Death of an Irish Mummy

by Catie Murphy

  CHAPTER 7

  The alarm went off much, much too early. Megan lurched out of bed, followed by two bouncing puppies, and only got dressed to take them for a walk because it was too cold out to do it in pyjamas. Still, dressed was an optimistic term: She put sweatpants and a huge jumper on over her PJs without bothering to put a bra on, and shoved her feet into cloppy shoes she’d bought just for the purpose of early-morning walks. The cold air did less to wake her up than she’d hoped—five hours of sleep just wasn’t enough at this point in her life—and she put coffee on to brew when they got back to the flat. “I could use a place with a garden,” she told the empty apartment, as if it would take dictation on her personal needs. The puppies, content with their empty bladders, flopped down and went back to sleep. Megan mumbled, “Traitors,” and went to shower.

  The hot water, followed by the scent of brewing coffee when she emerged, went miles toward awakening her. Increasingly chipper, she ironed her uniform, stole eight minutes to do the most basic yoga stretches possible, and headed out the door with her insulated coffee mug in hand. The previous evening’s text message was from Brian, sending her information about the people she was supposed to meet later that morning. A second one, sent while she was sleeping, was from Jelena, saying she’d miss Megan at the gym, and to call when she got the chance. Megan muttered, “See, not every text is mission critical and has to be checked immediately,” to a world that was neither listening to nor interested in her heretical opinions.

  Leprechaun Limos employed about thirty full- and part-time people, with a dozen or fifteen drivers and roughly the same number of maintenance and support staff. Usually, not more than six or ten of them were in the shop at any given time, and there were usually far fewer this early in the day. Today an astonishing bustle filled the garage, well over a dozen people there despite it being just after six on a Wednesday morning. Furthermore, it all basically came to a stop when Megan walked in, everyone’s gaze swiveling toward her. Megan blinked in confusion, opened her mouth to speak, and released a wicked little cackle instead. “What is this, my twenty-one-gun salute?”

  Tymon, the Irish-born child of Polish immigrants, glanced nervously at their coworkers, and, at their encouraging nod, stepped forward. He’d clearly been appointed their spokesperson, despite being barely into his twenties, but he spoke two of the three languages used in the shop fluently, and a third—Irish—that almost nobody else did. His communication skills outstripped most of theirs, including Megan’s. “First we wanted to make sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m grand. I’m okay. I’m fine.” The lady, Megan thought, doth protest too much, but Tymon’s shoulders relaxed a little and he nodded.

  “Good. Good. Grand. The second thing is we’re unionizing.” Colour flushed Tymon’s cheeks as he made the bold statement, like he was afraid of Megan’s opinion. His nervousness drained away, though, as Megan’s astonished smile bloomed.

  “Seriously? You are? We are? That’s brilliant!”

  Relief swept not just Tymon’s face, but everyone else’s too. Suddenly they were crowding around, offering hugs and sympathy for the madness Megan had been through with Orla over the past day. Someone was saying how they’d been afraid Megan wouldn’t be on board with unionizing because so many Americans didn’t seem to like them, while someone else lifted their voice to say no one should be treated the way Megan had been, and Tymon talked over them all, saying, “Our power is in working together. Orla can’t replace us all at once, even with drivers in Dublin looking for work, especially if we sit in. We won’t let her fire you, Megan. This isn’t right.”

  “You’re amazing. You’re all amazing.” Megan waded into the group, hugging and trying not to spill her coffee on anyone. “Don’t do anything dumb on my behalf, though, okay? Don’t get fired over me. If you’re going to engage in industrial action, wait until you’ve got all the union paperwork, or whatever it takes, in place. I don’t want anybody else in tro—”

  “The whole world is in trouble,” Tymon said fiercely. “We’ll stand together so we don’t fall apart.”

  Megan smiled. “A modern-day Benjamin Franklin.” At Tymon’s quizzical eyebrows, she said, “When they were signing the American Declaration of Independence he said ‘We must all hang together, or we will certainly all hang separately.’ Same idea.”

  “Smart man.”

