The Daisy Picker (21 page)

The fact that he came to her father’s funeral doesn’t really prove anything either; isn’t that something any friend would do? And the little carved cat – well, that was
just Joe. That’s what he does. For everyone.

The more she thinks about it, the worse Lizzie feels. If Joe could see how she felt about him – if she was that pathetically obvious – who’s to say that half of Merway
didn’t see it too? God, was Big Maggie telling all and sundry how Lizzie O’Grady was making a fool of herself over Joe McCarthy? She cringes at the thought of them all having a great
laugh at foolish little Lizzie.

Wrapped up in her grief and loneliness, she comes to the conclusion that she was sadly mistaken about Joe. He needed someone to take over for a few hours in the shop, and she was available; that
was all there was to it. Not that it matters, anyway, if she’s not going back to Merway.

She wishes she’d told Daddy about Joe. Even if it has come to nothing, she’s sorry Daddy never knew that, at the age of forty-one, his daughter had finally discovered what it meant
to be in love.

One morning, about three weeks after Daddy’s death, Lizzie looks out her bedroom window and sees Mammy hanging clothes out on the line. She’s bending to the laundry basket like an
old woman, fumbling with the pegs that she keeps in a biscuit tin. When did her hair go that grey? How can Lizzie even consider deserting her?

After dinner that night, she tells Mammy that she’s not going back to Merway. Mammy is delighted, and they live happily ever after in Kilmorris until Mammy’s death twenty-three years
later. Lizzie makes her peace with God and enters a convent the day after Mammy’s funeral, and dies in a state of grace at the age of ninety-six, just after benediction. The other nuns miss
Sister Elizabeth’s spicy fruit scones and rhubarb crumble.

Except that’s not what happens at all.

Lizzie is about to clear the plates from the table – she’ll wait till they’ve settled down for the night to talk about her decision – when Mammy puts a hand on her arm to
stop her. ‘Hold on a minute, Lizzie. Will you sit down again, please? I want to say something.’

Lizzie puts the plates back on the table and sits down beside her.

‘What is it?’

‘Lizzie, don’t you think it’s time you went back to Merway?’ Mammy looks steadily at her, hand still on her arm. ‘Angela will be missing you for the
baking.’

Lizzie’s eyes sting. She puts her hand on Mammy’s. ‘Mammy, I’m not going back – of course I’m not. I’m staying here to look after you and keep you
company. I was going to tell you tonight.’

Mammy shakes her head, smiling faintly. ‘You don’t have to do that, love; I don’t need looking after.’

‘But I don’t mind.’ Since she’s not talking to God, she doesn’t imagine a lie will do much harm. ‘I couldn’t leave you here on your own. My place is
with you now, and I’m happy to come back, honestly.’ Mind you, it
is
a fairly big lie. A colossal lie, really. But still, as long as she’s not talking to Him . . .

Mammy is shaking her head more firmly. ‘No, Lizzie, your place
isn’t
here; not any more.’ She presses Lizzie’s arm gently. ‘You have your own life to lead
now. You go back to Merway; you liked it there, didn’t you?’

As Mammy speaks, Lizzie watches her face. The lost look that’s been in her eyes since Daddy’s death is still there – she misses him terribly. Grief has crisscrossed her
forehead, and the skin on her cheeks looks tauter, the cheekbones more pronounced. A new collection of faint little vertical lines runs from her nose to her mouth. The man she expected to grow old
with is gone, and now she faces the prospect of doing it on her own. It must be terrifying.

And yet here she is, sitting beside her only daughter – the daughter who’s just offered to come back and live with her – and letting her go. No,
insisting
that she go.
She mustn’t know what she’s saying; she can’t have thought it through.

‘But, Mammy,’ Lizzie says gently, ‘you’ve never been on your own. How would you manage?’

‘Better than you’d imagine,’ says Mammy crisply, and Lizzie sees a flash of the old Mammy, the one you didn’t dare face without whatever she’d sent you for.
‘I’m not completely helpless, you know. And haven’t I got plenty of friends and neighbours I can call on? There’s Peter and Claire next door, and Julia, and the McDermott
lads are always around the place for odd jobs; and Rose is going to come and stay for a few days every now and again.’

