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The afternoon had gone grey early, the way September afternoons in Limerick sometimes did when the cloud came off the Shannon and settled low over the northside without any obvious intention of lifting. The Ennis Road was still busy, a slow crawl of buses and vans making the long stretch from the roundabout back toward the city, and outside Dillon's, the squat brick-fronted grocery on the stretch where the pavement widened, the last of the day's footfall moved in and out through the sliding doors with the automatic indifference of people whose errands were nearly done.
Kee had been leaning against the wall beside the trolley bay for the better part of fifteen minutes. Her mother had gone in for two things. She had been inside for what felt like a small portion of Kee's life, which could only mean she'd met someone she knew, which in the northern half of Limerick meant the wait could be anything up to half an hour depending on whose business was being reviewed. Kee had settled in the way she always settled when made to wait — foot flat to the wall behind her, puffer jacket zipped to the chin, earrings catching the weak light, watching the road. The bus stop across from her was doing steady business. She watched who got on, who got off, who pulled out a phone before the doors had even closed. She was very rarely bored when there was a street to watch.
It was the stillness that caught her first. Not stillness as an absence of movement, but stillness as a quality, a density in the air around one particular person that made that person harder to look away from than anyone else on the pavement. The woman was standing near the disabled bay, one arm folded across her middle, the other raised, a cigarette between two fingers, not smoking it yet, just letting it rest there while she looked at her phone with the expression of someone reading something she had already decided how to feel about. She was not tall. She was not glamorous in any obvious sense. She had on a dark zip-up hoodie, black leggings, slider sandals despite the chill, and her hair was pulled up in a loose bun with a few strands fallen at the side of her neck. There was a small medal on a chain that caught against her collarbone when she moved. She was not attempting anything. That was the thing. The whole posture of her — shoulders broad and settled, weight easy on her hips, the cigarette held without theatre — was the posture of a woman who had stopped requiring other people's attention a long time ago and had not missed it since.
Kee watched her for a moment, then looked away, then looked back. She was aware of having made a decision that she was not going to fully admit to herself. She peeled herself off the wall, hands in her pockets, and crossed the three metres of pavement in the particular kind of deliberate casualness that only a fourteen-year-old who is trying very hard can produce.
She stopped beside her, angled slightly toward the road, as if her reasons for arriving here were entirely geographical and had nothing to do with the woman two feet away. She stood there for a second. Then she turned her head, already committed.
"Deadly jacket, dat," she said.
The woman looked up from her phone. Not at the jacket. At Kee. She took the measure of her in one unhurried pass — eyes, face, earrings, the front of her puffer, the slant of her stance — and something in her expression settled into a very quiet amusement that did not quite become a smile.
"Thanks, girl," she said. Her accent had a texture to it, something rooted and particular that Kee didn't know well enough to name but recognised the way you recognised that a song had a key without being able to say which one. She brought the cigarette to her lips, lit it, and exhaled slowly toward the road.
Kee held her ground. "Ya waitin on someone?"
"Just finished," she said. "You?"
"Me ma. She's in der since forever. Probably met half the road." She gave a short, resigned shrug. "I know how dat goes."
A small nod. She smoked without urgency.
Kee looked at her again, the way she looked at things when she was assembling information — quick, not staring, but missing nothing. The Cedar Vale site was on the other side of Moyross, and there were girls at school who lived near the halting site, and she'd heard enough to know how to read certain things. The medal, the way she stood, some quality in the grain of the voice. She tested the guess before she was fully sure of it.
"Ya from Moyross, yeah?"
The woman turned to her properly then, a different level of attention. "I am, yeah. Cedar Vale." A pause. "How'd ya know dat?"
Kee gave a small, satisfied lift of her shoulder. "I'm Ballynanty meself. Watch House Cross. I can tell, like." She offered her own name the way she always offered it, as if it were a thing worth knowing. "I'm Kee."
The woman let the moment rest for a second before returning it, unhurried, with the ease of someone who had nothing to prove in the exchange. "Sinead."
Kee said nothing for a moment. She watched the traffic. She was aware of how close she was standing. She had gotten this far, and she was measuring the next step the way she always measured the next step, not with hesitation but with the particular calculation of a girl who understood that the gap between bold and stupid was a narrow one, and that she had been told all her life she lived on the wrong side of it, and who had therefore made a private project of proving otherwise.
She looked at Sinead the way she had practiced looking at girls she liked, level and easy, a look that said she meant it without asking anything back.
