The Walking People (48 page)

"I have knives, you know," Greta said, reaching for the paring knife Eavan had brought.

"Not good knives." Eavan shrugged. "Sorry."

"Okay, well, I have spoons. I have very good spoons," Greta said, nudging the melon baller.

"That's not a spoon," Eavan said, whisking it away and putting it back in the bag. "Did you get the meat for the sandwiches? Are the potatoes in the fridge? Cooked? Jackets on?"

"Yes, boss," Greta said. "But first we need a cup of tea and a snack. Don't we?"

"Mom, we have a lot to do between now and four o'clock, and you know when James comes, all he'll do is distract—"

"It's a lovely day, isn't it? Perfect."

"It's supposed to rain later."

"You have too many worries, girl," Greta said, taking the peeler out of Eavan's hand and tossing it into the sink. Facing her daughter, Greta took Eavan's hand and waltzed her across the kitchen.

"You're out of your mind," Eavan said, laughing, placing her hand on her mother's shoulder and letting herself be led across the room.

"Party day. Let's hear some of that music you worried so much about." Greta leaned over to speak directly to Eavan's belly. "Wanna hear some music in there? Let's see if your Mama picked out anything with a fiddle."

 

After a short break for tea, they rolled up their sleeves and got to work. They peeled, chopped, diced, turned melon after melon into perfect bite-size balls. Greta looked on as Eavan cut slices of bacon, wrapped each around a pitted date, and drove a toothpick through the middle. They made a team in the bathroom, where Greta scrubbed the tub and the toilet while Eavan polished the mirror, scrubbed the sink and the counter, and stashed away Greta's jars and lotions, Michael's razor and shaving cream. Eavan placed a candle behind the toilet while Greta searched under her bed for the little soaps shaped like seashells she'd picked up at fifty percent off weeks earlier. When they finished, Greta put out the good towels, the new bath mat. My girl can clean, Greta thought as she glanced at the sparkling sink. My girl is a good worker, a fine, strong, capable girl.

"The fumes don't bother you?" Greta asked. She'd been crippled with nausea when she was pregnant with James, and sometimes the sight of a pregnant woman still made her stomach turn.

"Nah," said Eavan, and reached up on tiptoes to brush away a spiderweb. Greta saw that she had already begun to thicken at the shoulders, the neck. Head to toe, her whole body was getting ready for the baby. Greta hadn't been that kind of pregnant woman. People used to say they couldn't tell she was pregnant unless she stood in profile. Eavan would have looked pregnant in a head shot at only five months along.

"You know what my mother used to say about expecting a baby?" Greta said.

"That she could squat down in the field in the morning and be up again to get the tea?"

"So I told you already."

Eavan looked at her.

They teamed up again on the deck, where they hoped people would gather. The weather was warm for May. The rain would hold off, Greta assured Eavan, and commanded that Eavan look at the sky, acknowledge that it was blue, stop worrying. Greta swept and then went down to the spigot at the side of the house to fill bucket after bucket of water to wash down the planks of wood. Eavan scrubbed two seasons' worth of grit from the white plastic chairs, six in all, and then stood aside as Greta splashed them clean. They used their hands to flatten the creases in the vinyl outdoor tablecloth. As they worked, they talked about names for the baby. Greta suggested good, strong names like John, Patrick, William. Mary, Ann, Kathleen.

"We want to do a family name," Eavan said as she used her fingernail to scratch a stubborn piece of dirt from the window.

"Michael is a family name."

"We thought Maeve is pretty for a girl." Eavan watched her mother reflected in the glass. "Or Lily," she added. "Gary likes either of them."

Greta, down on her haunches, with the sponge dripping water down her shin and into her sock, looked up toward the back of the yard and shrugged. All these years later, so many miles from home, and still the children felt a connection to these people they'd never met. It was a fad now, she'd noticed. Family trees and tracing ancestors. There was big money in it. Money spent mostly by Americans, Greta guessed. She could probably count on one hand the number of times Maeve Ward was discussed by name in their house. Lily was right. Blood is thick. Greta wondered briefly how Maeve Ward had turned out, whether she was still alive, still traveling, or whether the government had settled her in a flat outside Dublin.

