A story of someone we know, told through the eyes of his mother.
This character (I won't yet say who, I want to see if you can guess it before it is revealed!) has fascinated me for quite a while and had me wondering where he came from.
„Ah, Maureen, there you are!" Orla's broad grin, strong ivory teeth in a rosy face, flashed at her from behind the gleaming cash register towering on the counter. "I've got –"
She had Brendan and Moira with her, so she shook her head, just a curt, quick jerk, but it was enough that Orla understood and checked herself with a little cough.
"I've got some particularly lovely apples, I was going to say, and I might still have a slice or two of apple pie, too."
She paused slyly for effect and raised her eyebrows at the kids.
Brendan's mouth hung open expectantly, and Moira turned shyly towards her mother and whispered, "Can we, Mom? Or haven't we got enough money left?"
Maureen bit her lip, both because they were indeed in dire straits again and because a six-year-old girl should not have to be so terribly sensible as to ask this question if she wanted a treat.
Orla winked and rose on her tippy-toes to wordlessly pass each of the children a fat slice of pie across the counter.
"You know you're not supposed to do that", Maureen murmured from the corner of her mouth while she paid for the rest of the groceries.
"You know I don't care what you think I'm supposed to do", Orla murmured back. "And by the way, here it is." She reached under the counter and slipped the big brown envelope into Maureen's basket, tucking it carefully out of sight of curious eyes behind a couple of cabbages and a paper bag containing potatoes.
She needn't have worried for the moment. Neither of the children had noticed the little stealthy transaction. They were too occupied munching their pie and licking their fingers, and they grinned contentedly when they finally waved Orla goodbye.
Back home, Maureen sent them off to play in the street for a while, glad they didn't seem to wonder why they had not been told to help put the groceries away or to take care of some other little task. They were still young enough to simply accept anything good that came their way.
She lugged the heavy basket up the front steps and watched from the kitchen window until Moira's ginger plaits and Brendan's chestnut curls had disappeared around the next corner, hoping they wouldn't come home all filthy again.
But even if they did, she was ready to make a sacrifice and wash out their patched hand-me-downs in the kitchen sink after they'd gone to bed. Anything just to have ten minutes for herself and the contents of the brown envelope before the rest of the gang would descend on her and crowd the cramped place almost to bursting.
She took a deep breath and carefully closed the kitchen door before she took the envelope from the basket and began to peel away the flap, her heart pounding as she read the return address.
She loved all her children, she surely did.
She loved foul-tempered Niall and easy-going Katie, Kieran the whiner and Francis the stoic sufferer, spindly Moira and pudgy Rose, Brendan, who looked so much like herself, and Joe, who was the spitting image of his father.
There was a special place in her heart for Shelagh, who had only lived for three hours, and for Connor, who had not lived at all outside her womb, and for Stephen, taken by the measles when he was barely two and a half.
But, shameful as it was, there was one among them whom she loved just a teeny bit more. She knew that a mother should not feel such a thing, but she couldn't help it.
The one who had been gone for so long but was not buried in the churchyard of St. Clement's with his brothers and sister.
The one whose name was never spoken around the house any more, except maybe in hushed tones among the older children when Luke was not home. Brendan, Joe and Moira had been born too late to have any memory of him at all.
She whispered it under her breath now, although there was nobody home to hear her.
Ryan.
Her eldest living son, born a couple of months before poor little Stephen had died.
She didn't even have a photograph of him because there just never had been enough money to have one taken.
All she had was pictures in her mind, images she hoped would never fade, of a beautiful young man, tall and lithe with wild black curls and sparkling green eyes that had tiny golden lights in them.
He had been a beautiful child, too, with those large eyes and luxurious black lashes, soon willful and stubborn, soon sweet and funny and exuberant.
Growing up, he had still been quite a handful, his moods changing faster than the weather on the Irish coast.
More often than not, he had a been petulant and rebellious teen, with a scathing tongue he employed frequently against anyone who crossed him. Maureen had quickly given up washing any of her children's mouth with soap for using bad language because it just wasn't worth the while, but Ryan had been the worst, a veritable potty-mouth if there ever was one.
And yet, he could be immensely charming if he put his mind to it, which explained why he usually got whatever it was he wanted, from her and from most anyone else.
He had been an excellent impersonator, too. There was no one he was not able to imitate to perfection. Niall, Katie and Kieran had often shrieked with laughter when he tripped across the kitchen floor with tiny little footsteps, gathering invisible skirts and chirruping sweet nothings in the trilling tone typical of Luce McKenzie, the little floozy from next door, or paraded about with a grave look on his face and spoke mock blessings in an unctuous voice that wasn't hard to recognize as Father Brennan's.
She hoped to God the good Father had never got wind of how cruelly and accurately her son often mocked him.