"You're deadly lookin, d'ya know dat?"
There was no drama in the silence that followed. Sinead drew on her cigarette and exhaled through her nose and looked at Kee with an expression that had not changed so much as deepened, the way a room could be the same room and still feel different when someone in it decided to pay a different kind of attention. There was no flattery in her face. No disapproval either. There was only the look of a woman reading a situation she understood thoroughly, and finding it, in its way, quite endearing.
"Are ya, yeah," she said.
"Wha'?" Kee said. "I'm just sayin."
Sinead took a last pull of the cigarette, crushed it against the base of the trolley bay, and pocketed the dead end the way it came as natural to her as breathing. She looked at Kee with something warm coming into the steadiness of her expression, not changing it but softening the surface, the way light changed a stone.
"How old are ya, pet?"
The word landed gently, which was exactly why it slid under her. *Pet.* The way her aunt used it. The way a teacher sometimes used it before delivering something Kee hadn't earned. It was not the word she had been expecting, and what it told her about how she had been seen in this conversation arrived in the same instant as the word itself.
"Fourt—" She stopped. Started again. "Nearly fifteen."
Sinead looked at her for one quiet moment, then said: "Come here."
She leaned in close, easy and without ceremony, and brought her mouth to the side of Kee's ear, and said a number.
The precise arithmetic of what followed happened entirely in Kee's face. The colour began at the high point of her cheekbones and moved outward and downward, a bright, helpless heat that her foundation, thin as it was, could do nothing about. The number she had heard was not the number she had been working with. The number she had been working with had been somewhere in the optimistic vicinity of twenty, twenty-two at an absolute stretch. The actual number was categorically, irreversibly not that. The joke she had been half-constructing — some light, breezy exit line that would let her leave this conversation looking like she'd been playing all along — dissolved before she could locate it. What was left in the place it had occupied was a silence in her chest and a very particular kind of heat in her face that she associated with the worst kind of getting it wrong, which was the kind that could not be argued with.
She opened her mouth. Closed it. "Ah—" She could not find what was meant to come after.
Then Sinead's arm came around her shoulders, heavy and unhurried, settled there with the ease of someone who had done the same thing a thousand times for women in a thousand different kinds of distress, and who would not make a performance of this one any more than the others. A quick press of dry lips to the side of Kee's cheek. The faint smell of tobacco and something soft underneath it, baby skin or shampoo, was there and then gone.
Sinead's mouth came close to her ear again, lower now, a thread of real warmth in it alongside the amusement that had been there from the beginning.
"Go on, so," she said. "Go back to bein cool."
She stepped back, nothing changed in her face, and took out her phone with the air of a woman whose afternoon was resuming. The arm that had come around Kee's shoulder withdrew without fanfare. The kiss had already become a thing that had simply happened, absorbed into the ordinary passage of the afternoon the same way everything else had been.
Kee stood very still for a moment. The blood was still in her cheeks. The specific stupidity of the situation was registering in full, and there was nothing she could do with any of it except stand inside it until it passed. She became aware, in the particular way that only the newly embarrassed can, of the trolley bay and the sliding doors and the bus pulling away from the stop across the road and every other detail of the Ennis Road at twenty past four on a grey September Tuesday, all of it vivid and remorseless.
She looked at the side of Sinead's face. Sinead was looking at her phone, entirely composed, the St. Anthony medal resting against her collarbone, the loose strand of hair at the side of her neck turning slightly in the cold off the road.
Slowly, and with a great deal of private effort, Kee put her hands back in her pockets, and looked at the traffic, and said nothing, and stood there. After a moment she felt the first small twitch of something threatening to become a smile at the corner of her own mouth, aimed at no one, aimed at the road.
She would stay there until her mother came out. She had no particular plan to go anywhere.
Her mother came through the sliding doors with four bags, which was twice what she had gone in for, and the look on her face of a woman who had met someone she knew and was still processing the second half of the conversation in her head as she walked. She had the bags distributed across both hands in the practiced way of someone who had been doing this particular walk since before Kee was born, weight balanced without thought, and she was already scanning the pavement before the doors had finished closing behind her, the way she always scanned when she expected to find Kee more or less where she had left her and wanted to confirm it quickly before reorganising the rest of her thinking.
She found her. She also found the woman beside her.
The scan paused.
Her mother was not a woman who showed surprise openly. What she showed instead was a recalibration, a brief and very thorough reassessment of the scene in front of her that involved taking in Sinead from sliders to bun, clocking the cigarette between her fingers, noting the way Kee was standing, and arriving at a set of conclusions that her face did not announce but her pace did, slowing from a walk to an approach that had a question in it.
