EXILES by Joseph O’Malley

Grace Quinn sat in the dark kitchen imagining all sorts of horrors. She listened for the water’s whistle so she could wet the tea and calm herself as she waited for the sound of Dennis’s car pulling over the gravel in the driveway. He’d always been a good boy, and she hoped he still was.
Grace, a small, shapely woman with curves that fell just short of fat, had curly silver-threaded black hair that she most often wore in an upsweep because of its tendency to sprout like stiff wires at all angles if left untamed. Tonight she left it down and let the curls fall where they may. Her Thom thought her a fool to be waiting up for their grown son. She hadn’t done so for Colm, the oldest, or Myles, or Iggy, who was a slice of the devil himself, or either of the girls, Eileen and Nora, so why was Dennis different, he wanted to know. But he knew. Dennis was the youngest, and had sprung almost from out of nowhere. Just after Nora was born, Grace had thought the change was coming on her early, but it turned out to be Dennis. She and Thom had just opened the café and bookstore near Wayne State called The Bee-Loud Glade, and yet one more baby wasn’t what they were after. The surprise of it nearly knocked her over, and then she’d almost lost him at that. His was a most painful birth, not because he was big – he was just a little bluebird-sized thing – but because he lingered, pounding the insides out of her, refusing to come out until, in the twenty-fifth hour, they finally yanked him out with barely a pulse left for either of them. Although delicate, he’d grown into her most beautiful child with wild black hair and eyes to match, and smooth, pale skin that pearled with high emotion.
It was a curious thing watching your child grow, and then grow up. Watching puberty hit was hard on everyone involved, to be sure. For Grace, it was like watching the sweet child die; it was the first turning away from the mother, and it killed her too, for a little while. She wouldn’t want them to be dependant on her for life, but then again, well, yes, she would, if she were honest with herself.
The O’Brien’s dog howled, and the gravel rumbled and crunched in the driveway. Grace held her hands around the cup to warm them, and made her face placid. The door jiggled, swished open, and closed. The landing was right off the kitchen, so Dennis saw her straight away.
“Ma. How’re you?”
Grace smiled. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Not waiting up for me, I hope.” He kissed her forehead. He smelled of alcohol and cigarettes. They kept their voices low, so as not to wake the house.
“It’s getting on two-thirty,” she said, “and you’ll have to be getting up in only a couple of hours for work.”
He nodded at her cup. “Tea’s not likely to help you sleep with all that caffeine.”
“It’s peppermint. Settles the stomach. Did you have fun?”
“Just out dancing with the Ukrainians.”
“They seem a bit of a wild bunch. Do they work weekends?”
“Not really. I guess their parents pay for most things. But they’re all smart, and they know where to have fun.”
“Be careful you don’t get used to what you can’t keep up.”
“Okay, Mother,” he said smirking. “Get yourself some sleep.” He smoothed the soft coils at her temples and watched them spring back, and as he turned to go up to bed, she couldn’t resist a parting shot.
“Dennis.” He turned. “I’m glad you’re not a mangled bloody mess sprawled desolate at the side of the road somewhere as I’ve been sitting here worrying you were. Glad you’re home safe.”
He walked back, knelt beside her, rested his head in the hollow of her shoulder, and squeezed her in a tight hug. They both laughed, and kissed, and off he went to bed. When she creaked into bed next to Thom, he said, “All’s well, Mother?”
She prodded her cold foot between his warm calves, and laughed. “All’s well, Father.”
All her other children had had broken bones, semi-serious accidents and illnesses that could have gone either way. All had recovered, and seemed stronger as a result. Dennis had never had any of that. He was quick, and watchful, and often silent; he managed to avoid the growing pains the other kids barreled through, and because of this Grace feared for him, as if he were delicate crystal on a shaky shelf, or a rare jewel left unguarded. When he started talking about the Ukrainian girl, Grace felt the tremor underfoot; she saw the thief lurking in the shadows.
