16
cosy nook.
I was wearing the pink angora and she said how nice it was and where did I get it. You know, kind of superficial girl talk. When I told her I started to cry. I explained about Dad dying, the car accident, someone else’s fault, the coma for two days, and then gone. She just let me talk about it and bought me more coffee. After a while she started telling me funny stories about her childhood in Ireland and made me laugh. I felt kind of embarrassed about breaking down but it was the first time I’d been able to say how I felt. Of course all my friends back home have been skyping me and saying how sad it all was, but it’s not the same as having someone patting your arm and grabbing extra serviettes for you to blow your nose on.
I think Tasha’s slightly mad. She’s decided we need to go for a trip to Ireland to visit her family. They live in Dublin. She said she could buy some books while we are there so that it would be a tax dodge for her and therefore, since I wasn’t costing her anything she would pay my fare. I think she’s making all that up and I feel a bit guilty about her paying for me but she’s not really taking no for an answer. She said she would sack me for being a disobedient employee if I didn’t go with her.
. . .
I’m having a recovery day. I think I might possibly have been drunk for the entire weekend. Her family are crazy Catholics. They kept toasting my Dad with whiskey and making me drink more and more of it. They made me go to church with them and the whole family and I lit candles for his soul. Too bad that I’m an atheistic and he was Church of England through and through. Tasha had told them that I couldn’t afford to go back for the funeral. She said that they wouldn’t understand if I told them that my mother told me not to come home. Her mother kept grabbing me all through the weekend and hugging me and saying ‘you poor wee thing.’ I told stories about my life growing up in a small town and the stuff we did with my cousins, the family trips and Dad always helping me with my homework and generally started remembering all the Dad things he had done for me.
Two weeks since Ireland. I keep smiling when I think of that weekend. I feel like we had Dad’s wake. I’m so sad that I yelled at him in my last phone call ever with him. I’m angry that he died before I grew up enough to accept him and love him the way he was. But I also smile when I look at the pink angora and remember how patiently he