[Pure Fiction home]
Margaret had discovered that “honeymoon time” was just a sugary way of saying that her mother and Colm were doing it every chance they got, so she didn’t bother pointing out that every night for the past three weeks had been a “girls night out,” since the only people Margaret and Ronnie knew in the whole country were each other.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
It was easy for Laura Canavan to meet men—she was only 36, had a soft, curvy body and clear green eyes fringed in long, mascara-tarred lashes, and she spoke in a gentle, low voice that men leaned in to hear. She wasn’t unintelligent, but she was unimaginative; she’d always let circumstances dictate her social life. She started dating their father, she claimed, solely because he lived down the block from her and neither one of them owned a car. When he moved to Wisconsin to be with Bitch, she got an afternoon bartending job at Oinker’s, a divey little tavern that for years had been a butcher shop and still retained a faint stench of pig blood. It was a convenient setup: when her shift ended, she just relocated to the other side of the bar, and those nights at Oinker’s became her whole social life. Accordingly, it was the only place she met suitors. The first was Terry, a real estate agent who would walk around their apartment shouting into his cell phone, crop dusting the air with silent, sulfurous farts. Then came Ned, who “accidentally” walked into Margaret and Ronnie’s bedroom naked, and finally Stan, the contractor, who, on the night he admitted he was “not technically divorced,” stole a pair of cubic zirconia earrings, a laptop, and Ronnie’s entire Beanie Baby collection before sneaking off before dawn.
It was the day after one such lecture that she met Colm, an Irish roofer who’d spend the warm months in Chicago doing construction work. He was replacing the gutters at Oinker’s. Soon enough, the feminist rants were replaced by comments like, “Girls, when you know, you know.” Margaret wanted to ask if she’d known with dad, too, or Terry, Ned, or Stan, but her mother’s happiness was so acute that she’d have felt like a bad sport poking holes in it. And though Margaret was wary as ever, advising Ronnie to lock up what remained of her decimated stuffed animal collection the first time Colm came over for dinner, she’d had to admit that of all mom’s boyfriends he was certainly the best looking. His skin was weathered and tan, with sinewy veins snaking up his Frisbee-sized hands. His black hair was so thick that it jutted from his forehead like the brim of a baseball cap, and his eyes were almost as blue as dad’s. The fact that Colm was Irish solidified their mother’s infatuation, since her own father had been from Donegal. When Laura sat down to deliver the news to her surprised daughters, she told them that, given their ethnic background, they shouldn’t feel like they were moving to a foreign country but coming home. She kept calling Ireland the “Motherland” or the “Ould Sod,” and she often brought up her father, who’d died before the girls were born. “If your grandfather knew I was bringing you back to the Motherland to live,” she told them one afternoon, “by God, would that make him happy.”
Ronnie chose a shiny yellow vehicle, and Margaret picked a pale blue one. The ride operator turned a switch, and the electric current beneath her car hummed to life. Before she could even press the accelerator, a jug-eared boy who could barely see above his dashboard accidentally reversed into her at full speed. Her head whipped back, her eyes caught an image of cloudy sky, and then she saw white, drifting stars. The egg on her temple pulsed, feeling as conspicuous as a third eye. Gingerly, trying to move her head as little as possible, she steered meekly over to the rubber edge of the rink and stayed put while Ronnie and the other kids flew past, yelling, laughing, crashing. Margaret sat and watched, feeling entirely apart from all of them.
“Nah,” she lied. “I’m just gonna go meet some people at the Ferris Wheel. I’ll see you when mom gets here.” Ronnie looked at her across the wet pavement and the ringing lights of the booths—Dart-a-Card, Smash-a-Can, Roll-a-Coin—as if she were trying to figure something out. Finally she shrugged and ran to catch up with the other kids.
