June, 1982
Elinor Ipswitch watched the beautiful girl playing in her garden. How she looked so much like her daughter. Poor Helen. Seven years later, her death still clung to her like her black funeral dress drenched under the rain. It was a small funeral, one that she couldn't wait to be over. When the rain started, it seemed like an answered prayer as the priest spoke with a hurried pace.
Helen's death spoke to her in a rather unkind way, the way she died: that she'd failed in her role as a mother. The guilt weighed on her like a hundred bricks stacked up on her shoulders. Yes, life was about choices. Yet she felt she would have helped her daughter—guided her—in making better choices than ending up as a prostitute.
Now, at fifty- eight, she had another little child to raise. Was it life giving her another chance? A second chance to train up a little child in the right way?
The truth was that she was tired. Her hands were calloused from decades of laundry, scrub work, and tending to the little cottage her late husband left behind. She had buried a husband, now a daughter. Raising another child at her age felt like a cruel joke.
"Be careful now, child, don't go too close to the fence," she cried from where she sat.
She smiled as the little girl retreated from the fence and went after a butterfly that kept evading her little fingers.
Life in Oldcastle was basic. It seemed a place for retirement after the hustling and bustling of city life. Her husband's cottage in Oldcastle was small, with low beams and walls that held the smell of woodsmoke and boiled potatoes. Days fell into hard rhythms: scrubbing floors, hanging clothes on the line with iron pegs, chopping vegetables. The difference was that now, she was no longer alone. Her seven year old granddaughter trailed after her like a shadow, learning early to keep quiet, to be useful, to take up little space.
She was never the tender type. She was never the one that read bedtime stories or knelt for prayers before bed. Her Irish mother and Scottish, gun-blazing father hadn't been either. As far back as she could remember, their household had been built on one principle: work, work, and more work. Maybe that was the same gene she'd passed unto Helen. From a tender age she'd started selling milk and other light farm products to her peers.
Despite this missing piece—her lack of tenderness—she was ever present and steady. She made sure meals appeared at the same times every day. Clothes were made and patched, the fire in the hearth stoked when needed. For this little child who has been born into chaos, she hoped that her steadiness was enough—at least for the time being.
There were moments, though, when her care broke through the hardness of her upbringing like rays of sunlight through cloud. Like the time when the child scraped her knee in the garden, she'd dabbed the cut with vinegar and muttered, "You'll live." But her hand lingered on the child's hair longer than it needed to, her thumb moving in a slow, absent stroke, a tenderness she'd never admit to. Another time, when the child brought home a daisy chain from the meadow, she placed it in a jar of water on the sill, pretending it was only to keep it from going to waste. Yet there was that softness, that hidden, unnurtured tenderness in the act that said otherwise.
Elinor did tell her stories. Not fairytales though, but tales of her daughter as a little girl: stubborn, lively, brilliant, and of course, hardworking. She never hid the truth, either. "Your mum made mistakes, my child. Big ones. But she loved you more than the world. Never forget that."
There were Sundays, too, when Elinor dressed her in stiff white socks and a wool dress and walked her down the lane to the tiny Catholic church in the county. She watched her as she sang along when the hymns were raised, bright-eyed and waving hands. She couldn't help but notice the contrast. Helen always cried in church as a little child, as though all the holy activity around her made her uneasy. Elinor brimmed with quiet optimism. Her granddaughter would turn out different. She won't be anything like her mother.