Chapter 4 - The 197,000-Mile Ark
The driveway at my mother’s house was shaded by three ancient silver maples that dropped dry, winged seeds across the hood of the Corolla as I pulled in beside her small garden shed. The house was a one-story brick ranch built in nineteen-sixty-two, with white vinyl shutters and a concrete porch where two plastic tubs of red geraniums were slowly dying in the September chill.
When I stepped through the screen door, the kitchen smelled of cinnamon toast and lemon bleach.
Maddie was sitting on the linoleum floor under the breakfast table, wearing her yellow corduroy overalls and one red sock. She was busily lining up four plastic horses along the pattern of the floor tiles, making small, wet snorting noises with her tongue against her teeth.
Ellie was at the table, her schoolbooks spread out between a half-eaten apple and a glass of milk that had left a wet ring on the wood. She was practicing her cursive—rows of capital Gs and capital Bs that looped and curled like barbed wire across the blue lines of her notebook.
"Mom!" Ellie said, dropping her pencil. The lead snapped against the edge of the table. "Did you bring the form for the field trip? Mrs. Gable said if I don't have the signed yellow form by tomorrow morning, I have to stay in the library with the third graders while everyone else goes to the cider mill."
I looked at her. Her hair was the same dark, honey-brown as mine, pulled back into two uneven braids that my mother had clearly secured with rubber bands from the kitchen junk drawer because one had already snapped, leaving a clump of curls spilling over her left ear.
"We’re not going to the cider mill, Ellie," I said. My voice was very calm. I walked over to the table, rested my hand on the top of her head, and pulled her gently against my hip.
My mother came out of the laundry room carrying a basket of folded dish towels. She was sixty-seven, with the same narrow shoulders and sharp collarbones that I had inherited, but her eyes were tired—the dull, pale gray of someone who had spent thirty years watching my father die by inches from emphysema before she finally had the house to herself.
"Nora?" she asked, setting the basket on the counter. She looked at my face, then at the pink slip of paper sticking out from the top of my purse. "Is it done?"
"It’s done, Mom," I said.
She let out a long, slow breath that smelled of peppermint tea. "Did he give you trouble about the child support? His mother called here at nine, you know. Wanting to know if I still had the silver serving platter they gave you for your fifth anniversary. Said it was an heirloom from the Bennett side and should stay in the family."
"He didn't give me trouble about anything," I said. "He gave me full custody. No visitation schedule. Just the statutory support."
My mother froze, her hand still resting on a folded blue-and-white towel. "Grant did that?"
"He has other priorities now," I told her. I didn't say the word son. I didn't want the word in my mother’s kitchen, where Ellie could hear it and turn it over in her eight-year-old mind until it became a stone she would carry in her pocket for the next twenty years. "Mom, where are the two green suitcases from the attic?"
She looked at me, her eyes narrowing slightly as she took in the three passports lying on the corner of the kitchen table beside Ellie’s milk glass.
"Nora," she whispered. "What are you doing?"
"We have three tickets on the five-fifteen shuttle to Toronto," I said. I didn't look at the clock on the stove, because I already knew it was 11:24 AM. "The connection to Dublin leaves at eight-thirty tonight. Erin has the room ready. The beds have stars over them."
"Dublin?" My mother’s voice didn't rise; it dropped into that frightened, hollow whisper she used when the doctor told us my father’s oxygen tanks were no longer keeping his levels above eighty. "Nora, you can't just run off to Ireland. He’s their father. The court will—"
"The court gave me sole legal and physical custody twenty minutes ago, Mom," I said. I pulled the pink sheet from my purse and laid it flat on the table, right over Ellie’s cursive exercises. "Look at paragraph four. 'The mother shall have exclusive right to determine the legal residence and domicile of the minor children without prior notification or consent of the non-custodial parent.' Grant didn't read it. He was too busy texting Tessa about their eleven o'clock appointment."
My mother looked down at the purple stamp. Her finger touched the embossed seal, tracing the outline of the county eagle with a nail that was short, clean, and unpolished.
"He really let them go?" she asked, her voice cracking at the edges.
"He told me to keep them," I said. "He said he had a son on the way."
Maddie looked up from under the table, holding a plastic horse with a broken tail toward my knee. "Mommy, does Uncle Erin have horses?"