"Who's dis?" she said. Not unfriendly. Straight.
"Ma." There was a great deal of ground covered in that single syllable. A warning, a plea, a very precise social anxiety compressed into one word.
Her mother arrived beside them and set two of the bags down to free a hand, which she extended toward Sinead with the directness of a woman who had grown up somewhere that considered introducing yourself a basic courtesy rather than a formality. "Sharon," she said.
Sinead took the hand without hesitation. "Sinead."
"Ya from Moyross, yeah?" The way she said it was the way her mother said most things — not bluntly, but without any of the diplomatic cushioning that people who worried about causing offence employed before asking a direct question. It was information she wanted and she asked for it.
"Cedar Vale," Sinead said.
Her mother nodded once, which meant she had filed this away and was now moving on. She looked at Kee, whose face was doing something complicated near the cheekbones. "Were ya just standin here da whole time?"
"I was talkin."
"I can see dat." She picked the bags back up. She looked at Sinead again, briefly, and her expression settled into the warmer and more considered look she reserved for people who had passed some initial threshold she was never explicit about. "Sorry for draggin her off. She's gas, isn't she."
It was not entirely a question.
"She is, yeah," Sinead said. The amusement in it was genuine but quiet enough that only someone paying close attention would have caught it at the right register.
Her mother made a sound that was more acknowledgment than laughter, the sound of a woman who had heard this particular assessment before and found it accurate without finding it entirely uncomplicated. She looked at Kee. "Don't be too long. Dinner's on before six."
"Yeah, grand."
"I mean it."
"I know ya mean it."
Her mother's eyes stayed on her for a moment longer than the conversation required, the way mothers' eyes sometimes did when they were not checking on what was said but on the quality of something underneath it. Whatever she found did not alarm her. She picked up the bags with the shift of a woman redistributing long-familiar weight and moved off in the direction of the bus stop, already reassembling the rest of her afternoon into the correct order in her head.
Kee watched her go. Her hands were in her pockets. Her shoulders had come up slightly at some point during the preceding exchange and she became aware of this now and brought them back down with the conscious effort of someone who had been caught being embarrassed and was attending to the evidence. She looked at the road for a second. Then she looked back at Sinead with the expression of a girl in the specific aftermath of a thing that had gone wrong in too many directions to pick one and she said, flat and frank and aimed at no one: "She'd talk to a wall, dat one."
The corner of Sinead's mouth moved. She turned to look at the empty pavement where Sharon had been and then back at Kee, and what was in her face now was not the amusement of before, which had been wide and calibrated and slightly at Kee's expense, but something smaller and less complicated, something that had to do with watching a girl drop the performance for the first time and finding the person underneath it more interesting than the performance had been. She said nothing for a moment, which was its own kind of response.
"She's all right," she said, eventually, and it was said with the level certainty of someone who had spent enough time reading adults to know the difference between the ones who meant harm and the ones who just talked too loudly and couldn't help themselves.
"She's grand," Kee said, with the resigned and total affection of someone whose frustration had no real bottom to it. "She just." She stopped, because the end of the sentence was too accurate and therefore too large to finish in front of someone she had known for eleven minutes.
She looked sideways at Sinead, who was watching the road in the easy way of someone with no particular place to be inside the next thirty seconds. The afternoon had gone a specific kind of grey that Limerick did in September when the light decided to leave before anyone had quite finished with it. A bus pulled away from the stop across from them. Two women with a buggy came out of the sliding doors and negotiated the gap between the trolley bay and the kerb.
"I'm sorry," Kee said. She was aiming for careless. She landed somewhere closer to honest. "Earlier, like. I wasn't—" She stopped again. She was not accustomed to the feeling of not having the next word. "I was just messin."
Sinead looked at her then, properly, the full attention she had been directing at the road redirected without hurry to Kee's face. She held it there for a moment in the same way she held most things, without comment, without performance, simply looking and letting the look carry whatever it needed to.
"I know," she said.
And that was all. Two words of such complete and unweighted accuracy that Kee could not find the edge of them to push against, because there was nothing in them to push against, because Sinead had said them the way you stated a fact about the weather: not unkindly, not knowingly, just correctly, in the tone of someone to whom a great number of things were already legible and who had no need to make a display of that legibility.
Kee looked at the road. She breathed out slowly through her nose, which was what she did when she was adjusting to something she hadn't expected.
