She assumed it was going to be a bill, but the letter was addressed to her. He wanted to speak to her about her mother’s will and a codicil that had come to light. Elizabeth checked the date on the letter. A week after her mother’s funeral. She folded the paper and slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans. Hopefully it could be dealt with over the phone. She didn’t fancy having to drive all the way over to Kilkenny. As long as it didn’t involve her Uncle Jerry or complicate her plans, she didn’t care. Her goal was just to sell up and head back to New York with enough money to help Zach through college. He claimed he didn’t want to go but she knew that Elliot would read him the riot act when he got wind of their son’s plan. It was one of the reasons she had agreed to let Zach head west by himself to San Francisco for a visit with his father. She pulled her phone from her pocket. It would be after midnight in California, too late to call. She would ring in the evening. Looking at the screen she saw that she had a missed call and a voicemail. Zach! Even as she wondered how she hadn’t heard the phone ringing, she remembered she had left the phone on silent from the night before.
‘Hi, Mom. It’s me. Just to let you know I’ve arrived. Dad picked me up from the airport and everything is great. Really warm compared to home. Hope Ireland isn’t too depressing. I’m shattered so I’m going to crash. Love you.’
It was so lovely to hear his voice. His New York swagger trying to mask his adolescent excitement about his trip. She thought about calling him back but decided against it. He’d done what she had asked and called her, so she would let him enjoy his little taste of independence. She would wait to return the call. She wasn’t going to be that sort of mother, or more precisely she didn’t want to be her own mother.
One of the most enduring memories she had of her mother was the day Elizabeth was leaving Buncarragh to begin her studies at university in Dublin. She had expected her mother to perhaps be a little upset but what she was not prepared for was the emotional outburst that her departure had provoked. Her mother hadn’t just shed a tear as she waved her off from the door, she had collapsed into full-scale sobbing. Elizabeth remembered being embarrassed and impatient. It wasn’t as if she was heading off to war or a hospital for major surgery. She was just doing what dozens of other teenagers from Buncarragh were doing and their parents weren’t holding on to porch pillars, wailing as if they were watching their family trapped on a sinking ship. Afterwards, on the bus to Dublin, she had recalled all the excuses her mother had made over the years for not allowing her to go on any school trips. She had assumed it was to do with money, but in retrospect it seemed far more likely that her mother had an unhealthy attachment to her. Some might have said she was just being overly protective but to Elizabeth it had felt more like possessiveness. When the idea of her doing her postgraduate work in America had been broached, her mother had come up with a thousand reasons why Elizabeth shouldn’t. When the day finally came for her to fly to JFK, there was no sign of her mother at the airport to wave her off. She’d claimed she was ill, but Elizabeth knew the clingy truth.
In need of a caffeine fix, and with the twenty-euro note she had found in the pocket of her hoodie, she left the front door on the latch and headed out. The burglars of Buncarragh could help themselves. The only thing she cared about was her passport and that was being guarded by a rat.
Walking into Boost she fought the desire to roll her eyes. It was like stepping into one of the self-consciously hipster haunts in Williamsburg that Zach and his friends thought so much of. The exposed brick behind the counter, the chalkboards hanging from chains, the metal stools placed around old butcher’s blocks. It was a source of amazement to Elizabeth that such a place could exist in Buncarragh. She remembered the old café that Mrs Moore used to run, what had it been called? Coffee something … Pot? The odd thing was that the two women standing in front of her waiting at the counter could have been customers in Mrs Moore’s but here they were ordering skinny lattes and dry cappuccinos. She herself had always felt she was holding on to her Irish roots by stubbornly refusing to order anything other than an adjective-free coffee or tea, but now she found that the whole nation had moved on without her.
Sitting on a high stool, she perched her laptop on a wooden shelf that ran the width of the window. The Wi-Fi password was fullofbeanz. She scrolled through her emails, deleting the junk as she went. She was left with only two that she felt she should actually read.