Her name was Marta. From what Dennis had let drop, she was accomplished enough to become a classical pianist, but she planned to go to medical school. Dennis wanted to be a teacher. He’d first mentioned her as one of a group, but by the time he’d mentioned her by name for the third time Grace knew that there was nothing for it except to have her over for dinner.
Marta was a small girl, delicate, but strong looking with a stern bearing like a dancer, and in this much she seemed a good enough match for Dennis. She had pale red hair, plain brown eyes, a sharp little nose and chin, and, as far as Grace could tell, no sense of humor. Grace stood to greet them when they walked in the front door. She hugged and kissed the girl, as she did with all guests in her home, and Marta immediately stiffened. As soon as Grace released her from the embrace, the girl moved off and behind Dennis’s elbow. She looked at Grace and then quickly at every stick of furniture, taking in the layout of the room. Usually people commented on the thick, white throw on the back of the couch with the Aran pattern that Grace had knit herself, or the bog oak rocking chair, or the Celtic knot rug, and offered a compliment. Marta said nothing. They followed her into the kitchen to help break ice for the beer bucket in the backyard, while Grace blathered on about some nonsense. She hardly knew what she said, the girl made her so nervous.
Thom had fired up the barbecue in the backyard, and everyone sat in lawn chairs and at the picnic table. Grace had made extra batches of wild honey scones and other specialties from The Bee-Loud Glade. Marta sat in a lawn chair with her back rigid, not touching the back of the chair. She appeared to be making herself uncomfortable on purpose. Grace said, “Dennis, get this girl a better chair. She’ll never be able to move again, sitting in that stiff thing.”
Dennis said, “It’s not the chair, it’s her. The Alexander Technique. It’s a way of holding the body to optimize performance. It helps her with piano.”
“It helps with everything,” Marta said. “It gets rid of inefficient habits of movement and accumulated tension.”
“But are you comfortable?” Grace asked.
Marta laughed a mirthless little laugh and dismissed Grace’s question with a blink of her thick-lidded eyes.
“Would you like some lemonade?” Grace offered. “Fresh squeezed.”
“How cute,” said Marta, accepting the glass.
Once engaged, Marta talked at length about being Ukrainian, about how her great-grandparents escaped from Ukraine during what she called The Holodomor, which she explained was Stalin’s strategy to starve to death the entire Ukrainian population in 1932 and 1933. Her grandparents got out just in time, living as exiles in Norway before moving to the Unites States.
“Ireland had a famine too, no?” she said to Grace. “So you were also exiles.”
“No,” said Grace. “Our people seemed to have survived all that. My family, and Thom’s family too, both came over much later through Nova Scotia. I don’t know why they left. I guess just better opportunities.”
Marta widened her eyes in surprise. Her nostrils flared, and her head flicked back a notch. The fact that Grace’s family “moved” rather than having been exiled seemed to visibly lower Marta’s esteem for them. The girl spoke of her ancestors’ suffering as an intimate wound, and yet she’d also said they’d died well before she was born.
“Can you be called an ‘exile,’” Grace asked, “if you leave of your own accord?” She was just making conversation. She’d have never asked had she known the can of worms it’d open.
Improbable as it seemed, Marta’s spine stiffened more as she spoke. “Do you call the choice between staying to starve to death, or leaving life of your own accord? Do you think watching all your family and friends die one by one by one is a choice?”
Yes, thought Grace, horrible things happen all throughout history: to Christians, Muslims, Jews, Syrians, Armenians, Palestinians, Africans, Native Americans, Serbs, and Croats, and on and on in every nation all over the globe and it will never stop. But beautiful things happen, too. Marta’s great-grandparents lived! They got away and prospered! Their great-granddaughter sat among all the comforts of the modern world soaking up the attentions of a handsome boy! It all depended on how you told your story. She recognized in Marta the righteous indignation of a studious pupil of indoctrination. But you can’t tell people like that anything once they’re on a roll, especially if it’s a matter of “our people.” Everyone has people called “our people.”