"You're not from here originally," she said. It came out as observation rather than question, which was better than she had meant to do.
"Newcastle," Sinead said. "But dat was years ago."
"Ya don't sound it. Well." She considered. "A bit, maybe. The way ya say certain things."
Sinead looked at her without expression for a moment, the look of someone registering that a piece of listening just been demonstrated, and then nodded once, slowly, as if marking the point. She reached into her pocket and retrieved her phone, glanced at something on the screen, then put it away again without apparent urgency.
"Have ya anywhere to be?" she said.
The question landed in Kee's chest at an angle she hadn't braced for. She kept her face still with the particular effort of a girl who has been given something she wanted and knows better, for once, than to let the wanting show.
"Before six," she said.
Sinead nodded. She had already started moving.
The Ennis Road going north was a road that never quite made up its mind what it wanted to be. It carried the city out of itself gradually, the commercial giving way to the residential in the unplanned, incremental way of streets that had grown rather than been designed, so that a chipper sat beside an insurance broker sat beside a house with its front garden given over to a tidy square of poured concrete and a lone recycling bin. The footpath on the western side was wide enough for two people to walk without negotiating, which was something, and Sinead moved along it at a pace that was not slow but had no urgency in it, the pace of a woman whose relationship with the distance between here and home was old and automatic.
Kee matched it. She was aware of matching it. She was aware of quite a lot of things in the first minute of the walk, including the position of her own hands, which she had returned to her pockets, and the question of whether this was the right place for them, and the fact that she was thinking about her hands at all, which was not normally something she did. She had walked this stretch of road since she was old enough to walk anywhere without an adult, and she could not now have said what any of it looked like. She was looking at the side of Sinead's face.
"So d'ya just do dogs or what?" she said.
"Dogs mostly," Sinead said. "Cats if they're all right about it. Some of them aren't."
"Mean cats?"
"Anxious ones mostly. Mean ya can deal wit." She considered this. "Mean ya know what's coming, like."
Kee turned this over. "D'ya do it from home?"
"I do, yeah. Have a little shed set up. Does grand."
"And people just, what, drop dem off?"
"Or I do call-outs, if dey've got mobility issues or whatever. But mostly dey come to me." She lifted her chin slightly at the road ahead, which was about nothing and also indicated forward motion, a gesture that seemed to belong to someone who spent a good deal of time moving from one practical thing to the next and whose body had developed a vocabulary for it. "It suits better dat way. I've got my stuff dere, I know where everyting is. And I can keep an eye on tings at de same time."
Kee nodded as if this were information she had been expecting. She was quiet for almost a full thirty seconds, which was long for her, and she spent it watching the road and revising the image she had been carrying since the trolley bay without fully meaning to. She had assembled Sinead the way she assembled most adults she found interesting, quickly and from the outside in, working from surface detail toward an interior that she filled in with instinct and projection in roughly equal measure. The woman on the pavement outside Dillon's had been one thing: composed, set, the particular solidity of someone who had decided very early who they were and not revisited the question since. The woman talking about anxious cats and call-outs and keeping an eye on things was the same person but with more rooms visible, and Kee was reconfiguring the layout as she went.
"Do ya like it?" she said.
Sinead glanced at her. Brief, assessing, not unfriendly. "What makes ya ask dat?"
Kee shrugged with one shoulder. "Just wonderin. Some people do stuff just cos dey're good at it. Doesn't mean dey like it."
A pause. Sinead looked at the road. "I like it, yeah," she said, and the simplicity of it meant she had thought about it before answering, which Kee registered without having the vocabulary to explain why it mattered to her. "Dere's something to it. Ya get a dog in dat's a state, mats all through it, scared of everyting, won't let anyone near it, and by de time it goes out it's—" She made a small, minimal gesture with one hand, a turn of the wrist that meant something resolved. "Dat's something, isn't it."
"Yeah," Kee said, and she meant it.
They walked on. A car pulled out from a side road too quickly and the driver raised a hand in apology at no one, already gone. Two young fellas on bikes came up fast behind them on the footpath and swerved into the road at the last moment without breaking pace. Kee tracked them automatically, the way you tracked sudden movement on a northside street before your conscious mind had decided whether it warranted attention, and then let them go.
"How many have ya on at a time?" she said. "Dogs, like."
"Depends on de day. I try not to take more dan three in a session. More dan dat and ya can't give dem de time dey need, like."
"Tree." Kee performed a small, private calculation. "And what do ya charge?"