  Megan’s smile turned to a laugh. “He’s generally considered to be, yeah. Look, lads . . .” She smiled around at the group of them, aware that in this particular case they were all, in fact, lads. The first time she’d heard a teen girl address her all-girl cohort as “lads,” she’d laughed so hard she’d nearly wept, although she knew it wasn’t actually any more peculiar than the generic American use of “guys.” It was one of a hundred cases of being separated by a common language, and there were aspects of it Megan figured she’d never really get over. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you all. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this, but thank you.”

  “Learned Yoruba,” Dayo said dryly. Tymon said, “Stayed late to help clean the cars when you didn’t have to,” and Cillian, who had just come in from dropping his vehicle in the back, added, “Taken late shifts so we could go see our new nieces,” over several other peoples’ responses. Megan had to wipe her eyes, and sniffled as she tried to stop the rush of answers.

  “Well, okay, thank you. Thank you. I have to go or I’ll be late, but thank you.” She was mobbed with hugs again before they let her leave, but got on the road with just enough time to drive the forty minutes up to the airport. Traffic through O’Connell Street and Drumcondra, the two bottlenecks, was still light enough that she reached the M1 motorway in good time, and made it into the reserved parking area at the airport with two minutes to spare before the official landing time.

  Of course, it turned out the flight from Dallas had already landed, but the Williams sisters would have customs to get through, and possibly luggage to collect. Megan still made a face as she scurried through the airport, nodding greetings to porters and security she recognized from her regular visits there, and scooted up to the arrivals gate with Williams in bold text across her phone screen.

  Then she had to wait for forty minutes for them to clear customs and collect luggage, but she vastly preferred having to wait over the perpetual worry that she would somehow arrive late and have upset clients waiting on her. She rang Jelena, updating her on the entire ridiculous saga with Orla, who had thoroughly earned the pretty Polish woman’s pique. Tempting as it was, Megan turned down Jelena’s offer to go have a word with Orla, although the idea of watching her buff not-officially-a-girlfriend loom over her boss was pretty appealing. “Maybe next time,” she promised, and Jelena said, “I’ll hold you to that,” before hanging up.

  Personal business taken care of, Megan meandered up to the waiting area in front of the arrivals doors and stood around with other drivers holding their clients’ names on phones and printouts. Chats that sprang up about new grandchildren, enraging family members, the latest sports, and politics kept the drivers occupied while they waited, and Megan’s American opinion—or more accurately, her ability to explain often incomprehensible-to-Europeans American decisions—was highly sought after. “Explain it again,” one of the older drivers, a white guy named Liam, said to her that morning. “The part about being embarrassing millionaires.”

  Megan laughed. “No, ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaires. ’ America’s got this national mythology about how we can all pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and that we’ll all be millionaires if we only try hard enough. So the ‘temporarily embarrassed’ there means ‘we have somehow accidentally found ourselves without the millions we deserve, but as soon as we have them, we definitely won’t want to pay taxes on it.’ The thing is that while they’re feeding us the bootstraps mythology with mother’s milk, they don’t explain graduated taxes or how few people are actually millionaires or how much money a million—or a billion—dollars really is.”<
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  “I just read that a million seconds is eleven and a half days and a billion seconds is thirty-two years,” another driver said incredulously. Like Tymon, Alannah was young and Irish-born to immigrant parents, her Kenyan heritage clear in dark brown skin and tightly curled black hair. She was, also like Tymon, very cute. Megan kept wanting to introduce them to each other. “If I had a billion euros and spent one a second I would be fifty-three before I’d spent them all.”

  Liam proclaimed, “That’s mental,” and went to collect his clients. That signaled the breakup of their morning chat. Megan would repeat something like it later in the week with another group, or maybe just admire baby pictures and—maybe—laugh over the story of Ms. Kettles and the dinner disaster of the evening before. Those loose-knit friendships and the glimpses into other people’s lives were among the reasons she really did love her job.

