of bricks and mortar myself. Don’t trust the stock market.’

‘Right now neither do I. I’ve taken such a hit with my investments and bonuses.’ Alison nodded in agreement, draining her coffee. ‘I guess I better let you get on and
finish unpacking. I’ve to make a start myself. I’ve boxes everywhere.’

‘Thanks for the coffee, neighbour,’ JJ grinned, showing even, white teeth.

‘Thanks, Alison, nice to meet ya,’ and ‘Good on ya,’ the two F’s added.

‘You’re welcome,’ Alison assured them, deciding that she was going to make her studio as nice as possible, just in case JJ Connelly ever came to her door looking to borrow
sugar. She’d buy some just in case.

Once she made a start, it wasn’t so bad, and there was a degree of satisfaction in emptying each box, putting away her belongings and beginning to feel an ownership of her new abode. Once
the empty cardboard boxes were flattened, the place didn’t look so cluttered, and she was quite pleased at the homely ambiance she created by putting her books on the bookshelves and her
lamps at each window. Alison loved soft lighting in her home space. It relaxed her and made the place feel cosy, especially in the viciously cold winters of the past few years. Most of the offices
she had worked in had fluorescent lighting, which she hated.

She stared around after she’d emptied the last box into her by now bulging closet and wondered could she follow up on Melora’s suggestion to place a swathe of cream curtain material,
to drop in soft folds from the archway that divided the bedroom area from the small sitting room. She could ask JJ. He was a carpenter. It wouldn’t take long to stick a curtain rail across
the top of the arch.

Melora, minimalist to the last, had put most of her possessions, including her designer clothes, bags and shoes, in storage, all carefully wrapped and labelled. She intended coming back to New
York when the winter was over with either a prospective husband or, failing that, a new job in wealth management. No recession was going to get the better of her; she’d emailed Alison telling
her she already had a date, having only arrived in LA a week previously.

‘You go, girl,’ Alison had emailed back in admiration.

Melora was very anxious to get married, as were most of Alison’s single friends in New York. It was all about the date and the man, or meeting that special someone, or wondering was the
man you were dating really into you. Sometimes Alison wondered if she had a gene missing. Or, she pondered guiltily, was she a bit shallow? She liked dating, but it wasn’t the end of the
world if there wasn’t a man in her life. She hadn’t had much time to get into a serious relationship in her twenties, between work and college. But over the last few years she’d
had two relationships that had ended because the guys felt she was more committed to her job than she was to them. What was so wrong with loving your work? If it was the other way around and
she’d felt they were more committed to their jobs than they were to her, it would have been a perfectly acceptable scenario for them and she would have been labelled ‘needy’.

Jonathan suited her perfectly. They had fun, the sex was OK, she wasn’t in danger of losing her heart to him – and that was good also, she felt. Losing your heart left you out of
control and it was bad enough being out of a job and having temporarily lost control of her career, without losing control of her emotions. That would be a total disaster.

She heard clattering down the stairs and stuck her head out the door. It was Fintan, the red-haired, bearded one of the trio.

‘Are ya OK there, Alison?’ he said in his broad, rich brogue.

‘I thought it might be JJ. I was just going to ask might he be able to stick a curtain rail up for me? Do you think he’d mind?’ she ventured, uncharacteristically hesitant.

‘Yerra not at all, girl. Show me where you want it and I’ll sthick it up for you.’ His accent reminded her so much of home she felt a pang of homesickness.

‘It was just here over the arch, to close up the bedroom bit,’ she explained, leading him into the studio. He studied the archway and reached up and gave it a tap.

‘Hmmm, thought it might be plasterboard, but it’s fairly solid,’ he said knowledgeably. ‘You get the pole you want and I’ll do that for ye no problem.’

‘Thanks a million and please charge me the going rate,’ she said hastily.

‘Arrah that won’t take ten seconds, woman, would ye whist about the going rate.’ He laughed, showing a flash of white teeth through his beard.

‘Well, I don’t want to take advantage. You don’t know me,’ she demurred.

‘If I wasn’t happily married, you could take advantage of me any time,’ he slagged as he made his way down her narrow hall. ‘Here’s my card. Let me know when ye
have the pole and I’ll sort it for ye.’ He handed her a cream business card. ‘See ye.’ And then he was gone, pounding down the stairs until the front door closed and there
was silence.

‘Fintan McManus, Builder’s Providers’, she read, with an address in Queens. And a cell and landline number. She’d get the pole tomorrow, it would give her something to
do, she decided, yawning. She was really tired all of a sudden. It was late in the afternoon, the snow was whispering down past her window and the leaden sky was darkening the apartment. She yawned
again. Usually she was full of energy, but this lassitude, this weariness, had happened several times in the past few weeks, since the shock of being made unemployed.

One of her friends, Stella, who was a psychotherapist, had told her it was normal under the circumstances. ‘Losing your job is a bereavement of sorts. Your whole psyche is in upheaval.
You’re traumatized. Your sleep patterns are gone to pot. The mind and body need to adjust and accept this new and unaccustomed situation, so when the tiredness comes, give in to it and rest,
it’s not laziness, Alison,’ Stella had insisted when Alison had assured her she wouldn’t be caught dead taking a nap in the afternoon.