The corner of Sinead's mouth moved in a way that was not quite a smile but contained the shape of one. "Why, are ya tinking of opening up in competition?"
"I'm just—" Kee stopped, recognised the trap, stepped out of it cleanly. "I'm just askin."
"Depends on de dog," Sinead said, without making anything of the exchange. "Size of it, state of de coat, what dey want done. I've a woman from Dooradoyle wit seven shih tzus."
"Seven?"
"Audrey, Grace, Ingrid, Ava, Bette." She paused. "Rita and Cary."
There was a moment. It started in Kee's chest and moved outward and she laughed before she had made a decision about laughing, a short, caught, involuntary sound that she tried briefly to redirect into a cough and then abandoned the attempt. She pressed her mouth together. It didn't help. Sinead was watching her with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had been holding this piece of information for a while and had found the right person for it.
Kee shook her head. She was still smiling, the real version, the one that didn't go through any of the usual editorial stages she ran smiles through before they arrived on her face. It sat there unapologetically for a few seconds before she remembered herself and let it scale back to something more contained.
"Do ya have your own dog?" she said.
"Not at de minute. Had a fella last year but he died." She said it without self-pity, the way she seemed to say most things that were factually sad — fully, without dressing, without any invitation to make more of it than it was. "He was old, like. It was his time. But I miss him."
"What was he?"
"Bit of everyting. Rescue. Big eejit of a ting, couldn't walk in a straight line." A brief pause. "Dolly still asks about him sometimes."
The name landed and passed and Kee let it go by, the way you let a word go by when you don't know yet what it belongs to. She looked at the road. "Who's Dolly?"
Sinead took a moment before answering, not a long one, but a specific one, the moment of a person selecting which version of a true thing to use. "Me little one," she said.
Kee processed this on the outside as nothing, her face doing the work of staying neutral that she had trained it to do in the years since she had learned that visible reactions gave other people too much of the score too quickly. On the inside what was happening was a swift and comprehensive reorganisation. The image she had been building, refining and adjusting since the Ennis Road, ran into a new piece of structural information and had to be rebuilt around it. Not demolished. Rebuilt. There was no place in the version she had been carrying for a small child who asked after a dog. She installed the room without making a sound about it and kept walking.
"How old?" she said.
"Two in November."
"Ah, dat's lovely," Kee said, in the automatic register of someone who has heard adults exchange this information enough times to know the correct response, then stopped, because the correct response was the wrong one. "Is she—" She tried again. "What's she like?"
Sinead looked at her sideways, brief and very nearly warm. "She doesn't say much yet. But she's always watching. Like she's working out how everyting fits together."
"My sister was like dat," Kee said. "Quiet and den suddenly she had opinions about everyting and ya couldn't get a word in." She paused. "Still can't, like."
"How old's she?"
"Nine. But she acts about forty." There was no irritation in it. It was said with the resigned tenderness of someone whose frustration and affection had the same source and had long since stopped being distinguishable from each other.
Sinead made a sound low in her throat that meant she knew this particular dynamic from the inside. "How many of yis are dere?"
"Just de two. Me and Baby Kee."
"Baby Kee," Sinead repeated.
"Keeley. It's just what everyone calls her. To differentiate, like." She paused, then felt the explanation was perhaps unnecessary and moved past it. "It's just a family ting."
They were turning now, off the main road, the character of the street narrowing and shifting the way it always did going into the north end of the city, the houses closer together, the gardens smaller, the sky a different shape overhead with less of it visible between the roof lines. Kee knew this geography in the soles of her feet the way you knew a place you had walked since you were small enough that the walking itself was the event rather than the journey.
"Do ya ever get lonely?" she said. She heard the question arrive in the air between them and was aware immediately that it had gone further than she had cleared it for, that it had come from the part of her that was still processing the two bin bags and the little one who asked about the dog and the fact of Sinead going home to a caravan and not to a flat with a sister in the other room and her mother's hairspray on the bathroom shelf. She considered pulling it back and rejected the attempt because pulling it back would be worse.
Sinead did not answer immediately. She was not the kind of woman who answered things immediately. She let the question sit in the air between them for long enough that Kee had the time to regret it fully, decide she didn't regret it, and settle into waiting.
"Everyone's lonely sometimes," Sinead said. She looked at the road. "Dat's just what it is."
It was not the answer Kee had expected, because she had expected to be handled, redirected, given something light or practical that closed the question off at the source. What she had been given instead was a thing said straight across to her from one person to another, with no modification for her age or the length of their acquaintance, and it landed with the particular precision of a thing said exactly at the right level.
