Cheating at Canasta Read Free Page A

dawn had come by the time he parted from Minnie Fennelly, and he imagined that too, the light beginning as he walked in from the country feeling all right again. But more likely he wouldn’t be.
    ‘One day that kid’ll be killed,’ he heard Fitzie Gill saying, and someone else said the woman wasn’t up to looking after the kid. The child was left alone in the house, people said, even for a night while the woman drank by herself in Leahy’s, looking around for a man to keep her company.
    That night, Cahal didn’t sleep again. And all the next day he waited for someone to walk into the garage and say what had been found. But no one did, and no one did the next day either, or the day after that. The Spaniards would have gone on from Galway by now, the memories of people who had maybe noticed the Ford Cortina would be getting shaky. And Cahal counted the drivers whom he knew for a fact had experienced similar incidents with the child and said to himself that maybe, after all, he’d been fortunate. Even so, it would be a long time before he drove past that cottage again, if ever he did.
    Then something happened that changed all that. Sitting with Minnie Fennelly in the Cyber Cafe´ one evening, Minnie Fennelly said, ‘Don’t look, only someone’s staring at you.’
    ‘Who is it?’
    ‘D’you know that dressmaker woman?’
    They’d ordered chips and they came just then. Cahal didn’t say anything, but knew that sooner or later he wasn’t going to be able to prevent himself from looking around. He wanted to ask if the woman had her child with her, but in the town he had only ever seen her on her own and he knew that the child wouldn’t be there. If she was it would be a chance in a thousand, he thought, the apprehension that had haunted him on the night of the incident flooding his consciousness, stifling everything else.
    ‘God, that one gives me the creeps!’ Minnie Fennelly muttered, splashing vinegar on to her chips.
    Cahal looked round them. He caught a glimpse of the dressmaker, alone, before he quickly looked back. He could still feel her eyes on his back. She would have been in Leahy’s; the way she was sitting suggested drunkenness. When they’d finished their chips and the coffee they’d been brought while they were waiting, he asked if she was still there.
    ‘She is, all right. D’you know her? Does she come into the garage?’
    ‘Ah no, she hasn’t a car. She doesn’t come in.’
    ‘I’d best be getting back, Cahal.’
    He didn’t want to go yet, while the woman was there. But if they waited they could be here for hours. He didn’t want to pass near her, but as soon as he’d paid and stood up he saw they’d have to. When they did she spoke to Minnie Fennelly, not him.
    ‘Will I make your wedding-dress for you?’ the dressmaker offered. ‘Would you think of me at all when it’ll be the time you’d want it?’
    And Minnie Fennelly laughed and said no way they were ready for wedding-dresses yet.
    ‘Cahal knows where he’ll find me,’ the dressmaker said. ‘Amn’t I right, Cahal?’
    ‘I thought you didn’t know her,’ Minnie Fennelly said when they were outside.
    Three days after that, Mr Durcan left his pre-war Riley in because the hand-brake was slipping. He’d come back for it at four, he arranged, and said before he left: ‘Did you hear that about the dressmaker’s child?’
    He wasn’t the kind to get things wrong. Fussy, with a thin black moustache, his Riley sports the pride of his bachelor life, he was as tidy in what he said as he was in how he dressed.
    ‘Gone missing,’ he said now. ‘The gardaí´ are in on it.’
    It was Cahal’s father who was being told this. Cahal, with the cooling system from Gibney’s bread van in pieces on a workbench, had just found where the tube had perished.
    ‘She’s backward, the child,’ his father said.
    ‘She is.’
    ‘You hear tales.’
    ‘She’s gone off for herself anyway. They have a block on a couple of roads,