Today, though, she was just going to work through her guilt and lie down and flick through a magazine for ten minutes. She’d slept so badly the previous night in the strange bed and
unfamiliar environment, it was no wonder she was tired. She kicked off her shoes and curled on top of the bed, pulled a soft Tommy Hilfiger throw over her, and began to flick through
Vanity
Fair
, her favourite magazine. The studio was lovely and warm, the lamplight casting soft shadows on the walls and, outside, the snow fell steadily and unrelentingly, blanketing the city. The
noise of the traffic was gently muffled, and she fell fast asleep.

A knocking on the door woke her, and she shot up, dazed and disorientated. The clock on her bedside locker showed it was after seven. She’d been asleep for more than three hours. She
jumped off the bed, ran her fingers through her hair, hurried out to the door and unlocked the various locks.

‘Did I wake you up?’ JJ stood there with a cream curtain pole in one hand and a tool kit in the other. ‘Oopps! Sorry – maybe you have someone with you? Fintan told me
about your curtain-pole conversation, and I was passing a hardware store on the way home and stopped and got this. It will go with the colour we painted all the apartments in, if your friend
hasn’t redecorated,’ he said briskly. ‘But listen, I can come back another time.’ He turned to go.

‘No, no, there’s no one here. I fell asleep for a few minutes, didn’t sleep so good in a strange bed last night, and Melora didn’t change the colours.’ She stifled
a yawn, stepping back to let him in. She was mortified at having been caught snoozing.

‘The same fate probably awaits me tonight,’ JJ said. ‘Although I do have my own bed with me. But the creaks and rattles in the building and the noise outside will be different
to what I’m used to. It’s always like that at first when you move.’

‘That’s
exactly
it. And I had a doorman before as well. It’s that extra bit of security that you get used to. Did you live in an apartment too?’ she asked as he
followed her in.

‘Nope. I had a house in Rockaway, and I’ve sold it to buy the place I was telling you about.’

‘A house! You
will
find it a bit different then,’ Alison remarked. ‘Are you married? Do you have kids?’

‘Was married. No kids,’ he said succinctly.

‘Oh!’ she said. Was married . . . Did that mean he was divorced? she wondered.

‘Right, where do you want this? Is it OK for you?’ He was all business-like.

‘It’s fine, fine. Thanks so much for going to so much trouble.’ She wished she’d had a chance to brush her hair. She knew she must look a sight. ‘I was just going
to hang a curtain here,’ she said, flustered, as she led him through the alcove, aware of the tossed blanket and pillows and the magazine face down on the bed. How lazy he must think her. It
was so unfair. She couldn’t think of the last time she’d fallen asleep on the bed on a weekday. And why was she so bothered anyway about what he might think? What was wrong with
her?

‘This won’t take a jiffy. Can I stand on one of your kitchen chairs, or are they delicate little things?’ JJ asked.

‘I’m not in the posh apartment like you. I don’t have kitchen chairs. My kitchen’s just a little galley,’ she reminded him, throwing her eyes up to heaven as she
regained some equilibrium.

‘Sorry, forgot you were slumming it,’ he teased.

‘How about the ottoman at the end of the bed?’ she suggested.

‘Grand job.’ He bent down and untied his shoes. He had lovely thick hair, Alison noted, and he was very broad-shouldered. Even in his stocking feet he was over six feet tall. He was
wearing a light-blue shirt tucked into his jeans and had a lean, easy grace about him as he slid the ottoman over to the arch and stood up on it.

‘If you just hold these for me, I’d be obliged,’ he said, handing her some screws and rawl plugs. He took a slim, fold-up wooden ruler from his hip pocket and made a quick
measurement.

Nice ass
, Alison thought, as he stretched to the left a little. He made two discreet pencil marks, then got down and picked up his drill. ‘Just a little bit of – dust is that
OK?’

‘No probs.’

Five minutes later, her curtain pole hung neatly across the top of the arch and he was packing away his drill. ‘Ummm, how much do I owe you, JJ?’ Alison inserted a note of firm
authority in her voice. Fintan might have offered to do the job for nothing, but JJ had gone and bought the curtain pole as well.

‘Have you eaten yet?’ He glanced up at her as he tied his shoelaces.

‘Er . . . no,’ she replied, wondering what had that to do with the cost of buying and putting up a curtain pole.

‘Right, me neither. How about ordering in a Chinese, there’s a really good one a few blocks down that we used when we were working on this place. You can pay for dinner,’ he
suggested casually. ‘I have a bottle of Bin 555 upstairs.’

‘Well . . . well, sure if that’s what you want.’ She was completely thrown.

‘It would be kinda neighbourly. I don’t know any of the other inmates and I wouldn’t have to eat on my own here the first night, and it might help you get over your
“paying for the job” fixation!’ he said easily.

Alison laughed. ‘Melora said the people here are nice enough, except for some old bag on the second floor who’s a bit nosy.’

‘Ah yes, that would be the redoubtable Mrs Wadeski, who has already taken me to task about the noise I was making arranging my furniture. A formidable woman indeed, and with a moustache
that would put a bristle brush to shame.’ He grinned.