And a printer’s job — twenty-one printed menu cards, on good card, folded. Sixty dollars.
Two thousand eight hundred and forty dollars, on my card, out of the account I keep for the bookkeeping money.
And every single item of it was booked for delivery to 14 Fentiman Row, Ashglen.
Solange’s bungalow.
I told nobody. Not Dermot. Not for six weeks.
They came on Friday the fourth of July at twenty past one in the afternoon.
Three cars up the lane, which you can hear from the kitchen for about ninety seconds before you see them.
Solange got out of the first one in the enormous sun hat she has worn to every outdoor event since 2019. Nessa and Roisin got out of the second with a handbag each and nothing else.
Six children came out of the third like water out of a burst pipe and went straight for the sheep field gate, which is a whole other conversation.
Solange came across that yard and hugged me and she smelled of the perfume she wears, and she said:
“Bridie! Tell me you’ve got it all ready, we’re absolutely starving.”
And I said, “Almost.”
And I smiled at her, and I have been told since by my sister-in-law Roisin that the smile was, in her words, “not right.”
At ten past two, Sylvan Doole’s van came up the lane.
He got out, walked over, and said — loudly, because he is a loud man and because I had asked him to check with me on arrival —
“Mrs Halloran? I’ve got the marquee lads at Fentiman Row and they’re nearly up. Do you want to head over about four?”
There was a silence in that yard.
And Solange said, “Fentiman Row?”
And I said, “Yes. It’s at yours this year.”
I want to describe the next four minutes because they were the best four minutes of my adult life and I am not going to be modest about it.
She said, “At mine?”
I said, “There’s a marquee going up on your lawn. Sylvan’s doing the food. There’s a bar, there’s chairs for twenty-one, there’s a loo out the back so nobody’s queuing, and Ailish is coming Monday morning to put it all back.”