He had always seen the best in the boy and even turned a blind eye when he and some friends had sneaked into the vestry well before Mass to drink most of the altar wine, leaving Father Brennan with hardly enough wine to fill half a cruet and with four swaying altar boys.
Any other priest would probably have caned them, making sure they wouldn't be able to sit for a week.
All Father Brennan had done was make them kneel and pray for an afternoon and promise solemnly they would never do it again.
She wryly remembered Ryan and his best friend Dylan Kelly serving in church, heading the entrance procession on festive days, with Ryan proudly swinging the censer and Dylan ceremoniously carrying the incense boat, or kneeling on the altar steps, their youthful faces appropriately grave, eyes cast earthward modestly, singing the responsories in their strong young voices.
While stocky Dylan had always appeared a little awkward in his vestments, Ryan seemed to have been born to wear the white pleated surplice with its inserts of lace and the blood-red, emerald-green or purple cassock underneath, standing perfectly tall and straight, the model of a good Catholic boy with the looks of a dark-haired angel or saint.
There was a picture of St. John the Apostle in her Lives of the Saints book in which the favourite disciple of the Lord Jesus bore a striking resemblance to her handsome son, or so she thought.
For a while, she had cherished secret hopes that he might even enter the seminary.
What a priest he would have made with his beautiful face and his lovely voice, which had broken into a slightly gravelly, enticing tenor. He'd certainly have been what Orla liked to call a "Father What-a-Waste".
Ryan's charms, however, had certainly not been wasted on the female specimens in the neighbourhood.
He had been barely fifteen when she caught him and Maisie Bell half-naked in the shrubs by the river, and she had lost count of the girls whose hearts he had broken after that.
After he left school, he had begun to work at Dolan's grocery store. That had been before Orla and Shane took over, back when old Jack Dolan was still in charge and ruled the place with an iron hand.
Unpacking crates, replenishing shelves, doing small repairs and making home deliveries had been all he was allowed to do at first, but once, when the old man was out with a head cold bad enough to make even a man of Jack Dolan's format surrender and stay in bed, Maggie had asked Ryan to help out in the shop and sent tongue-tied Shane out back to supervise deliveries and repair the storeroom door.
It hadn't been long until he had secured himself a permanent place behind the counter with his silver tongue, complimenting old ladies and flirting with young housewives, talking them into buying this slice of cake and that tasty chunk of cheese in addition to what they had actually wanted or needed.
On various occasions, he spontaneously climbed onto an upturned crate and put on a little impromptu show for the entertainment of the regulars, impersonating a well-known person or two or singing an Irish ballad. Maureen had never found out if it was true that he had once even jumped onto the counter to dance a jig to which he whistled the tune himself, but she wouldn't put it past him.
Jig or no jig, it was a fact that all the women in the neighbourhood loved Dolan's charming young shop assistant, half of the men hated him, and Jack Dolan had to admit that Ryan was a natural with customers and grudgingly let most of his flamboyancies fly, only chastising him when his jokes became all too bawdy or his mockeries too disrespectful.
The younger kids eagerly waited for his return every night. More often than not, he didn't come home empty-handed but with some leftover vegetables Maureen would use for supper or with small sweet treats for the little ones, sometimes even a bit of good tobacco which he would roll into as many cigarettes as he could and share them with Luke and later also with Niall.
Maureen cherished those rare moments when the three of them were peaceably smoking outside the front door, Luke leaning against the windowsill and the boys lounging on the doorstep.
The sad truth was that Ryan and his stepfather did not get along very well. She had never quite found out why, but she guessed that they were just too different.
Luke was a hard-working, gloomily silent man, toiling in Kennedy's sawmill for a pittance. He was wary of Ryan's flirtatious streak and happy-go-lucky nature, and she also had a feeling that he begrudged him his easy job at the grocery store.
But most of all, he hated the fact that Ryan was his mother's darling. She had never been able to hide entirely that she had a soft spot for her eldest surviving child, despite – or just because of? – the circumstances of his birth.
Luke knew what nobody else but Ryan and herself knew: Maureen had been married twice, but neither of her husbands was Ryan's father.
Everybody thought that he, like baby Stephen, was Raymond's, and he looked the part with his dark curly hair and fair skin that tanned quickly, but Raymond had not touched her since their first son had been born.
Their marriage had not been a happy one, and he had begun to satisfy his considerable appetites elsewhere ever since her belly had begun to swell.
If she was honest, she had not minded too much that she was spared his drunken groping and grunting and all the rest.
What she had minded was being left vastly alone with a baby and all the housework and no two pennies to rub together.
More and more often, Raymond had not even bothered to come home at night, and what little money he gave her barely sufficed for her and Stephen to scrape by.
If it hadn't been for Orla, her oldest, truest friend, she wouldn't have known how to bear it at all.