"Aunt Erin," I corrected, kneeling down on the linoleum until my face was level with hers. I took the horse from her small, warm fingers. "And no, she doesn't have horses, baby. But the man who lives down the lane has sheep. Big sheep with black faces that eat grass right up against the garden wall."
"Can I pet them?"
"If you’re quiet," I said. "They’re very shy. You have to be as quiet as a mouse."
"I can be a mouse," Maddie said, nodding with immense seriousness. She crawled out from under the table, grabbed her second red sock from the floor, and began trying to work it over her heel with both thumbs.
Ellie hadn't moved. She was staring at the three blue passports with their gold eagles.
"Mom?" she asked. "Is Daddy coming to Dublin?"
I sat down on the chair beside her. I took her hand—her fingers were sticky from the apple—and held it between both of mine.
"No, Ellie," I said. "Daddy is staying here. He has a lot of work to do with his new house, and he won't be able to visit for a long time."
"Because of the new baby?" she asked.
My heart felt as if someone had taken a pair of rusted kitchen shears and snipped three of the small cords that kept it suspended behind my ribs. Children know. They always know. They hear the phone calls through the floorboards; they see the way their father looks at his watch while they are showing him a drawing of a turtle; they feel the cold air coming through the door five minutes before anyone says the word goodbye.
"Because Daddy has his life here," I told her, looking straight into her brown eyes, which were so like mine that looking at her was like looking into a small, clean mirror from thirty years ago. "And we are going to have our life with Aunt Erin. We’re going to live near the sea, Ellie. You can wear your yellow wellies every single day, and nobody will tell you to keep off the grass."
"Will I have my own room?"
"You and Maddie will share the room with the paper stars," I said. "The pink bed is by the window. You can see the sheep from the pillow."
She looked down at her cursive Gs. Her lower lip trembled once, just a tiny hitch that she caught by biting down on it, exactly the way I had done at the third red light on Maple Street.
"Okay," she whispered.
My mother stood up from the counter. She didn't argue anymore. She walked into the back hallway, pulled the folding attic stairs down with a loud, metallic creak, and disappeared into the crawl space above the ceiling.
Three minutes later, she came down carrying two vintage Samsonite suitcases—the hard-sided green ones with the brass latches that had belonged to my parents when they took their honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls in nineteen-seventy-one.
"The clothes are already washed," my mother said, her face pale but her hands moving with the brisk, ruthless efficiency of a woman who had survived two strikes at the ball-bearing plant and three winters without central heat. "I packed four sweaters for each of them on Sunday. I bought three pairs of woolen tights at the department store yesterday while you were at the lawyer's. They’re in the front pockets."
"Mom," I said.
She turned to me, her eyes wet, but her mouth set in a straight, hard line that looked like iron.
"Don't you 'Mom' me, Nora Bennett," she said, her voice shaking with a fierce, quiet rage that I had never heard from her while my father was alive. "You take those babies and you go. You don't let that family make these girls feel like second-best because they don't have a name on a commercial real estate sign. My grandmother came from Kerry with fourteen dollars sewn into the hem of her petticoat and three brothers who died of the croup before they were six. We don't beg for scraps from men who don't know what a daughter is worth."
She grabbed the green suitcase, snapped the latches open with two sharp clicks, and began pulling Ellie’s clothes from the laundry basket.
My phone, which was sitting on the edge of the kitchen counter beside the sugar bowl, began to vibrate.
The screen lit up.
APRIL BENNETT - INCOMING CALL.
I stared at the name. The phone buzzed against the ceramic tile, sliding half an inch toward the edge with every pulse.
Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.
"Are you going to answer that?" my mother asked, her hands full of pink flannel pajamas.
I picked up the phone. I looked at the clock on the stove. It was 11:42 AM.
"No," I said.
I pressed the red circle on the screen, slid the toggle to Block This Caller, and set the phone face down on the table.
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"Ellie," I said, turning toward the table. "Go get Maddie’s stuffed dog from the sofa. The one with the missing ear. We don't leave Barnaby behind."
"Barnaby's in the car already," Maddie called out from the hallway, her voice muffled by the sweater she was trying to pull over her head. "I put him in the front seat so he could see the trucks!"