"How did she spell it? Do you know?" Eavan asked.

"She didn't spell it, love," Greta said, and ignored that bereaved look all the children got when they remembered that their father's people could not read or write. The fact that Michael had learned as an adult in a matter of months made him a genius in their eyes. They
were fiercely proud of him, that much Greta could see, but she never got the impression that they truly knew how much work it had been or how much it meant to him to stand in line at the deli and read the headlines of the paper just like everyone else did. The children would never be able to understand that some days, when he'd been frustrated and Greta didn't know how to explain some aspect of putting words together in a way that made sense, it was less humiliating for him to not be able to read at all than to go to the library and check out a book intended for a first grader, or to be quizzed on the sidewalk beside a new street sign as strangers passed by. Somehow, through the years, the detail that Greta was the one who taught him had gotten lost. In the children's version he'd simply buckled down and taught himself.

"But if you go that way," Greta said, looking up at Eavan, "I'd pick the one Americans will make sense of. Otherwise she'll be correcting people her whole life."

"And Lily?"

"Either one, really. Either one and you can't lose."

"So you wouldn't mind Lily?"

"After my mother?" Greta asked. "Why would I mind?" And she wouldn't mind, she realized as she spoke. Another Lily in Greta's life to fill that long-empty chair would be welcome, and for the first time since she learned that Eavan was pregnant, it hit her that there would be another person in the family soon. Not just an idea, a name tossed back and forth, an empty bassinet, but a person who ate at her table and felt as at home with her as her own children had.

Eavan turned back to the window and, in a habit recently formed, pressed her hand to her belly, spread her fingers wide like a starfish, took a deep breath.

They spoke at the same time. "Will I run into town for flowers?" asked Eavan.

"Do you think your father has any idea?" asked Greta.

"I think flowers would be nice," Eavan said, and turned so fast she knocked the Windex off the ledge and sent it flying over the railing and onto the grass.

Greta stepped up close to her daughter. "You're flushed," she said, pressing the back of her hand to Eavan's cheek.

"I just hope it goes okay," Eavan said.

"Why wouldn't it go okay?" Greta asked, squeezing Eavan's hand. "We have food, don't we? And music, thanks to you? We have a crowd of people all bent on keeping the surprise. Don't worry so much. It's bad for the baby."

 

James arrived at one o'clock with a cup of coffee in one hand, an oversize cake box in the other, and, tucked under his arm, the pictures he had blown up at the copy shop and mounted on cardboard.

"Jesus," Eavan said when she saw him, and rushed to hold open the screen door. "Ever hear of making two trips?" she asked, taking the cake from him.

Unlike Eavan, who seemed worried and distracted, James was keyed up. Looking him up and down, Greta was glad to see that he owned an iron after all. He'd pressed his khakis and his button-down shirt. He'd also gotten a haircut and bought a new belt. As usual, from the moment he stepped through the front door, it felt as if the house were on tilt and everything within it sliding toward him. "Listen up," he said, as if he were talking to his class of fifth graders. "We have some work to do." He wanted the party to be perfect and had put himself in charge of what he called the extra touches. The blown-up pictures, along with a giant diagram of the tunnel as it would appear when finished in the year 2020, with a sticker that said
YOU ARE HERE
, to mark where it stood on Michael's last day. The sheet cake had Michael's caricature done in icing.

The pictures were of Michael at a union picnic playing tug-of-war, Michael lying on the couch in the old apartment with his leg and arm in a cast, Michael outside a site in the year 1982, Michael in his work gear, barely recognizable in his blackened, mud-drenched clothes, the dark hole of the tunnel stretched out behind him. When Eavan and James were little, they loved that one, thought it was hysterical, and Greta gathered from listening to them talk that they thought it was something that had happened only once, the day Daddy was covered in mud, Daddy filthy dirty, Daddy with muck all over his face.

"He mightn't like that one," Greta said, pushing it aside. "Maybe we better leave it."

"Mom, stop," James said, pushing it back where it was. "People will think it's funny."

