Semi-Sweet (22 page)

“Who?”

“Adam and Hannah—he’s moved into her house.” She laughed lightly. “I assume it’s just to help her out financially.”

He studied her. “I would imagine so.”

“On the other hand,” Leah said, “I wonder if he was just waiting for you and her to break up.”

Patrick sipped his wine. “And I wonder,” he said mildly, “why you’re being such a bitch.”

Leah looked innocently at him. “I have no idea what you mean,” she said. “I’m just making small talk.”

And for the next forty minutes, while they played with their food and made more small talk, he didn’t take her hand again
or touch her foot with his under the table.

“He ran out in front the car,” Tom said. “There was no way I could avoid him.”

It was the first thing he’d said to her since they’d left the police station. Alice had refused the guard’s offer to drive
them home, dreading their arrival in a squad car, the twitching net curtains all along the road. Not that, on top of everything
else.

But the taxi they’d gotten instead just reminded her of the night before—only one night ago!—and she’d sat rigidly on the
backseat, gripping her handbag and trying to think of nothing at all.

They’d let themselves into the house, and Tom had gone straight upstairs, and she’d let him. She hadn’t called him when the
kettle boiled, and he hadn’t appeared by the time Geraldine showed up an hour later, having closed the shoe shop early for
the day.

And only when Geraldine had left and the sky was almost completely dark, did Alice hear his footsteps on the stairs. She picked
up the tea towel as the kitchen door opened and he walked in.

“He ran out in front of the car,” he said immediately, his voice low and broken. “There was no way I could avoid him. It happened
in a second—there was nothing I could do.”

Alice finished drying the cups she and Geraldine had used. She put away the banana bread that neither of them had touched.
She kept her back to him as she took potatoes from the vegetable rack and brought them to the sink.

“You saw it too,” he said. “You saw how he ran out. You were there too.”

Alice began to peel the potatoes, noticing with some surprise that her hands were shaking.

“Alice,” he said, “didn’t you? Didn’t you see how he ran out?”

She faced him then, a half-peeled potato in her hand. “You shouldn’t have been driving,” she said, trying not to make the
words too loud. “You should have let me drive. I
offered
, I
said
I would—” A wobble on the last word made her stop and take a breath. “You were drunk last night,” she said more quietly,
“and you were still under the influence this morning, and a little boy—”

Her voice cracked again, and she turned back to the sink and tried to finish peeling the potato, but she could hardly see
it with her eyes full of tears.

“I felt okay,” Tom said. “I didn’t feel that I couldn’t drive. I would have let you if I had.”

Alice wiped a sleeve across her face and went on peeling.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “If you knew how bad I feel—”

She whirled then, the potato flying from her hand and thumping onto the floor between them, skidding across to rest by the
fridge. “
You
feel bad?
You
didn’t lose a child today, did you?” The words bursting out of her now, flying from her mouth. “You have no idea how those
people feel, no
idea
, because you’re too busy feeling sorry for
yourself 
!”

She clamped her mouth shut. She crossed the room and grabbed the potato, her heart thudding, the breath gasping out of her
nose in sobs.

She heard, or sensed, Tom leaving the kitchen. She dropped the potato and the peeler into the sink and held on tightly to
the edge, trying to calm herself.

A file will be sent to the prosecutor,
the curly-haired guard had told her.
Because your husband failed two breathalyzer tests, he will be charged today with drunken driving. As this is his first offense,
we can release him on station bail, and he’ll be summoned in due course, probably in a few months, to appear at the district
court and be formally charged with whatever the prosecutor decides.

And what then?
Alice had asked, her hands twisted together around the fresh tissues he’d given her. Terrified of his answer, and terrified
of not knowing his answer.

He’ll be summoned to the circuit court for trial. That’ll take another few months, probably in the autumn sometime.
He’d seen the next question in her face and added,
Sentencing will depend on the charge, and on how the case goes in court—it’s impossible to anticipate the outcome at this
stage.

But he could go to prison?

The guard had met her terrified eyes calmly. Her situation probably meant nothing to him. He must hate Tom, another drunk
driver who’d mowed down and killed a little child.

He could go to prison, yes,
he’d said.
Quite possibly.

The worst of all, the part that wouldn’t leave her head, was that she’d made him go to work. She’d forced him to get up, too
afraid of what people might say if he hadn’t gone in. She could have left him asleep, she could have phoned Stephen and said
he wasn’t well, and everyone would have gotten over it. They’d have dealt with it. And a little child would still be alive.

After a while Alice pried her hands from the edge of the sink. She went to the cupboard and took down a can of beans. She
opened the can and spooned the beans straight into her mouth, standing by the window, looking out into the blackness and seeing
nothing except the little flying blue boy, whose life they had ended.

“He was only four,” Hannah said. “He was in Junior Infants. His mother was walking him to school.”