“Sure, the world is full of atrocities,” Grace said to be conciliatory. “You seem to have suffered a great deal.” She tilted her head slightly to appear thoughtful, and thought, especially for something that happened eighty years ago to someone you never even met. She refrained from pointing out that those left behind had it hardest. She didn’t mention that she thought it a sin not to savor every joy that comes your way in this short life. The conversation closed with a snap, and Thom served up the grilled chicken kabobs.
Grace, having noticed the way Marta’s consonants slammed out of her mouth, asked if she spoke Ukrainian. Marta said English was her second language, having grown up in the insulated Ukrainian communities of Hamtramck and Warren, and educated in exclusively Ukrainian schools there.
“Almost like us, here in Corktown,” Grace said. “Although a lot of the Irish have moved out to the suburbs, now.”
“Along with three quarters of the rest of the city,” Dennis added.
Grace blinked and went on, telling the girl how she and Thom had both grown up in the Irish section of Bad Axe in the northern part of Michigan’s thumb, before marrying and moving down to Detroit. Marta barely pretended to listen, and Grace got the impression the girl either didn’t believe her, or didn’t think Grace was as Irish as Marta was Ukrainian, as if it were a contest of some sort. Grace had never until now felt not Irish enough, or more generically American.
Having a stranger to dinner was different Up North, where people behaved as guests upon entering a foreign community. Down here in the city, there were so many different kinds of communities. Nobody seemed to pay attention to the rules.
The evening was comfortably mild, the barbecue was sizzling, and everyone had something to say. Dennis had just done a cutting impression of Grace’s brother, who they called “Weeping Will,” a family favorite who grew maudlin and misty when drunk, usually spilling another juicy family secret or two in the process.
“You should talk,” said Marta. “You were crying the first time I met you.” This comment drew Grace’s attention from Eileen and Nora, who were trying to remember if the last secret their uncle had revealed was the accidental pregnancy of one of his many girlfriends, or the revelation that their prettiest cousin got caught shoplifting.
“I was,” Dennis said to Marta. He saw that Grace’s sudden attention required an explanation.
“I’d just discovered Cheever. I’d read one story a day as a treat to myself. I was sitting in the Pedestrian Mall reading one about an American woman living in Europe.” He turned his attention back to Marta. “It’s an imperfect story, but it has this one moment. She meets another American and the sound of his voice reminds her of her youth standing by railroad tracks watching a string of trains go by, enthralled with the sounds of the odd names of cities written on the sides of the trains. He lists the cities one by one, names with no apparent musicality, but the string of them together created this kind of spell on me, and then he ends with “clackety clack and out of sight.” It just killed me. And then I heard your voice, and looked up, and there you were with Bohdanna and Vera, and they introduced us.”
“I thought you were gay or something. Crying over a story.”
“But you don’t think that now,” he said leaning toward her slightly. His smile closed the space between them with an intimacy that curdled the marrow right up Grace’s spine.
“No. But I still think you’re a little weird. Stories aren’t real.”
Grace had a trick of letting the muscles in her face relax so that strangers wouldn’t be able to detect anything wrong. Her face was calm and passive in a way that appeared inquisitive. Had Dennis looked at her then, he would have known something was wrong, but his eyes were all for Marta. Had he looked at his mother, he might have caught the spirit of her thoughts, if not the particulars: that a girl like that, with no sense of humor, no imagination, no natural human feeling, could only be trouble.
Marta stood up abruptly. “This lemonade needs more ice.” She stood in the center of the backyard commanding attention with her slight, girlish figure. “Do you want ice, Dennis?”
He smiled, handed his glass up to her.
“Anyone else? Should I bring out a whole tray?”
Grace stood too. “Sure, there’s no need for that, girl. Let me get it for you.” Marta dismissed her with a flick of her hand and turned. “I saw where you keep it. I won’t be a minute,” and off she pranced.
