Her Name Is Rose by Breen Christine

Author:Breen, Christine [Breen, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781466857230
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Eleven

The thing about Iris Bowen was she liked to talk to people, even strangers. Like a few days earlier with Thornton Pletz, the Polish-American waiter at Botolph’s. If it hadn’t been for the dead-ended conversation about Hilary, she would have gone on and asked him about his family in Europe. Had he any relatives still there? Did he have children? Or, with Kerry at the airport the day she arrived, if she hadn’t been so overwhelmed with the sense of arrival and her mission, Iris would have asked in what village in County Kerry her granny was born.

At home in Clare, she struck up conversations with the people behind shop counters, too. With the man who sold her flowers on a Wednesday afternoon at the street market in Ennis, with the fair-haired fishmonger from Slovakia, who had developed a habit of asking each time he met her, “When is Rose due back?” To which Iris usually replied, “In a few weeks.” Her answer, too, had become a habit. Their frequent exchanges (Iris always bought a piece of halibut from him on a Friday) had turned to repartee, which made the Slovakian and other customers in the fish shop smile.

A few things like that, little anchors, helped her cope with loss.

And, it made her feel less lonely.

Before flowers and fish, Iris would often meet Tess for lunch in Ennis. In winter they sat in old feather-stuffed chairs beside the fire, just inside the front door of the Old Ground Hotel. In the summer they sat in garden chairs under the ancient beech tree on the moss-lined patio. They became regulars among regulars and the owner, an art lover named Allen, got to know their names. He never failed to ask how Rose was getting on. He’d known Luke because Luke often lunched there on his noncourt days and they’d become friends. When Luke was in hospital, Allen would send meals from the hotel’s kitchen. One day he had driven all the way out to Ashwood to deliver a bread-and-butter pudding, which was Luke’s favorite.

All of this Iris thought about the following morning as she stood at the bedroom window upstairs in Grace Hale’s house, wondering if she should phone Tess again. She was sure Grace wouldn’t mind if she used her phone. She listened to the unfamiliar sounds of Boston’s early morning traffic, of buses and cars and garbage trucks. American cities woke so early. She was used to birds and tractors and, at this time of year, the disappearing song of the cuckoo.

Her hands were restless and she kept fussing with her hair. Twice since rising, Iris had changed her clothes. Nothing looked right. Sitting on the bed fastening her sandals she recalled the dream she’d had early that morning. Luke was in it. He was walking out of the sea holding a box. He walked toward her but the tide kept coming with him and he made no progress to the shore. He wasn’t struggling, just walking in his suit, ankle deep in the tide pools.

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