They sat at the table, their dinner plates stacked but not removed. She should have been making her usual preparations for
the morning, but instead she cradled her coffee.

“And the driver was Alice’s husband?” Adam asked. He and Alice had talked some years before about setting up a Web site for
Glass Slipper, but in the end it hadn’t happened.

Hannah nodded. “Tom…You’d have met him at Mam and Dad’s twenty-fifth. They’d all been out the night before, and apparently
he was quite drunk going home.” She sighed. “He was breathalyzed when it happened, and he was still over the limit, imagine.”

“It can happen. And Alice was with him in the car?”

“Yeah…She’s in an awful way, Mam says.”

Adam reached for a cupcake and peeled off the paper. “That would wreck your head. I’ve often thought I’d rather be run down
myself than do it to someone else.”

Hannah shuddered. “God, don’t talk like that. Mam was in the shop on her own all day. She didn’t hear from Alice till the
afternoon, when they got home from the police station.”

“He wasn’t kept in after failing the breath test?”

“No—he was released on bail.”

They sipped their coffee in silence. The rain lashed in sheets against the window. Hannah imagined the little boy’s parents
listening to the same pelting rain, the same howling wind. Or maybe they didn’t hear it, maybe they were beyond hearing it.

“Una was so upset when she rang me, poor thing. Imagine, she was apologizing for missing work. I told her to take as long
as she needed.”

“What did you say he was? Her nephew?”

Hannah nodded. “Her sister Claire’s son. Remember I told you I baby-sat for them. He was the first grandchild, on both sides—they
all doted on him, apparently.”

She remembered Claire as a youngster, all wiry and long-legged, mad into sports, couldn’t care less about clothes or boys
or anything unless it involved a field and a ball. But it was Claire, and not prettier, quieter Una, who’d gotten pregnant
at seventeen, just a few years after Hannah had given up baby-sitting. Everyone had been convinced that the boy, the father,
was going to disappear, like so many before him, and that Claire’s parents would be saddled with the child’s upbringing.

But Dave hadn’t done what everyone expected. He’d stayed around, eventually managing to provide a home for his small family.
Hannah had lost touch with the girls by this time, but Una had brought her up to date.

Dave’s a house painter. He works with his cousins. He and Claire rent a house in Springwood Gardens. It’s nothing special,
but Dave has it looking lovely. He’s got an eye for color. You should see Jason’s bedroom—it’s brilliant. The kind of room
every boy would love.

She’d taken out her wallet and shown Hannah a photo of a round-faced, earnest little boy with an unevenly cut, pale-colored
fringe and the full Cupid’s-bow lips of the very young.

He’s a bit older than that now—this was taken last summer. His hair is getting darker, too. Claire hates that. She wants him
to stay blond.

He’s gorgeous,
Hannah had said, and Una had smiled.

Isn’t he? He’s spoiled rotten, but he’s not a bit cheeky.

And now he was dead, and his hair would never get darker. Hannah cradled her coffee mug and chased a crumb with her finger.
“God, I can’t imagine what his mother is going through right now. Life’s so unfair, isn’t it?”

“Sure is.”

“Anything funny on the telly?”

They moved into the sitting room and searched around and eventually found
Curb Your Enthusiasm
, and sat watching as Larry got into an argument in an ice-cream shop, but for once Hannah found it all terribly pointless.

The church was packed. It might have been Christmas Day. Most of the pews were full, people shuffling along to make room for
still more. The atmosphere was thick with the smell of damp clothes and waxy flowers and furniture polish.

The little white coffin sat in front of the altar, a single wreath laid on top, spelling out
JASON
in red carnations. Someone was playing a tune on the organ that sounded familiar to Hannah.

Cupcakes on the Corner was closed, the first time in its twelve weeks of existence that she’d closed it outside normal working
hours.
“Back at one,”
she’d written on the sign she’d stuck to the door. Two hours off to mourn Una’s nephew, Claire’s son.

“God, it’s warm.”

Beside Hannah, Geraldine fanned herself with a hymn booklet. Glass Slipper was closed, too, had remained closed since Friday,
three days before. “
Closed until further notice
” was what Geraldine had written on the sign that went up on that door, the day after the accident.
God knows when we’ll reopen,
Geraldine had told Hannah.
Poor Alice is in an awful state. I’ve told her I can manage on my own, but she hardly hears what I’m saying, she’s so distracted.

There was a rustle among the congregation, and Hannah looked up to see a priest walking onto the altar. She got to her feet
with everyone else. The priest told them in a soft voice that they were about to take part in the Mass of the Angels. He said
that he had baptized Jason, that he had met him often in the Junior Infant class when he visited the school. He remembered
Jason’s cheerfulness and love of drawing pictures, and he said a terrible cross had been given to Jason’s loving family.