Grace sat as if she’d been struck. The thought of that girl rooting around in her own house enraged Grace, but she didn’t want to show it. She could get up and follow her into the house and have it out, but that seemed rash and unnecessary, so she simply said, “Dennis, go and help her.”
He sprang up, almost flying into the house, and Grace tallied up another point for the girl.
Eileen raised an eyebrow, and Nora shook her head as they both looked to Grace. So, she hadn’t imagined it after all.

“She says she likes you,” Dennis said the following afternoon. Grace had just brought up the last batch of Irish soda bread from the convection oven in the basement, and was getting it ready for Nora to load into the van to take to the Bee-Loud Glade.
“Did she offer that, or did you ask?”
“Jesus Joe, Ma, what difference does it make? She said she liked you, isn’t that enough?”
“I’ve loads of people like me, Dennis. I’m not desperate for more. That she likes you well enough is all that worries me.”
“Well enough,” he repeated, and laughed a mocking laugh. She’d heard this laugh when Dennis dealt with his brothers or sisters, but he’d never before applied it to her. Dennis sat at the kitchen table. Grace had just put a tea bag in her cup and was waiting for the kettle to whistle. She walked over to Dennis, ran her fingers lightly through his wild black hair, and kissed his forehead. “I’m glad you feel comfortable bringing girls home here.” He smiled, crooked his arm around her waist, and rested his head against her ribs. The kettle whistled. Grace moved off to make the tea, and said, “You should bring more girls over.”
“More girls? Do you think I have a harem?”
“You could though,” she said. “But that’s not what I want for you either. That was Iggy’s way of course, but in the end he’s too excitable to handle the mess of it. You’re more steady and sensible. Have your fun, is all I’m saying. Don’t stop at the first girl that’ll let you have your way with her. Shop around.”
“Okay,” he said with a scalding calm in his voice. “I get your point. There’s no need to be a bitch about it.”
“Ah, what a little man y’are now, who can spew filth from his tongue at his mother. Is that the way the Ukrainians do? Tearing the heart out of the only people in the world who’ve given up everything for you? I suppose it’s my fault you’re the coddled little pup you turned out to be.”
“Give ME up, why don’t you. Jesus God, woman.” Again he used that deathly quiet voice, as if he were too disgusted to bother shouting. But what volume his voice lacked, he more than made up for on his way out. The slam of the door set the blood beating into her ears, and she knew she’d won a small point, but that the girl had gained the larger point.
“I’ve made a hash of it with Dennis,” she told Thom later in bed. He was a short, lean, powerful man with hands like hams and ears like wings laid tame against the sides of his head. He was quick to laugh and slow to talk, but when he spoke, it was as if he ‘d been gathering his words for a long time. Thom only looked at her when she told him about the argument. He nodded once, and she knew then Dennis had already told him all about it, and that Thom had aligned himself with his son. “It’s just growing pains,” he finally said, and because he didn’t look at her when he said it, she wasn’t sure if he meant Dennis, or her.

When he was at home, which he wasn’t much over the next week, Dennis skulked in and out, skipping dinner “to study,” he said, for his summer classes. In one fly past the fruit bowl, he swooped down for a peach, and Grace cornered him.
“Go on, Dennis, take at least two if you won’t be staying for dinner.”
He shot a dark, questioning glance at her, and she said, “Now, how long are you going to limp around me like a wounded lion?”
“I thought it was a coddled pup,” he said.
She threw her head back and laughed. “Ah, so it is.” She corralled him between a chair and a wall, tickled her fingers along his rib cage mewling, “coddle coddle coddle,” until he fell away in laughter.
“Stop!”