Aunt Rose, Mammy’s widowed sister in Cork, already lined up to come and visit . . . Maybe Mammy
has
been thinking it through. A tiny flicker of hope leaps in Lizzie’s chest,
but still . . . she has to be sure.

‘Well, yes, of course Rose will come, but –’

Mammy doesn’t wait for her to finish. ‘Look, Lizzie . . .’ She looks at the table and says nothing for a minute, and then she looks back at Lizzie. ‘I know it
hasn’t been easy for you, seeing all your friends go off and get married, or go abroad somewhere, making something of their lives, while you . . . well, you never really got to do what you
wanted, did you?’

She shushes Lizzie’s protests. ‘No, you didn’t. You took the waitressing job even though it wasn’t what you wanted; you wanted to be a baker, and we never really listened
to you or tried to help you.’

This can’t be Mammy talking – Mammy who was so adamant that baking was no sort of a career, Mammy who had her heart set on me getting married and having children and taking over
O’Gorman’s someday
. . .

‘You got engaged to Tony because you knew it was expected of you,’ Mammy says gently, ‘and he wasn’t right either.’

Tony O’Gorman, son of Mammy’s best friend Julia – the most eligible man in Kilmorris, as far as Mammy was concerned
. . . Lizzie remembers Mammy’s face the day
they told her they were engaged; she was thrilled.

‘All your life, you did things that weren’t really what
you
wanted – maybe you felt we wanted them for you, or maybe you just thought they were things you should do .
. . Anyway, that doesn’t really matter now.’

‘All Lizzie can do is sit and listen while Mammy says things she never expected to hear her say.

‘When you came home that day and told us you’d broken off the engagement and you were going to head off to God knows where, I couldn’t believe it.’

Don’t I know it; and didn’t you make no secret of how you felt
. But Lizzie feels no bitterness; she’s too stunned to feel anything. She suddenly notices that
Mammy’s eyes are full of tears.

‘I’m ashamed to admit it, Lizzie, but I had no idea you were unhappy – and you must have been, for a long time. I just never thought beyond what I wanted for you – or
really, I suppose, what I wanted for me.’ Mammy blinks, and a tear rolls from each eye and races down her face, veering sideways when it comes to a line. She pulls a tissue from the box on
the table that keeps having to be replaced.

‘Mammy, don’t feel bad, please; I really didn’t know myself what I wanted.’ Lizzie squeezes Mammy’s hand. How hard must it be for her to lay herself bare like this?
She’s admitting that maybe she got it wrong all those years . . . and doing it without the comfort of Daddy beside her. Lizzie speaks gently, ‘Something just – woke me up one day,
and I knew that it was all wrong . . . and that I had to stop, and get away . . . It’s hard to explain.’

Mammy nods, dabbing her eyes. ‘And I made it as hard as I could for you to go. I’m mortified now when I think of how selfish I was, worrying about what people would think, never
giving a thought to you and your happiness.’

Lizzie shakes her head, but Mammy goes on: ‘Lizzie, it’s taken Jack’s death to make me realise how short life is, and how silly it is to worry about what others think . . . and
how we must make
sure
to make the best use of it that we can.’ She grips Lizzie’s arm urgently. ‘You have to promise me that you’ll go back to Merway.’

The spark of hope bursts into a tiny flame. Lizzie chooses her words carefully. ‘I
have
been happy there – happier than I’d been in a long time.’

Mammy smiles. ‘I know, love, and I’m glad you finally found the courage to make the break, despite your stubborn old mother.’

Lizzie starts to say something, but again Mammy stops her. ‘Hold on – there’s something else I have to tell you.’ She presses a hand to her mouth for a minute, then goes
on. ‘Your father had a life insurance policy from his work, and he kept paying into it after he retired.’ She takes an envelope from her bag and puts it between them on the table.
‘I got this in the post today.’

