None of them replied.
Not one. Not a no, not a can’t-do-Saturday, not a thumbs up.
I know all three of them opened it, because I am not too proud to say I had a read receipt on it, and all three came back within twenty-four hours.
And on the twelfth of June, Solange rang me.
She was on for eleven minutes. She talked about Nessa’s kitchen extension and about a woman at the church who’d had a fall.
And at the end she said, “Now — we’ll all be down for the fourth. Friday to Monday. There’ll be twelve of us. Nessa’s Fionn’s bringing a friend so thirteen. You’ll do that lovely marinade you do.”
Not a word about the email.
I said, “Right.”
And then I sat at my desk for about twenty minutes and I did not cry and I did not ring Dermot, and I opened a browser.
Now I have to tell you about the house, because otherwise the rest of it is just a woman being petty about sausages.
Tullamane was Solange’s.
She and Dermot’s father Fintan farmed it from 1986. Solange lived in this kitchen for thirty years. She had all three of her children in the front bedroom, which is now Etta’s.
Fintan died in March of 2016.
She could not run eleven acres on her own at fifty-seven and there was a debt on it, and by the spring of 2018 it had to be sold.
Dermot and I bought it in June of 2018 for four hundred and ten thousand dollars.
Family sale, under market, done properly through a solicitor.
The deposit was one hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars.
That money was mine.
My father, Hugh Bright, died on the eleventh of August, 2017, of a stroke, in a lay-by outside Corran, aged sixty-one.
He was a lorry driver for thirty-four years and he owned a small house in Merrow that he’d paid off in 2009, and when he died it was sold and I got what was in it.
Every penny of that deposit came from a man who never once set foot in this house.
