The Promise of Light Read Free Page A

hour.
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    The front door was open.
    My father’s dinner lay cold on a white china plate. It was pork chops and a potato, with some of Mrs. Gifford’s apple jam for sauce. I left the door open and ate the food. It was too early in the year for mosquitoes to come in, and I liked the breeze blowing through.
    After dinner, I pulled a bottle of my father’s Irish whiskey from the mantelpiece. The bottle had a red label and said Dunhams Belfast. My father’s friend Willoughby had brought it back from one of his trips to Ireland. I sat down in his chair with the horsehair stuffing. He had rubbed the leather seat dark and smooth with years of naps and pipe-smoking sit-downs and whiskey-drinking sit-downs with Willoughby and Monahan. From this chair, he would raise his glass whiskey mug into the last beam of sunlight coming through the room. He let the sun wink rainbows through its sides.
    My father and Monahan used to go on and on about how you could taste the peat in Irish whiskey. I would be handed a glass of the honey-colored liquid and told to smell the peat and taste it and let it rest on my tongue. But I had no idea what peat looked like or smelled like or even tasted like on its own. As I washed the whiskey through my mouth, I would try to pull apart the different threads of its fire and let instinct tell me where the peat was hiding.
    I pulled out the cork and took a drink. I swished it through my teeth before I swallowed, feeling it sting along the line of my gums. First there was only the heat, like embers scattered in my blood. But when I stood up to shut the door, the alcohol plowed through me so hard I had to sit back down.
    An explosion echoed across the bay. Another slab of Dillon’s roof must have shot into the sky.
    “So you’d like to make a deposit?” I said to a reflection of my face in the window. “Will that be to your checking account or your savings account? Oh?” I slugged back another mouthful of the Dunhams and sat forward. The whiskey rocked in my skull. “You don’t have a savings account? Well, allow me to explain our policy.” I stopped talking and frowned at myself. It seemed as if the fun had already gone from telling people what to do with their money and I hadn’t even started yet. For a moment, panic fluttered up inside me as I wondered if it might be a mistake to start at the bank. But I had been talking about a job as a banker for over a year now. I had no other plan.
    I thought about my vision of the rails, how they were bolted to the land and raced like slivers of mercury into the future.
    It was the Dunhams doing this to me. Making me think wobbly. I tapped at my chest to settle the fire. I saw myself walking into the bank in my new suit and sitting at a desk with my name on it. I heard the hum of business. The frown stayed on my face, but now it was the frown of responsibility and calm.
    I’d be starting at the bank and that was that. I knocked back some more of the Dunhams.
    Then a face appeared in the window.
    I cried out and stood up. The whiskey went down the wrong way and its burning doubled me over. My eyes teared and I couldn’t see the floor to put the bottle down.
    The door opened and I heard from the swish of cloth that Willoughby had come to visit. He was the island’s Catholic priest and I felt as if I’d spent most of my life trying to avoid him. My father sent for the man whenever it was time for a long talk. Through every spotty-faced clumsy part of my growing up, Willoughby had been there. His arm was always creeping around my shoulder. I hated saying hello to him and I hated saying good-bye. Shaking the man’s hand was like grabbing hold of a glove filled with pudding. I used to squeeze hard sometimes, to see if there were any bones inside at all. I didn’t know why my father sent for Willoughby. Most likely, he didn’t want to be the one who came trampling into my memory whenever I thought back to the times when I put a foot wrong and