No Way to Say Goodbye - Anna McPartlin [38]
Their mother took control. “It involves thickening of the valves. A good diet can be preventive but you should all get checked out. You’re young men so it shouldn’t be a problem, but it’s better to know.” She sat back in her chair.
Vicky looked at her husband with concern. Steven looked at Barry with the same concern. Even the twins were silenced. Ivan stared at his plate. His mother leaned over and squeezed his hand. “It’ll be fine,” she said to the table.
Afterwards the others made their way into the sitting room. Ivan insisted on helping his mother in the kitchen. She allowed him to, knowing that he hated being in the crowded sitting room alone to be reminded of the family that had left him. Halfway through drying up, he sat up on the counter. “Wow, a separation and a possible heart condition all in the space of a year. I must be on a roll.”
She laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous!” She scrubbed hardened potato from a sudsy plate.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not going to have a heart problem,” she told him. “You and Fintan take after me. It’s Barry and Séamus who won’t be able to eat a fry for the next forty years.”
Ivan laughed – he couldn’t help it. His mother wasn’t a doctor, yet he knew that if she said he had nothing to worry about, it was the truth.
“Thanks, Mam,” he said, leaping off the counter like a teenager. He gave her a kiss on the cheek.
“You’ll get checked, though?” she asked, and he nodded. He walked to the door.
“Tell me this,” she said, “who’s your new lunch mate?”
He was confused.
“The American,” she said.
“Oh, Sam!”
“Tell my niece her auntie Sheila likes the cut of her new neighbour.” She winked.
Ivan grinned. “Will do.”
“Tell her to come and visit, and sure if she likes she can bring him along.”
Ivan left the room laughing.
By five he was on the water and in the company of the American the whole town seemed to be talking about. Sam wasn’t much of a fisherman but he was a quick study and Ivan enjoyed guiding him. The sea was crystal clear and the mackerel were biting so it was shaping up to be a pleasant evening. They had been fishing for more than an hour when Sam broached the topic of his standoffish neighbour and commented on her unfavourably. Ivan let him speak, then mentioned that the woman he was dismissing was his own cousin and best friend.
“You’re kidding me?” Sam said.
“I’m not,” Ivan replied, and laughed heartily, thoroughly enjoying his new friend’s discomfort. It was then he had offered him two pieces of valuable information. One: a warning never to speak ill of a local unless he was absolutely sure there was no connection between the person to be spoken of and the person being spoken to. And two: the reason why his cousin was as she was.
Ivan spoke of how he’d watched Mary beat the unbeatable, surviving a devastating crash to go on to give birth to her dead boyfriend’s son, and then he had told him where his neighbour’s little boy had died. The tale was devastating. A beautiful child broken and a mother’s screams. She had held him in her arms knowing that death was instant and that no doctor could bring him back. Others had stood around, silently bearing witness to her agony while clinging to their own children, covering their small faces from the horror before them. As a storyteller Ivan could transport his listener to another time and place. Sam felt a lump in his throat and sat quietly, feeling pretty guilty for judging the unfortunate woman.
Ivan was silent for a while and Sam didn’t know what to say so he concentrated on the water. After a few minutes, the pole bobbed and then he felt strain. Ivan returned to the present to help him hook the smallest fish he’d seen in a long while. They laughed and threw it back. Then they shared a flask of coffee and shot the breeze about nothing in particular.
But Sam wanted to hear more about Mary and about what had happened in the aftermath of such tragedy. Ivan didn’t seem to mind returning to it.
“Well, we thought we’d lost her,” he said, scratching out the sea salt lodged in his