The First Time I Said Goodbye Read Online Free PDF Page B

get the odd old doll come in looking for something in a nice tweed or offering to sell her old Sunday best, complete with gravy stains circa 1976, but we are quite discerning. You should call in while you’re here. I could set you to work. My lovely mammy tells me you run your own shop back home.”
    “A bakery,” I said, although it had been at least eight weeks since I had done a day’s work there and, if the truth be told, I felt a little removed from it. Bake My Day – it seemed like such a quirky, funny name back then but now it seemed stupid, childish even. The last eight weeks had changed me – still this was not the kind of conversation you had with an almost-stranger not even twenty-four hours after you met. You didn’t launch into the horrors of grief and the fact that if you have to ice another cupcake ever again in your life you may do yourself in with a spatula. “It does okay. My assistant is keeping it ticking over for me at the moment.”
    “I must get you to bake me something while you’re here,” Sam said. “Although I’m trying to watch my figure,” he added, patting his almost-flat stomach. “Can’t see any hot young thing falling for me with some extra padding around my middle.”
    He smiled and I was grateful he didn’t push me further about work. Actually, as he picked up his car keys and wished me well, I was grateful he hadn’t pushed me much about anything. Whether it was the jetlag or something darker I definitely felt a little raw that morning. I sipped my coffee, walked into his den and sat down punching buttons on his remote control until his TV sprang to life. Scrolling through the channels I clicked on an old episode of Frasier and started watching, until I found myself welling up at the scenes with Martin. Pull yourself together, I told myself, brushing my sleeve against my eyes. Positive mental attitude – back in Ireland with your mom – there is no need to cry every time anyone even thinks about their father.
    Thankfully my slump into self-pity was disturbed by the arrival of my mother and Dolores – who were clearly in better spirits than I was. I heard them before I saw them, laughing as they came through the door – Sam’s mother obviously having a key to her son’s house. “Annabel?” my mother called, her accent now quite a bit more Derry than it had been.
    “I’m in the den!” I called.
    “‘The den’ – I love it!” Dolores said. “Sounds like something off the TV. I love Americanisms!”
    “We have a unique turn of phrase here too,” my mother said. “Remember the ‘good room’?”
    “I loved that room,” Dolores said as they came in, still lost in their own conversation. “I’ve many happy memories of courting young men in that room, not that we got away with much. Not with Mammy and Daddy in the next room. Do you think they really put a glass up to the wall to listen to what we were getting up to – making sure we were behaving ourselves?”
    My mother giggled – again a childish lilting laugh I hadn’t heard in a long time. “Well, I wasn’t prepared to take a chance. Were you?”
    Dolores laughed heartily, “Ah no, that was what the Bollies were for! Sneaking up those lanes to the woods after dark – it felt so rebellious.”
    My mother wiped a tear of mirth from her eyes and looked at me. I must have looked a sorry sight in comparison, curled on the sofa, scraping tears of another kind from my eyes.
    “Ah, pet,” she said, sitting down beside me, “did you not sleep well? Are you feeling okay?”
    I stared at her blankly, wondering how, in just a week, she seemed to have forgotten what we had been through and was no longer acknowledging that I might have a legitimate reason to be crying over Frasier at eight-thirty in the morning.
    “I’m fine,” I lied, because I didn’t want to embarrass her in front of Auntie Dolores by shouting at the top of my lungs that it might just be the dead dad in my recent past which had put