Uchenna's Apples (11 page)

With her armful of clothes, Uchenna went upstairs quietly past her Mam and Dad, who were lounging in front of the TV again; off to one side her Dad’s laptop, ignored for the moment, flashed with new e-mail. Her Mam threw Uchenna a glance as she went up the stairs: Uchenna virtuously kept on going as if she always remembered to grab her laundry and this was nothing unusual.

As she reached the landing she heard a chuckle down behind her: that was Mam, saying something amused under her breath to Uchenna’s Dad.
Good,
she thought.
I’m off the hook, even though I was over the wall.
And she grinned at the silly phrase as she shut the door to her room and dropped the laundry on the cushion-covered chest at the foot of her bed.

Uchenna flopped down on the bed, gazing at the bedroom window.
The poor Mammy Horse…
she thought.

Fretting again!
she could just hear Emer saying. But this was something that had to be fretted about.
And once you start thinking about something that way, it’s not so easy to just stop,
Uchenna thought.

She rolled over on her back and lay staring at the ceiling, turning over and over in her mind the problem of where to find horse food.
This is how Mam frets about me, I guess,
Uchenna thought.
Where I’m going and what I’m doing, what I should be doing to stay okay…
Sometimes it was a nuisance: yet at the same time, she wouldn’t like to wake up one morning and find that Mam had stopped worrying about her. She flopped over on her tummy again.
But she’s got a million more things to fret about than I have. Me and Dad, and her own life, her work. And the baby…

For that was something else that had occurred to Uchenna while she was looking at her Mam during the talking-to. The baby was really showing now, even when Mam came home wearing floppy medical scrub clothes. It was becoming more than just “the bump”, as her Dad called it.
I’m not Jimmy’s sucker at all,
Uchenna thought, amused.
It’s because my Mammy’s about to be a mammy again that the Mammy Horse is a big deal.

For a few moments she tried to imagine what it was going to be like. The other kids at school mostly went on and on about how the way your house got stunk up with diapers, about parents who didn’t have time for you any more because they were either up at four in the morning feeding the baby, or spending all day online applying to fancy preschools for something that couldn’t even keep its butt dry, let alone talk: about the money troubles that came with another mouth to feed, how you weren’t going to be getting the latest cool gadget when everybody else did any more, because the stupid baby needed a new car seat or something like that. But Uchenna, having heard it all endlessly, now found herself wondering,
Is it because the kids think everybody’ll laugh at them if they admit to
liking
the idea of a little brother? A little sister?
—and then she muttered under her breath, because her Mam had refused to get the test that would tell them all ahead of time which it was going to be.
Which do
I
want? Which would be better?
It could be cool to have a little brother, if you whipped him into shape real early.
But a little sister’s just going to wind up wearing your old clothes and resenting you for it…

Outside, the wind rose a little, and out in the back, Uchenna could hear leaves rustle. She thought of the apple tree, suddenly hearing again something Jimmy had said last night:
Sure they’d never eat anything that didn’t come from a supermarket.
At the time she’d been annoyed by that. But now she thought,
When
have
I ever eaten one of those apples?
She remembered her Mam warning her about them last year, when they got here in the spring: “Watch out for those, they’ll make your stomach ache something terrible if you eat them green…” The problem was that they were
always
green, even when they were ripe. The challenge lay in figuring out just when that was.

I’ll try one tomorrow,
Uchenna thought as she got up to put on some pajamas before going online to investigate in more detail just what horses ate…

*

It took her a long time to get to sleep, and so she probably shouldn’t have been surprised when the first thing she heard was her Mam’s voice outside the bedroom door: “Sweet, time to get up, it’s eight thirty, this is the third time I’ve called you now, you have to get washed up and I have to get you to the bus, will you come
on
—!”

Uchenna sat up in bed in utter shock.
Emer was going to text me?!
she thought, and rummaged under her pillow for her phone.
How did I not hear this go off?!

As she popped the phone open, she checked to make sure that it had been turned up on high. But it was, or at least as high as she ever set it for under-pillow alerts: higher would be heard down the hall in the master bedroom. “Feck feck feck feck,” Uchenna said under her breath as she jumped to the text menu and saw the last message to come in:

They re stil here!!!

