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and come to find me, and she’d known exactly where to look. That was how well we
knew each other.
    And it wasn’t as if Balbriggan were a big place, after all.
    She said, “Are you okay?”
    It was my moment of supreme cowardice. “Fine, love,” I said, holding up an arm so she could sit down inside its bend. “Just thinking of you.”
    She snugged herself into my side and kissed me, long strands of dark hair curving her cheek.
    I was the worst person alive.
    •  •  •
    My dad was up by the time I came home. He always made a virtue of punctuality and keeping to a schedule, just as if he were Employed. He said it helped lend purpose to the day,
and when I compared him to the rest of my friends’ moms and dads, spending all day down at the pub or sleeping until afternoon, I thought he had it right.
    The clouds had rolled in, tall and tattered, and the wind smelled like coming rain. I watched it twist the leaves of the willow in the front garden as Dad came down the steps to meet me.
    “Shaun was looking for you,” he said.
    “She found me,” I said, and kissed him on the cheek. He’d been taking out the composting. I lifted the bag from his hand and carried it over to the bin in the garden
corner.
    “She’s worried about you,” he said. “So’m I.”
    It stopped me, one hand on the composter’s solar lid. The lazy whirr of windmills along the terrace filled my hearing. A white-waist-coated magpie hopped up, eyeing the multi-colored
kitchen waste inquisitively. I shut the bin in its face.
    “There’s no call to be worried,” I said. “You should right-mind it out.”
    He sighed. I knew perfectly well that he didn’t need re medial rightminding. Dad was one of the most stable people I’d ever met, and he was rigorous about keeping up with his
emotional controls. They really worked best after twenty or so—I’d been told often enough that the erratic shifts of adolescent hormones were hard to balance out, no matter what
surgery, cognitive measures, or chemical supports were used.
    Maybe, I thought, when the rightminding kicked in properly I’d be able to let go of my dream of going to sea.
    Except I’d already decided that wasn’t going to be what happened. I supposed I had the rightminding, to the extent that it was working, to thank for the fact that I could have
a conversation with with him rationally. We were taught in school that young adults were once notorious for their emotional lability.
    “Now, Billie,” he said. “You know I just want to see you contented. Not—”
    “Not like Mam?” I asked.
    His face paled.
    Now that was cruel , I thought. Maybe my rightminding wasn’t so good after all.
    But he saw through the cruelty, I guess, to my hurt. “You’re not your mam, Bill,” he said. “I’ve never thought so. You wouldn’t run out on people who love
you.”
    He said it with kindness. He reached out to touch my arm.
    Shame filled me up until I wanted to vomit it out. Wasn’t that exactly what I was thinking of doing?
    •  •  •
    I went upstairs to bed—my half-sister Katy was just getting up, so I didn’t have to share the room with her and her fretting infant—and slept for six hours,
which still had me up by noon. When I came down again, Dad and Katy were both out. I thought Dad might be at his painting class (he’s terrible) and I seemed to remember that Katy’s son
David had an early rightminding appraisal (he’s two). I thought about using some of the water ration to shower and decided to get some work done in the back garden instead. I sat in the
parlor and ate two pieces of toast with butter while I was considering the chores and staring at the dusty guitar hung over the old fireplace.
    We had a typical Irish terraced house with a typical Irish garden, which was about six meters by five and bounded by gray stone walls too high to see over. There were roses in two corners,
scarlet runner beans planted where they’d climb the through the