What Heirsake makes.

We never had much, but the kitchen on Linden Street was always warm. My mother kept the stove going from before dawn, and the whole house smelled of bread and coal smoke. I can still hear the screen door slap shut behind my brothers when they came in from the cold.

1953

On Sundays my father would put on his only good shirt and we would walk to Mass together, all of us in a line by height. Afterward there was always someone at the table who hadn't been invited, and there was always enough. That was the rule of the house, though no one ever said it out loud.

I learned to read at that kitchen table, with my grandmother's finger moving under the words. She had come over from Galway with nothing but a tin box, and she told me once that the box was for the things you keep when you cannot keep anything else.

I met your grandfather on a Friday in October, at a dance I almost didn't go to. He asked me twice and I said no twice, and the third time I said yes only because my friend Eileen pinched my arm.

1962

He walked me home the long way so it would take longer, and he talked the entire time about a boat he was going to build and never did. I knew by the corner of Linden Street that I would marry him, though I made him wait a respectable while before I let on.