"You know, never once did your father come home with a speck of dirt on him," Greta said, taking up the picture and bringing it close to her glasses. "Never once. He's a very clean person."

James cleared his throat, nodded at Eavan to put the pictures away. "We know that, Mom. That's exactly why it's so great."

"Yes, but—"

"Okay," James interrupted. "So I called last night—did he mention it?—and asked him some B.S. about how to fix a hole in Sheetrock, and I don't think he suspects a thing."

Eavan pulled up a chair and sat down. She put her head in her hands.

"Will he be mad?" James asked. "Mom? What do you think?"

Greta stood behind Eavan and pulled the hair away from her daughter's face. "I feel sick," Eavan said, then shook her head when she saw James and Greta glance down at her belly. "No, not that." She groaned into her hand. Greta couldn't think why the kids should be so nervous. She, after all, had thought up the idea, and she was the one he'd take it out on if it turned out that he was being serious all these years when he forbade them to ever throw him a surprise party. He issued the warning whenever they went to a surprise party thrown for someone else. It's cruel, he insisted. What was fun about giving a person the shock of his life? It's not to honor the person, it's to laugh at him. And is reaching a particular age really a cause for celebration? Just breathing in and out for a certain amount of time? He'd reminded her after the last surprise — a sixtieth birthday thrown for the wife of a former sandhog—that he didn't even know exactly when he was born, as if she weren't already well aware. That's how silly birthdays were. Probably in early April. Maybe in late March. Probably in 1945, but possibly 1944. It was a circumstance the kids would never in their whole lives get sick of thinking about. "How can you not know when you were born?" they'd demand, the tone in their voices changing little from childhood to adulthood.

But this wasn't a birthday party. It was a retirement party, the first among their small group of friends, and so something Michael had not
specifically outlawed except under the general umbrella of surprises. Also, Michael just wasn't that intimidating. At worst he would smile through it and take a week to recover. If he got presents, he'd refuse to go near them, putting his hand to his forehead and shaking his head. "All that money," he'd say, looking at the pile. And then one by one the kids would coax him to pick just one and open it. Then another. Then another, until the whole pile was unwrapped and at his feet.

 

They had the food prepared by three o'clock, and anything that didn't have to be refrigerated was left out on the dining-room table. The refrigerator was packed to the brim, so James brought the cake down to the garage, the coolest room in the house. Eavan put out a few photo albums next to the blown-up pictures and Greta's gift—a nine-piece gardening set complete with seeds for starting an herb garden. At three-thirty Greta changed into her party clothes: white slacks, red sandals, a short-sleeved black cotton sweater with a red stitch along the collar. They had another half hour to kill before people would start to arrive. Michael—with Ned Powers's help—wouldn't be home until five.

Back in the kitchen, sitting at the table and eating the ends of the soda bread and waiting for the hands of the clock to move, Greta began to take more notice of how odd Eavan and James were behaving. Twice now she'd seen Eavan look at her brother with widened eyes, as if urging him forward. It was as if they were teenagers again, trying to send each other messages with kicks under the table.

"Nicole is coming, right?" Greta asked. Nicole and James had been dating almost two years, making it James's longest relationship by a year and ten months. As Michael put it, she was a sound girl, and Greta wouldn't mind if all this looking and signaling each other had to do with some engagement plan they wanted to let her in on.

James pulled his eyes away from his sister. "Oh, yeah. She'll be there." Same as always. No extra look of significance. No flutter of surprise.

"And Gary?" Greta asked, looking at Eavan.

"Of course," Eavan said, and Greta noticed it again, how she tossed the words out casually, then looked straight back at her brother. Go on, the look said, tell her.

"Stop staring at me," Eavan said to Greta without taking her eyes off James. "Your eyes in those glasses bug me out."

"I'm not staring. Maybe that's your conscience making you think I'm staring. Keeping secrets from your mother." She turned to James and stared at him instead. Of her three children, he looked the most like her. She'd never thought of herself as pretty, but her features on his face had turned out to be quite handsome.

"Cut it out," he said. "Seriously. Didn't you get glasses that don't make your eyes look so weird?"

"They broke. This morning."