She held him firmly by the edge of his tee shirt, at his waist. This boy had never had an ounce of fat on him, and with his shirt pulled tight against his body she noticed the broadness of his back, shoulders and chest, like a real man’s, over the waspish waist, and felt a pulse of what this Marta girl wanted with him. “I only want you to be happy, Dennis. And, of course, I want to be happy too. But I can’t be happy unless you’re with someone who makes you happy.”
“What makes you think she won’t?”
The future tense threw Grace. She’d been talking about now, and she suddenly realized there was real danger here. She had to plan carefully.
“But we don’t even know her yet. Bring her back over. Didn’t we treat her fine when she was here?”
He looked at her a little doubtfully, and she turned away to find something in the sink to attend to. “It’s good to meet strangers,” she said. “Have her next week Sunday. For Eileen’s birthday.”

The Quinns were large in number, slight in stature and build, with an outsized sense of party, even if it was only themselves and a few outsiders. Those outsiders invited in left feeling that to love and fight as intensely as the Quinns was a wonderful thing, the only way to really live. Eileen’s striking dark hair and deep blue eyes more than made up for her weak chin and sharp little nose. Her figure was splendid with her long, thin waist and legs, smallish breasts, and nicely curved breeder’s hips. Nora was prettier, in a simpler way: small and shapely like her mother, but tight and athletic, with burnt ginger-snap colored hair and copper eyes like Thom’s side. She was a star swimmer in high school, and of all the kids she was the only one of them who’d kept up the Irish dancing at the Gaelic League, winning several dance competitions. That summer she and two other girls from the dance troupe swam across Lake St. Clair to raise money for the new soup kitchen the Gaelic League had started. All the Quinns were do-ers.
Their house sat in the middle of a long residential block in Corktown. They had no trees in their yard, but the big oak in the Flannery’s yard to the north, and the huge maple in the Casal’s to the south gave the Quinns what they felt was the perfect proportion of sun and shade all through the day and evening. The flowers that lined the sides of the fences grew lush, and the watermelon, corn, and other produce in the garden were sweet and juicy.
Grace had shepherded the romances of two of the older boys before, but Dennis was different. Colm, the oldest, was a priestly loner who’d never dated, and probably never would. He was like so many of Grace’s single uncles who lived their whole lives in a solitary existence and seemed quite happy. Iggy, the second boy, was wild and lusty until he finally met his wild, lusty match in Imogene. Imogene smoked too much, but never around Grace, and she held her liquor well. Myles fell somewhere between the witty loner, Colm, and fun-loving, incautious Iggy. He married a smart Brazilian girl named Gabriella who, thank God, was lively and funny.
Everyone else had arrived, when Marta entered with Dennis on her arm. She came bearing a bottle of wine, a birthday gift, and two friends. She’d made bracelets in a traditional Ukrainian style with beads of different sizes and colors; one for Eileen, and one for Grace, but nothing for Nora. Nora clearly wasn’t bothered, but Grace thought it bad form. In her estimation, Marta would have been better to bring just the one for Eileen’s birthday, and kept her transparent attempt at buttering up to herself.
Nora said, “Dennis makes bracelets, too. He does the Celtic knot thing with leather. See the one he’s wearing?”
“She has one,” Dennis said.
“Have you?”
“It’s hanging in my car off the rear view mirror. It’s a little too Heavy Metal looking for me.”
“Oh!” said Gabriela, looking at her own wristband. “I never think of this. This is super.” She strummed a few licks of air guitar, whipped her long hair to and fro, kicked out a leg to land in a crouch, and everyone applauded.
“If you’d like,” Myles said to Gabriela, “I could catch a sparrow for you to bite the head off of.”
“No, thank you,” Gabriela said. “It would spoil my dinner.”
Colm lightly slapped his palm against his forehead. “I totally forgot to pick up the sparrow burgers on the way here. We’ll have to settle for steak.”
Imogene, who wore three of Dennis’s leather bands around her left ankle, crossed her leg, dangled her flip-flop back and forth, and burped open another can of beer.
