Her Name Is Rose by Christine Breen Page A

rain, rain.”
    She considered his green eyes, gauging whether he had said this in good humor or good old Irish sarcasm. It was both. It was a trait she’d come to love—his self-effaced delivery of facts.
    â€œI know. But I was rushing this morning. Lecture at nine. I overslept.”
    His square face creased as he smiled. “I had company law this morning and I should have slept in.” The skin around his eyes was pale, thin, and freckled.
    â€œWas it worth it?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThe lecture?”
    â€œOh. Yes…” she blurted. “‘The Wasteland.’”
    He paused. Thought a moment. “ Memory and desire  … right?”
    â€œYes. Stirring dull roots with spring rain. ”
    â€œImpressive.” He smiled.
    She blushed. “Not really. It’s the next line. Ask me to recite any more and you’ll see I belong at the back of the class.”
    Luke was from the south side of the city near Sandymount Strand, where he lived with his elderly parents on Gilford Road, one block from the Irish Sea and half a mile from the Martello Tower of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. His parents, Agnes and Eugene Bowen, married late in life. They maintained a dental practice together. Like two bookends they supported his life, he’d always said. He later told Iris he never once took for granted the serenity of their life, nor their devotion to him. The sea air around Sandymount was like a tonic, he said, infusing tranquility into the Bowen house. It’d had been a charmed life, he knew.
    When they got to know each other better, Luke showed Iris the old leather sofa in the front room where he studied every evening. His mother would bring him a cup of tea and a ham sandwich and slip quietly away. It was so much a part of the fabric of the workings of their life—mother and son—that neither needed to acknowledge her care nor his gratitude. “It just happened like clockwork,” he’d said, “like it was somehow always meant to be that way. Like it was ordained. That’s what I want one day, Iris.” On Saturdays when the dental practice was busy with fathers and teenagers, Luke would bring his mother tea and biscuits at just the hour when he knew she’d be beginning to fade.
    From that chance meeting on a wet November day Iris and Luke’s beginnings had been set in motion. He was three years ahead of her in college. When he trained at Blackhall Place to become a solicitor, Iris was completing her final year at university. Then they moved in together to a one-bedroom flat on the Beach Road in Ringsend. After Luke passed exams and Iris had graduated with a degree in literature, they married in the late summer and had a small reception in Iris’s parents’ back garden in Ranelagh. By autumn they’d moved to the west of Ireland, where Luke accepted a job as a junior solicitor.
    It ran just like clockwork.
    They rented a house near the village of Seafield thirty miles from Ennis so Luke could be near the ocean. (It’s where he’d always felt safest, he’d said.) A few years following their marriage, Iris’s parents both passed away, first her father from heart failure and then her mother, who died in her sleep. With the money left to Iris they were able to put a down payment on an old cottage, ten miles in from the Atlantic, beside a grove of ash trees with a garden overgrown with wild blackberries and grass and nettles and rushes. They called their new home Ashwood and, when Luke went off to Ennis every morning, day by day Iris began the slow process of resurrecting the garden. It was then she really fell in love with gardening.
    Three years after they’d moved to Ashwood, their GP, Dr. O’Reilly, advised them that if they wanted children they would have to adopt. She asked if they wanted to know who was—
    â€œDeficient?” Luke had said. “Found lacking?” He looked at Iris who