She’s getting overexcited again,
Uchenna thought as she she hit “details” and the phone showed her when the message had come in.
0617.
Holy God but she wasn’t kidding about getting up early!
Uchenna thought. Hurriedly she texted back,
Overslept, OMG so sry, how were they?

She dropped the phone on the bed and went across the room to get her bathrobe off the hook behind the door. Uchenna hardly had time to get the robe on before the phone made the SMS Morse-code beep of an incoming message: she leapt for the phone and picked it up.
They’re fine, hungry still, apples really not enough, aren’t you going to be late?

Uchenna shook her head.
How
does
she text that fast? Unless she had it ready to go. But how would she know what I was going to say?
She laughed under her breath and texted back,
Right as always, gotta go, text you in the car.

As she dropped her phone on the bed again and headed for the bedroom door, from outside her Mam shouted,
“Uchenna, come on!”

“Here already,” Uchenna said as she came out, in a voice intended to let her Mam know she was fussing for no reason. But her Mam just nodded and turned away, saying as she headed for the stairs, “Good, now hurry up, when you’ve showered there’s just time enough to get some breakfast down you before you go….”

Her Mam sounded stressed, much too much so for a Saturday morning. But it wasn’t just the Saturday.
All that fighting again last night…
Uchenna thought: for this was another of the things that the master bedroom was too close for her to avoid hearing. Uchenna sometimes wished that if her folks wanted to fight they’d just go down to the pub and do it, like everybody else in Ireland seemed to do. She sighed.
They’re a rule unto themselves,
she thought, going into the bathroom and shutting the door.

It had been about work again. In the shower, Uchenna shook her head helplessly, for her Dad and Mam were fighting about this all the time lately.
It’s not like anybody’s going to repossess the house,
Uchenna thought.
She’s a doctor, he’s a high-end software guy, they’re both doing okay, in front of me they’re all about how it’s the other one who’s working too hard—
But everybody knew that Ireland was getting expensive to live in: more expensive than it had ever been. “Couldn’t believe it, went to
Geneva
last month on that outservice and it was less expensive than here,” was one of the things Uchenna had heard through the walls last night. There followed a great deal more discussion that Uchenna didn’t understand about expense accounts and how they didn’t go as far as they used to. That she found peculiar: the whole idea of expense accounts, she thought, was that your boss gave you as much money as you needed to do what the boss wanted when you were traveling.
Weird. Well, hope it’s nothing serious. Please, God, don’t let it be anything serious…

Uchenna finished up in the bathroom, got dressed in her hockey clothes, stuffed normal clothes in her change bag, and ran downstairs to breakfast. Half an hour later she and her Mam were in the SUV on the way to the bus pickup, which was in the parking lot of a small shopping center about a mile outside of town, on the far side of the train station— too far to walk if you were in any kind of hurry, as Uchenna was this morning. She spent the ride with her Mam texting Emer, which her Mam was used to. But when they pulled up in the parking lot and saw the minibuses there with most of Uchenna’s hockey team and Uchenna’s hockey team’s Mams gathered around it, suddenly her own Mam looked stricken. “I knew there was something I was forgetting,” she said. “Sweet, we still haven’t shopped, there’s nothing in the house, we’re going to waste away to nothing. I’ve got things to do this morning—”
What, I wonder?
Uchenna thought. “But this afternoon I should go to the Tesco: if we leave your Daddy to do it, all he’ll come back with are CDs and PC magazines, and sandwich stuff, and bread for toast. And I think he’s going to be busy. You want to come with me after hockey?”

Uchenna’s first thought was,
What a shame. Now I can’t go online and try to order hay…
“Sure, Mam,” she said, hurriedly kissing her and then bouncing across the seat to pop open the SUV’s door and climb out. “I’ll text you when we’re on the way back.”

