Five Years of Marriage to Mr. Bradford novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Cúpla Focal

Fiona Lyons was waiting under the bus shelter in Eyre Square with an umbrella and no coat.

I knew her at once from fourteen months of video calls: short grey curls, glasses on a cord, a jumper the color of oatmeal.

"You're thin," she said, instead of hello. "And you've been crying on a plane. Come on."

"Dia duit," I said.

"Dia is Muire duit. That was grand. Your vowels are a crime, but the words were in the right order."

She took my suitcase before I could stop her.

She was fifty-two and half my size, and she carried it up the street without once stopping.

Her house was a narrow stone terrace with a blue door, and she lived in the bottom of it.

The flat above her kitchen was mine for the term.

It had a slanted ceiling, an iron bed, a window over the river, and a radiator that coughed.

I put Danny's photo on the sill.

Fiona stood in the door and looked at it for a moment.

"That's him?"

"Yes."

"He has your jaw."

"He had a fiddle too. He used to say he'd play on the Spanish Arch with his case open."

"Then you'll bring the case, and I'll find you a fiddle," she said. "But not tonight. Tonight you eat and sleep."

She fed me bacon and cabbage at her kitchen table and told me which landlords in Galway to avoid, which pubs had a seat free on a Sunday, and which of her students were in love with each other.

She did not ask me one question about my husband.

At the end, as she cleared the plates, she said, "You'll tell me when you want to. Not before."

I fell asleep with my shoes on.

My first class was at ten the next morning, in a room above a bookshop.

There were eleven of us.

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