During this exchange, Grace had a chance to assess some of the girl’s appeal, trying to see how what she found distasteful was an attraction for Dennis. Marta’s large-lidded eyes looked disdainful to Grace, but Dennis may have seen them as “sleepy.” It seemed to Grace as if it were a great bother to Marta to open her eyes fully, to pay anything real attention, but if she did open her eyes wide enough to look at you, you’d be grateful.
Her two friends were as different from Marta and from each other as two girls could be. The one named Bohdanna was quick and light and full of questions, and when anyone talked to her, she really listened. The politeness that Grace found stiff and pretentious in Marta seemed natural and charming in Bohdanna. The other one, Vera, was happy and cheerful to a fault, and Grace thought her pleasant enough, if a bit vacant. All were unmistakably fashionable, and clearly well-off.
To demonstrate a truce for Dennis’s sake, Grace asked Marta, “What kind of doctor do you want to be?”
“The kind that makes a ton of money. Beyond that it doesn’t make much difference.”
“That’s a Ukie thing,” Bohdanna said. “Our parents beat it into our heads that we have to be successful and respectable, so we’re all doctors and lawyers and such when we really want to be poets and pianists.”
“I never said I wanted to be a pianist,” Marta protested with a huffing laugh. Even her own witticisms didn’t seem to make her happy. “I’d never make any money doing that.”
“But you want to be a poet?” Grace asked Vera.
“No. I’m ‘and such.’ I’m going to be a dentist. And I want to be a dentist. Bohdanna’s the poet.”
“Yes,” said Bohdanna. “But law school first. For the parents. And Dennis says he wants to be a teacher, but I think he should be a writer. He has a long, long way to go, though. But with sufficient attention and application you can never tell. He needs to take himself more seriously. As a writer, I mean. He needs to take himself a little less seriously, otherwise.”
“Teacher, writer, whatever,” said Marta. “Our parents aren’t stupid. Dennis should take himself more seriously, not less.” She turned to Dennis. “I don’t know why you don’t go to law school.”
“Because I don’t want to be a lawyer.”
“You may not be smart enough anyway, but you could at least try.”
Bohdanna unleashed a cudgel of Ukrainian on Marta. Marta huffed another scoff-filled laugh, and although she appeared to have been scolded, she seemed to take it as a compliment. Vera looked nervously back and forth between them. Dennis couldn’t have possibly understood their language, but he seemed to understand the intent. He touched Bohdanna’s and Marta’s arms, and said, “It’s okay. That’s what I like about her. I love honest people.”
If Grace were being honest, she would have said, You can be honest without being nasty. A lot of people mistake cruelty for honesty. But she held her tongue, and caught Dennis’s eye. He looked away quickly, and she was satisfied. Then the girl briefly reached for his hand, squeezed lightly, let go, and Dennis beamed.
There is meanness and hardness of heart, but when pheromones circle around a boy the cloud of desire becomes stronger than the substance beneath the cloud. Many a ship has sunk this way. Grace saw that this girl thought she was too good for Dennis, and she wasn’t afraid to let him know it. There was no way of telling which way it would go. She might use him and dump him for someone she thought more worthy, or she might shackle him and trounce him under foot for the rest of his life.
“It’s a scalding kind of life to work at a job you don’t love,” Grace said. She’d directed her comment to the girl, but it was Dennis who responded.
“Actually,” he said, “I’m thinking of grad school.”
“For English?” Marta huffed.
Perhaps it was a birth defect, Grace thought, that nothing this girl said could come out without sounding like mockery.
“Yes,” said Dennis. “You may be able to call me ‘doctor’ yet.”
“Since when?” Grace and Marta said at the same time.
“I finished my teaching credits last year. The more English Lit classes I took, the more I realized this was what I really loved. I’ve been taking summer classes so I can get French and German minors along with my English major.”
Nora asked, “Does Wayne State have a good grad program?”
“Not great.”
“So, then,” said Eileen, “U. of M.?”
