Once We Had a Country by Robert McGill Page B

father always said hello as if he didn’t have the foggiest notion who it could be. It seemed the case that as long as his mother was out of sight, he forgot she was a few yards away. He forgot that she owned his house, that she had gotten him his job. He seemed truly to believe there was just him and Maggie in the world, along with the ghost of his dead wife knocking about in the unlit rooms.
    Sometimes Maggie liked to think her mother had merely run away, and that one day on a long car trip across America, Maggie would come upon her singing in a lounge or serving hamburgers at a diner. The problem with this fantasy was that Maggie could remember the first day of her life. She remembered lying with her mother at the hospital, the bright lights above them and the antiseptic reek from the floors, the apple-cheeked nurse hovering in her bleached uniform. Maggie remembered the soft scratch of the blanket around her and the warmth of her mother’s hands. She even remembered the exact moment when life passed from the fingers and a cold stiffness settled in. Gran told her this was nonsense and foolishness; no one could remember that far back.
    “Your mother was a selfish, stuck-up girl,” said Gran. “And the mouth on her! Never when Gordon was around, mind you. In his eyes she could do no wrong. She had him right beneath her sticky little thumb.”
    Her father thought otherwise. He said her mother was a cherub and an angel. But he and Gran didn’t have this argument in person, only through Maggie and the opinions she reported to each of them in turn, passing from house to house with her cargo of second-hand speech. Sheran between her father and Gran like an electrical cord, crackling and throwing sparks, thrilling at how the things she said could make the two of them come alive.
    “My mother wasn’t selfish,” Maggie told Gran one afternoon. “She was an angel and a cherub!” It was so easy and pleasurable to be contrary when Maggie was articulating someone else’s thoughts. If they were her own, she’d never speak with such recklessness or conviction.
    Her father had stopped going to Mass after her mother died. Gran disapproved of this decision, if that’s what it was, but Maggie accepted its wisdom. For her quiet, introverted father to stay away from that place, with all its words and people, seemed natural, even necessary. She was sure that if he was ever forced to go, some disaster would strike from which he’d never recover.
    Maggie told her father only once about remembering her birth. As she spoke, his expression grew glazed and terrified. For this man whom she loved more than anything, the loss of his wife was still a scabless wound. Seeing it plainly on his face, Maggie slaughtered her mother once more, this time in her mind, and silently vowed never to mention her again.
    When she arrives back at the farmhouse, she’s still trying to decide what to tell Fletcher and Brid. If she reports her encounter with the two girls, Brid will probably say she’s a prude and needs to loosen up. She doesn’t want to tell Brid and Fletcher about the priest and his sister either. They’ll want to know why Maggie entered the church inthe first place, and they won’t believe it was only because of the rain.
    She’s halfway up the drive before she notices the mud-spattered truck parked by the house. It bears the logo of a gas company, and for a moment she feels a sense of relief, until she spots Fletcher on the porch, shirtless, arguing with a bald man in a blue uniform. As she draws nearer, she makes out a crest on the outfit that says his name is Frank. He has a slumped, wizened face with bloodhound eyes, and he keeps his forehead lowered in Fletcher’s direction like a bull preparing to charge.
    “I told you, thirty bucks,” she hears Frank say. “I’ve got overhead.”
    “You’re kidding me,” replies Fletcher. “There’s no way I’m paying more than fifteen.”
    “You want me to unfix that leak?” the