“He was my dad. He paid the deposit on Tullamane.”
Nessa said, “Oh.”
And then she said, “I didn’t know that.”
And I said, “No. Nobody does.”
Nobody said anything for about eight seconds and then somebody asked for the salad and it went on.
That’s it. That is the whole confrontation. Eleven words from me at a table.
I did not raise my voice once that entire weekend and I never mentioned nine thousand one hundred and forty dollars to a single person.
Here is what happened afterward.
Friday night. Dermot and I had the worst row of our marriage, in his mother’s spare room, whispering, from about half eleven until nearly two.
Not about the party. He thought the party was — his word — “extraordinary,” and he’d been laughing about it since four o’clock.
It was about the sentence.
Because what my husband said, at about midnight, was: “You could have told me you were going to say that.”