  A text filled with exasperated emojis, their faces frowning and their hands thrown in the air, came through from Detective Bourke, and she wrote back a sorry not sorry? I mean, I’m glad I’m not 100% fired . . . before putting her phone back in her pocket. A mix of contentment and sorrow settled in her chest as the Dallas flight passengers began to flood through the arrivals doors into the cordoned triangle, and then out to the airport proper.

  Like Raquel, Jessie and Sondra were obviously their mother’s daughters, though one of them had the hip-length hair and soft-looking clothes of a hippie, and if Megan hadn’t been looking for facial resemblances, she wouldn’t have pegged her as a Williams. The other looked buttoned-down and strained, wearing four-inch heels and carrying her shoulders so high that Megan thought she spent most of her life stressed, and that she was now near to breaking. They were both pale with grief and lack of sleep, the strained one marked with hot spots of colour on her cheeks.

  The hippie saw Megan’s sign first and pointed, guiding her sister toward Megan. The strained sister, whose hair was pulled into a braid so tight Megan got a sympathetic headache, nearly crumpled when she saw Megan, and it was the hippie who said, “I’m Jessie. This is Sondra. Thank you for coming,” as they approached the cordoned barrier.

  “Megan Malone. Leprechaun Limos, and I, would like to extend our sympathies. I’m so sorry for your loss,” Megan said gently. “Let me help you to the car.” She gestured down the length of the cord, indicating they could come that way, and they both followed obediently. They only had one suitcase and one carry-on between them, plus a couple of personal bags, and Megan offered to take the former with another small gesture. Sondra immediately handed the suitcase over but Jessie shook her head, whispering, “I can handle it.”

  “Of course. Don’t be shy about changing your mind, though, please.” She guided them out of the airport to the car service private parking lot, held the Lincoln’s door for them, and wasn’t surprised, when she got in the car herself after putting the luggage in the trunk—the boot—to see the buttoned-down sister staring glassily out the windows. Jessie cast first Megan, then Sondra, an agonized glance, but apparently didn’t feel she could reach out to her sister with someone watching.

  Or maybe, Megan thought, Sondra’s rigid frame just never allowed anyone to comfort her. Megan herself liked to maintain a certain degree of professional attire when she flew, but she also chose those clothes carefully for comfort: knit skirts over leggings, flat shoes, layered shirts that could be taken off or put back on depending on the varying temperatures in the plane. Sondra Williams wore a structured skirt suit half a size too small, with an unforgiving waistband and a blouse too thin to keep an airplane’s chill out beneath a lined, shoulder-padded jacket that would be too warm to keep on. Her one concession to the eight-hour flight appeared to be having undone the three buttons that snugged the jacket around her waist. It looked like hell to travel in.

  “How long is it to the city?” Jessie whispered. “Is Raq all right?”

  Megan, pulling out of the parking lot, glanced at the clock. “The drive in will be slow this morning, ma’am. We’ll be hitting the eight am traffic head-on. I’m sorry about that. I saw Raquel late last night and I think she was as well as she could be under the circumstances.”

  “Oh, please don’t call me ma’am. I’m Jessie. And you’re American?”

  “I am. From Austin, actually.” Megan offered Jessie a little smile in the rearview mirror, and noticed that Sondra glanced her way too, at that confession. “I’ve been here in Ireland about three years now.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Sometimes. I did twenty years in the military and stationed overseas and on tour a couple of times, so in some ways I’ve been gone a long time. I miss the instant family the military brings, but it’s not quite the same as missing the States. I suppose in the end I felt separate enough from the idea of America to be comfortable living outside of it, at least.”

  “What’d you do in the military?”

  Megan smiled. “Drove cars, mostly. Field medic too, because it seemed like it went well with driving people in and out of combat zones, but mostly I drove.”

  “And you’re still driving.”

  “And I’m still driving,” Megan agreed. “I love meeting people, and this is a great way to do that.”

  “Ever met anybody famous?”

  Megan’s smile grew. She knew the young woman—Jessie Williams couldn’t be more than twenty-five—was distracting herself with questions, but crawling through morning traffic toward Dublin would be boring even if there weren’t emotional trauma weighing the drive down. “You know Niamh O’Sullivan?”