Lizzie takes the letter out and discovers that Daddy, who always provided for them, made sure that they’d be well taken care of after his death too. The words on the page blur
together.

‘Lizzie, that money is for you; he always said so. He invested his retirement lump sum; I’ll have plenty from that, and the pension.’

Lizzie thinks of Mammy’s careful spending – the chops and the cabbage and the white pudding, and the homemade brown bread. She thinks of the long-ago caravan holidays, and the rented
houses in Kerry and West Cork and Connemara when she was a bit older – the pub lunches, the dinners Mammy cooked in the rented kitchens. They had nothing expensive, nothing extravagant, not
even when Daddy retired. Mammy and Daddy never stayed in a hotel, not once – never ate in a fancy restaurant, except for the few times when Lizzie and Tony insisted on bringing them out to
dinner. They never had a foreign holiday. They were saving all the money for some distant future, when only one of them would be around to enjoy it.

Mammy gestures towards the letter. ‘Would it be enough, I wonder, to start your little bakery in Merway?’

Oh yes, Mammy, it would. Lizzie smiles over at her and nods, and silently tells God she’s sorry for fighting with Him.

Later that night, she phones Angela.

She stays another week with Mammy, sorting out a list of numbers for her to keep beside the phone – doctor, plumber, electrician, handyman. Unknown to Mammy, she calls in to Claire next
door and thanks her again for all her help, and leaves her mobile number with her in case of any emergency. She finishes replying to the letters of condolence, and arranges for Cian McDermott,
Johnny’s younger brother, to mow the back lawn once a week till the end of summer. She shows Mammy where the water turns off and where the fuse-box is and how to read the meter, and she makes
sure that Mammy has a drawerful of candles and a torch. She checks the batteries in the two smoke alarms and shows Mammy how to do it too. She gets a man out from Eircom to run a phone line into
Mammy’s bedroom, even though Mammy thinks it’s the height of nonsense.

‘It’s not for you, Mammy, it’s for me; it’ll help
me
sleep, even if it does nothing for you.’ Then she smiles faintly; it’s the first time
she’s felt more like Mammy’s mother than her daughter.

On the day she’s heading off again, Lizzie stands by the car. ‘I’ll phone twice a week, Wednesday and Sunday, and you have my mobile number if you need me.’

Mammy nods.

‘And I’ll come and visit often, I promise; and you have Rose coming at the weekend.’

Mammy nods again.

‘And you’ll remember to –’

Mammy stops nodding. ‘Lizzie, for goodness’ sake, I’m not a child. Get into that car, and give me a ring to let me know you’re safely landed.’

So Lizzie hugs her and drives away, and tries not to remember the last time she drove off, with her head full of dreams and Daddy standing beside Mammy on the path, waving.

When she comes to the place where she picked up the American hitchhiker, she wonders what’s become of him. Is he still in Rockford, in the house with the holes in the roof? She can hardly
remember what he looks like.

She drives on towards Merway.

When Lizzie pulls up outside The Kitchen, she sits in the car for a minute. It’s been less than two months since she was here, but it feels like another lifetime. She
winds down her window and breathes in deeply, smelling salty air and garlic: Angela has started the dinners. A wave of something peaceful washes over her.

She takes her bag out of the car and walks around to the back of the restaurant, feet crunching on the gravel. The kitchen door opens as she approaches it.

‘Lizzie – there you are. Good to see you.’ Angela gives her a hug, then steps back and looks at her carefully. ‘You’ve lost weight. How are you?’

‘All the better for seeing you, my dear,’ smiles Lizzie. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine; I’ll be telling you all later on.’ Angela goes to the cooker and gives the pan a shake, making something sizzle loudly. ‘Why don’t you settle back in and
come up when you’re ready? I’ve your duvet airing in the hot press here – you can take it down when that rain stops.’

On the way to the caravan, Lizzie spots a familiar ginger bulk poking out from under a bush. ‘Jones, hi.’ She crouches beside him and scratches the back of his neck, and he yawns
hugely at her. ‘Well, I’m really glad you missed me too.’