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"I think Momma is coming down the stairs, Mike, I think she's back. I heard her steps."
"Come on in now out of that, and make me some tea. My belly's above in my back. D'you know how many cows I milked this morning, do you? Before you even turned over for your second sleep, Missy!"
He throws two sods of turf on the fire, and hangs the kettle on the crane. The clock is quieter now. Outside, the crows are cawing. Mike is standing, looking into the fire, and she does the same. When the flames are big and red and the kettle is singing, he makes a pot of tea. He cuts the bread and says, "Will we make a bit of toast?" She smiles. He knows—like her mother knows—that toast is her favorite, favorite thing in the world. He sticks a cut of bread on a fork and leans in and holds it before the flames. She leans in too. Their faces grow pink and warm as the bread turns brown. He toasts three or four cuts and neither of them says a word. But she is happy. She is happy. They sit together at the big table and he butters her toast and spreads jam on it and her mouth waters. He pours two cups of tea and gives her a wink. "Eat up now," he says. And then, just as he is about to take a bite, he turns his head and sees something and a change comes over him. She follows his look to her mother's apron hanging on a nail at the end of the dresser. It is floury around the belly from all the times her mother leaned against the table, kneading the bread. "Eat up, Mike," she says quickly. "Your toast is getting cold."
* * *
They have all come back, the priest too, and they are sitting at the long table up in the dining room. Tess keeps an eye on the small china milk jugs, and when they are empty she runs all the way back to the kitchen and refills them. She moves along the table offering buns and shop cake from a plate. Her hair is tied back neatly. She stands straight, smiling politely when she is praised. The priest asks her how old she is. Seven, she tells him. He says she's a great girl and that she's the image of her mother and in that second her heart nearly bursts with happiness. She looks across the room, up at the spot above the window where the bird tore the wallpaper. She wants to run and find her mother and tell her what the priest just said.
Her father sits at one end of the table, the priest at the other.
"May the Lord have mercy on her soul," the priest says. "What age was she, Michael?"
Her father stops eating. "Nineteen hundred and four, she was born. She was forty last March. That's when she started to complain. Just after the child was born."
He looks around them all, then at the priest. "I met a nun once in a church in Galway," he says. "She was back from America. D'you know what she told me? She said that a man's soul weighs the same as a snipe. Some scientist over there weighed people just before they died, TB patients she said, and then he weighed them again just after they died, beds and all. And weren't they lighter?… Imagine that … The soul was gone, she said."
Aunt Maud blows her nose into her handkerchief. Evelyn goes around the table with the teapot, then whispers something to Aunt Maud.
"She told Evelyn where to get the linen tablecloth to put on the table for the meal," Aunt Maud says. "Isn't that right, Evelyn?"
Evelyn nods and sniffs. "She did. Only a few days ago. She told me which drawer it was in."
Tess is watching her father. He takes a drink of tea and swallows. All the time he is looking down. She can see the bones in his face moving under his skin.
"She was a fine woman," the priest says. "A fine woman."
"She even told us which dress to lay her out in—her new blue dress," Evelyn says.
Tess's heart nearly stops. She understands what that means; her mother is lying in her coffin in her new blue dress. The one she got in Briggs's that day that Tess got her dress, the one she is wearing now. Carefully, she leaves the cake plate up on the sideboard and walks out of the dining room on shaky legs. She climbs the stairs. The sun is flooding in through the stained-glass window, like yesterday. She hurries past, to the upstairs landing and down along the corridor to her parents' room. The door is closed. She stands for a moment, then turns the handle and walks in. It is dark. The drapes have not been opened. There is a bad smell, like when a mouse dies under the floorboards. She runs and drags open the drapes on one of the windows. The mirror is still covered with the black cloth. On the dressing table there is a photograph of her father and mother on their wedding day. She looks at it. Her father might get a new wife now. She might get a new mother. There is another photograph of her mother in a nurse's uniform when she was young and working in a hospital down in Cork. She opens the top drawer, lifts out a red cloth box, checks her mother's brooches, her locket, her hat pins. Nothing is missing. She opens the wardrobe door and gets a terrible fright. For a second she thinks there are people in funeral clothes standing inside the wardrobe. She pushes at the coats and the dresses but there are too many and she is too small and they fall back in her way again. She pulls and drags on the hems of the dresses and skirts, bringing them towards the light. She is almost crying. There is no blue dress. Her mother is wearing it in the coffin. Then she remembers that her mother is no longer in the chapel. She is down in the ground now. Or up in Heaven.
Excerpted from Academy Street by Mary Costello. Copyright © 2015 by Mary Costello. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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