“Don’t know exactly. I’m going to apply to lots of places. I figured why not go big. Maybe Harvard. Maybe Oxford. Maybe University College Dublin.”
Grace’s heart lumped up to her throat, then sank down with a dull thud. “And how do you plan to pay for that?”
“Same way I do now. Scholarships and work.”
“Are you applying to these places?” Grace asked Marta.
Marta, slightly flustered, said, “I haven’t thought about it much yet. Wayne State and U. of M. both have good medical schools.” Marta looked at Dennis and waited for him to speak.
“Who knows if I’ll get in anywhere. It’s very competitive.”
Another huff of laughter. “Competitive? It’s not like it’s medical school. How competitive could English Lit be?”
“Are you crazy, Marta?” Bohdanna asked. “In this economy? It’s way easier to get into med school than grad school in the liberal arts these days.”
“That’s so cool,” said Vera. “I’ve never been to Ireland. If you go there, could we come visit you? That would be so cool.”
“You’d leave home?” Thom said, holding Grace’s hand.
Dennis said, “It’d be a mighty commute, wouldn’t it?”
Grace had never imagined the rest of her life without Dennis near her, and she couldn’t believe that he’d imagined his life away from her. Grace now saw that the first part of her life was over. She shook her head quickly as if shooing away a fly that had flown too close to her eyes, and Dennis went on.
“Detroit is dead. Hundreds of thousands of houses abandoned. More than half the street lights in the city don’t work. Over an hour for the police or fire department to respond, if they respond at all.”
“But not here in Corktown,” Grace said.
“Our neighborhood is just lucky. For now. Close enough to downtown to matter, organized and with just enough money to keep things running, mostly at our own expense. You know that.”
“You’d go away from us, Dennis? Easy as that?”
“The Chinese are buying up all the empty houses for the land. Everyone here will be pushed out. Before you know it Corktown’ll be Shanghaiville. The Russians, Saudis, and Chinese are all hovering around right now waiting to buy up all the art in the DIA.”
Grace shook her head again. “That’ll never happen. That’s not true.”
“Look around you, Ma. Detroit’s an abandoned, bankrupt shit hole. There’s nothing here. And anyway, wouldn’t it be great if I were to go to Ireland?” he said. “You’re always on about how Irish we are all the way back on both sides, but none of us has ever even been there. We were all born here. Nobody’s been back since Gram and Pa came over when they were babies. Wouldn’t you like to go to Ireland to visit me?”
Detroit’s decay had nothing to do with it. Dennis was only trying to impress this girl, to make her see him as worldly. Grace was sure of it. A mother spends her whole life doing the best for her kids, trying to keep them out of the grips of dangerous strangers, and in this, too, she’d failed. She could keep her peace no longer.
“I’ve no desire to go anywhere, Dennis. Everything I have that means anything to me is right here. I live here, whatever its troubles, and so do you. Why go traipsing all over the world when we’ve many fine colleges right here in Michigan? Everyone who loves you is here.”
“Well. As I said, nothing has happened yet. I don’t start applying until the fall.”
“And what about all your pretty little friends?” She waved an open, upturned palm toward Bohdanna, Vera, and Marta. “You’d leave them all behind you, too?”
Marta didn’t utter a word until Grace pressed the point. “And what do you think about this? If Dennis went away to England or Ireland?”
Marta drew together her coldest manner and laughed another of her mirthless laughs. “He’s a big boy. He can do what he likes. It has nothing to do with me.”
Dennis listened with interest, and kept watching her even after she finished speaking, but she wouldn’t look at him. In the silence that grew after she spoke, Marta collected the emptied paper plates leisurely, half absent-mindedly, carrying them over to the plastic garbage pails set against the garage. On the trip back to her lawn chair, she stopped to survey the gladiolas at the edge of the fence, and then the rest of the garden. She stood next to her chair, and said to Grace and Thom, “Which of you is the gardener?”