“Okay, sweet, see you then…”

*

“Then” was around two in the afternoon. As Uchenna climbed out of the minibus with the rest of the team and saw that her Mam was alone in the waiting SUV, she was suddenly glad her Mam hadn’t called Emer’s and asked to let Emer come along shopping, as she sometimes did. Earlier, Uchenna had been just as glad that Emer hadn’t come to the game, for the same reasons: she’d made some really bad plays during the game, and had Emer been there she would have started teasing her again, telling Uchenna that she should take up baseball. As it was, she was going to hear about them soon enough anyway, from Emer and everybody else at school who cared about team sports. But Uchenna’s team had won: she’d made two of their four goals, and so made up for her scattered state of mind earlier in the game.
The Mammy Horse, the Mammy Horse,
had been the thought singing through her head all that morning, until the sheer physical exertion of the game drove it out of her brain.
What are we going to do about her??
But still, no ideas were coming, and Uchenna was feeling uncharacteristically stupid. She might not be a fast thinker, like Emer, but she usually managed to work out a plan eventually when she set her mind to it.

Maybe I should ask Mam—

Oh please,
she thought immediately after that.
I’m not that desperate. Besides, she’d just come up with some good reason I shouldn’t be getting involved—

As they drove off towards the Adamstown Tesco, Uchenna pulled out her phone and reviewed some of the earlier texts from Emer, trying to think of something useful.
Was he there?
—was one of the first texts she’d sent after hearing the horses were all right.

Yeah.

He okay?

Yeah. Later.

Uchenna had thought when she’d first seen the message that it was a little unusual for Emer to be so terse. Now she wondered what had been going on between Emer and Jimmy out there in the field past the Condom Ditch.
Nothing bad, or she’d have said.
Something else is going on…

…& the Mammy Horse??

She’s OK. Looks bigger.

That had thrown Uchenna off balance.
How can she be
bigger?
She’s like a blimp already. Has she got twins? Oh God, this is terrible!

They pulled into the parking lot of the Tesco supermarket and got out. This wasn’t one of the biggest Tescos—one of those gigantic outer-suburb places big enough that you thought maybe you could see the curvature of the Earth. But it didn’t have to be that big: just big enough to satisfy all of Adamstown’s needs—and that it did very well. It was also absolutely brand spanking new, and people did come in from other towns up and down the Naas Road to see what the “next generation” of Tescos was going to look like, and to pick up specialties carried by the Adamstown branch that you couldn’t get except in the really fancy supermarkets up in Dublin.

“Get us a cart, sweet?” Uchenna’s Mam said, handing her a two Euro coin.

“How big, Mam?”

Her mother sighed. “Better be one of the jumbo ones, I guess.” She grinned a rueful grin. “I just have to laugh at all your dad’s promises to shop last week! Only thing he’s shopping for right now is more software people…”

While her mam walked into the store, Uchenna ran over to the long line of locked-together carts in front of the store, stuck the coin into the slot-box fastened to the cart’s handle, pushed in the coin and pulled the cart loose when the chain let go. Uchenna caught up with her mam inside: she was standing in front of a big rack of glossy magazines, pointedly ignoring the ones about PCs and computer games. Her attention was on the ones that had to do with food. “How long has it been since I actually cooked anything?…” she said softly.

“Mam, it’s okay,” Uchenna said. “You made us cake last month.”

“Oh, that’s not cooking, sweet!” her Mam said. “That came out of a box.” She sighed as they pushed the cart along into the produce aisle, down among the heaps of gleaming polished red and yellow peppers and the bright red and green apples, the leafy lettuces and cabbages, the big twenty-pound bags of potatoes. “I’m just so tired when I get home at nights, it’s all I can do to stand up, sometimes. I feel guilty…”

“Mammy, cut that out!” Uchenna said. “Don’t you ever be guilty! You spend all day helping people. And carrying the baby around!”

Her Mam smiled a little at her, maneuvering the cart over toward the vegetables. “Well, it is a little like carrying a basket of washing all day! Not a really huge basket, just yet.” She sighed. “But getting bigger…” Then she turned an analytical eye on the salad greens. “Meanwhile, let’s get some of these, my sweet one. We’ve been eating nothing but meat, meat, meat all this week.”

“There was rice last night…”