  “The actress?” Jessie straightened. “You’ve met her? Really?”

  “She was actually one of the first people I drove for Leprechaun Limos when I got to Ireland. I ended up helping her out of a jam and we got to be friends.”

  “Oh my god,” Jessie said breathlessly. “What’s she like?”

  “What’s it matter?” Sondra broke in with a snarl. “Mama’s dead. Who cares about some stupid actress?”

  Jessie’s face went even paler as tears rose in her eyes. “You think I don’t know it doesn’t matter? It’s just a conversation, Sonny. Jesus. You won’t talk to me so why shouldn’t I at least hear about Niamh O’Sullivan?”

  “What do you want me to say?” Sondra shouted. “All this bullshit about earls and Ireland got Mama killed and now you’re sitting here gossiping about an actress like this is some kind of vacation and—”

  “Shut up shut up shut up!” Jessie’s face went red, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Oh my god, shut up, you awful bitch! It’s not my fault you and Mama weren’t speaking! It’s not my fault Trevor left you because you’re such an uptight bitch! It’s not my fault your stupid business is failing and your kids hate you and that Raquel took the time off to come with Mama instead of you doing it like the oldest sister should! This was Mama’s dream and all you could do was shit on it, and now she’s dead and you don’t get to say how I deal with that and if I want to hear about some stupid actress then I goddamn well will and you can just shut up!” She subsided into heaving breaths while Sondra, whose cheeks now glowed so red she looked burned, clenched her jaw and turned a hard, furious gaze out the window.

  Megan had long since developed the apparent inability to hear personal details about clients’ lives, and said, “Niamh’s amazing,” into the heavy silence, like nothing had happened. She went on, talking easily about her friend, not mentioning anything a magazine interview wouldn’t reveal, but below the light flow of chatter, she thought maybe Detective Bourke wouldn’t be so sorry she was hanging out with the Williamses, after all.

  * * *

  The Williams sisters, it turned out, were all supposed to be sharing a room. Megan privately gave it until noon before one of them—probably Sondra, but she wasn’t sure—rented a second to get some privacy. She’d developed an idea of sororal affection between the sisters from what little Raquel had said about them, but that idea was obviously miles off the mark. Maybe Raquel was the peacemaking middle c
hild, although Megan had also thought she was oldest. All of her preconceptions were going out the window, and she desperately wanted to be a fly on the wall during their reunion in the Gresham. There was, however, no way for her to invite herself beyond bringing their luggage up to the room, where she stood behind them an uncomfortably long time while they waited for Raquel to open the door.

  She looked as though she’d been on a three-day bender when she did, with her hair unnaturally flat on one side and a tangled knot on the other. Her makeup was smeared into raccoon eyes, and she honestly looked as though she didn’t know who her sisters were, for a few seconds. Then she burst into tears and fell into Sondra’s arms, although the older Williams woman did little to actually catch her. Jessie stepped forward and put her arms around both of them—mostly around Raquel—and held on while two of them sobbed and the third maintained her stony silence. Finally, wet-eyed and snuffling, Raquel lifted a miserable gaze to Megan. “Thank you so much for getting them. I knew you wouldn’t let us down.”

  “I’m glad I can help.”

  “You’re being paid to help.” Sondra extracted herself from the unwelcome embrace and took the suitcase. “I understand Mama engaged your services for the week but I can’t imagine we’ll nee—”

  “Of course we will! We’re going to Lyetrum—”

  Raquel said, “Leetrim,” for which Megan was grateful, and Jessie picked it up without hesitation. “Leitrim to see our great-great-granddaddy’s lands—”

  Sondra said, “Great-great-great,” in tones more scathing than Megan had known could be applied to a generational listing.

  Jessie made an obvious decision to ignore her and continued. “—and we’ll need a driver for that, I don’t want to try driving on the wrong side of the road when I’m tired and sad and—” Whatever else she had to say disappeared into quiet tears. Raquel began drawing her into the room and Megan made a small apologetic motion to get Raquel’s attention.