“It’s Nora, actually,” said Thom.
“Well done, Nora.” She nodded and smiled at Nora, and looked dreamily at the garden, speaking to no one in particular. “Growing corn in the city. It’s a miracle, no?”
Of course, there was nothing miraculous about it. It was only natural. Corn will grow anywhere there’s the right combination of sun and water and good dirt, but the fact that the girl could see the miraculous in the mundane threw her into a completely different light for Grace.
A plane sounded faintly overhead, and Grace looked up to spot it. Their backyard was smack under the landing lane for the Detroit Metro Airport. Dozens of planes flew overhead every day, some so high up that only long vapor trails marked their paths, some low and droning, like this one. Grace had heard of birds getting sucked in and pulverized by jets, clogging up engines, bringing planes down. It was a wonder you didn’t hear stories of them dropping out of the sky every day of the week.
It wouldn’t be accurate, or even fair, to say that Grace had hoped the break-up would have been more dramatic. She wasn’t with them when Dennis and Marta broke it off a month after the backyard party, so she’d never know. At one point she’d have asked Dennis about anything that had happened in his life. At one point he’d have told her everything down to the last wrenching detail, but that Dennis and that Grace were gone. Some sort of barrier had sealed off tiny bits of his life to her labeled ‘none of her business.’ The new Dennis could take or leave what he wanted, even her. Autumn came, school started again. Imperfectly printed pages from application forms to English and Irish schools appeared in the wastebasket by the family’s printer in the den.
All that was left of the break-up for Grace was an abbreviated re-telling of the barest facts when she asked about Marta.
“Oh. No,” said Dennis. “That’s all over.”
It was late, around eleven o’clock. They were last two up. She sat in her rocking chair reading a book. He sat on the couch braiding together slim strips of leather to make another wrist band.
“Are you sad?” she asked. And here is where hope rose up unwanted, like a hungry, ill-bred dog looking for scraps. To be able to comfort her boy, her favorite boy once more, would be like a gift. Who knew if another chance would ever come along. She wanted to pet him, to soothe him, to work the magic of mother on child. She wanted to weave the spell that would bloom in him later in life when he most needed it and least expected it. No matter how far he traveled from her, no matter how long they might go without seeing each other’s faces, they would always be connected. She wanted her boy to understand that to the end of his days – even when he’d become a man, even after his mother had long crumbled to dust – that he was loved, purely and simply. She wanted to be sure he knew it even more so after he’d loved and won, or loved and lost, many women. She knew hers was a different kind of love, but no less powerful for all its difference, because there was something the same about it, too.
And right then, she wanted just one teardrop to wipe from his cheek. But Dennis waved her off. With the ends of the leather strips dangling, he tried to sweep the whole thing away as so much nothing.
“She’s a little too smart for me.”
“Ah,” Grace said. She was going to leave it at that and return to her book, letting him slip off into his own life, as his own man, leaving his mother far behind, as was only natural. It was true, what Dennis had said. Detroit was no place for the young and vibrant. The city had emptied out, but in the abandoned neighborhoods one now saw pheasants, goldfinches, even scarlet tanagers among the wildflowers and vast fields the likes of which Grace hadn’t seen since she lived in the farmlands up north. Despite the desolation, she couldn’t help but feel a certain fascination with nature’s swift, wild reclamation of the land. The stars at night were brighter without all the streetlights, the crickets louder in the absence of traffic. But this new quiet beauty wouldn’t last either.
Dennis tugged together the last bits of leather on the wrist band. Grace set down her book down, moved over to the couch, wrapped her arms around him, and kissed his forehead. Little man though he was, he fell into her hug and rested there. After a few moments he shifted to free himself, but she held him fast just a little while longer before letting him slip off to bed while she turned off the lights, and locked all the doors.

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Joseph O’Malley’s stories have appeared in American Literary Review, Greensboro Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Santa Monica Review, and Glimmer Train. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.