“Early on a Sunday, after first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives into deep Wexford towards the coast where my mother’s people came from.”
This is a novella published by Claire Keegan, who was nominated for the Booker Prize last year for other short novella Small Things like These. Both novellas are good, but then one I liked better for its general tenderness. The other one is a Christmas story and I read it in the summer, so I might have been out of season for it.
In the novella, we are following a young Irish girl who is being taken to a foster home with two older people. We are not entirely clear why at first, especially since her father is the one taking her. When there, she is given some clothes, treated well, and the house itself is sweet, but clouded in mystery. Later, she’s taken to a wake, and it’s not entirely why she’s there other than that was the plan for the older couple and the child needed to go with them. When a short time later she’s returned to her family, a handful of small realizations happens. But it’s the small moments she spent with the kind people that stand out.
I remember as a kid a few times where I was sent to weekends away with aunts, and while the reasons for any given of those trips might have been perfectly innocent, my childhood had just enough danger and instability where the reasons might have been anything but innocent. I will never know, but I think about them from time to time. It’s also one of those things where I tell my wife, who was not a part of my childhood and the conspiracy of silence in my family (like a lot of families) who makes it clear to me that a lot of what I felt was normal, was indeed not normal.