She didn't know what to do with it so she did nothing, which was the right thing, and the question receded and the afternoon went on around them, a woman taking a bag from the boot of a parked car, a child's red jumper over a front gate, the smell of something cooking from an open kitchen window that was probably only significant to whoever lived there and nobody else.
"Ya go to school up dis end?" Sinead said, after a while.
"St. Cormac's." She paused. "It's grand, like. De teachers aren't de worst." Another pause. "Some of dem are de worst, but not all of dem."
"What's ya favourite ting?"
Kee considered this with the expression of someone who had not been asked before and was therefore accessing an answer that had not been prepared. "English, I suppose. Or—" She corrected herself, and the correction was slightly reluctant, as if the true answer were one she had not decided yet whether to give to someone she had just met. "I like when ya get to talk, like. When dere's discussion and dat. I like—" She stopped.
Sinead waited. She did not fill the silence and she did not hurry it.
"I like when ya can make people see sometin different to what dey thought dey were goin to see," Kee said. "If ya say it de right way, like. Ya can take de same ting and if ya—" She made a frustrated, reaching gesture with one hand, the gesture of someone whose idea had arrived before the language for it. "I dunno. The way ya say it changes what it is, kinda."
She stopped. She was looking at the road with the expression of someone who had said a true thing in public for the first time and was not sure of the reception. It was a very different face from the one she had worn on the Ennis Road.
Sinead said nothing for a moment. They turned another corner and ahead of them, beyond the last row of houses, the beginning of the site was visible — the caravans set in their places, a line of washing, the shed roof just catching the last of the low light. Sinead walked toward it without altering her pace, without performing the approach in any direction.
"Yeah," she said, eventually, and it was the same word Kee had used earlier, said with the same weight and the same brevity, returned across the afternoon like something recognised.
Kee didn't answer. She put her hands back in her pockets. She kept walking.
The dog went back to its owner by way of a girl of about sixteen who came to the shed door with her hands in her sleeves and her hood up and said only "me da sent me" in the manner of someone whose errand was beneath them, and Sinead handed the lead across without ceremony and the girl departed with the dog trotting ahead of her in the restored and unselfconscious way of an animal that had been made comfortable in its own coat and knew it.
Sinead wiped her hands on a cloth and hung it over the edge of the sink and moved the last of the brushes back to their places along the shelf with the unhurried precision of someone closing down a space they would return to in the morning. The shed had the particular quality of late evening in it now, the light from the single fitting overhead doing its best against the encroaching grey beyond the small square window, and the smell of shampoo and warm dog and the faint cut of Dettol underneath it all had settled into something Kee had stopped noticing twenty minutes ago, which probably meant she had been here long enough for it to have become simply the smell of where she was.
She was still on the upturned crate. She had not moved from it in the better part of an hour and had not been asked to, which was its own kind of permission. She watched Sinead move around the shed with the ease of someone at home inside a small space, which was different from the ease of someone at home inside a large one — more deliberate, more economical, each movement knowing what the one after it would need. She filed this away the way she had been filing things away since the Ennis Road, without quite realising she was doing it.
She became aware of the sound before she identified it. It was coming from outside the shed door, which had been left ajar, and it was low and looping and without particular melody, the way humming was when it wasn't trying to be anything, just breath turned into a kind of presence. It stopped. Then the door opened wider.
The child was very small. She was wearing a yellow top with something printed on it that was too faded to read, and dark leggings, and one sock, and she moved through the doorway with the front-weighted, purposeful locomotion of a toddler who had decided exactly where she was going and considered the negotiation of the door a secondary concern to be dealt with in passing. She did not look at Kee. She looked at Sinead.
Sinead turned from the shelf and her face did the thing Kee had not seen it do before, not the bright crooked version from earlier on the road, not the level warmth of the shed, but something beneath and before both of those, something that did not perform itself at all. She crossed the small space without hurry and lifted the child in one smooth movement, the lift of a woman whose arms had been doing this particular thing long enough that her body conducted it independently of thought, and Dolly folded against her shoulder with the complete and trusting compression of a small animal finding its exact place.
They stayed like that for a moment, Sinead's hand moving once across the child's back, settling there.
Then Dolly turned her head.
She looked at Kee from the height of her mother's shoulder with the particular directness of a child who has not yet been taught to moderate a stare, dark eyes open and still and entirely without self-consciousness, conducting the kind of assessment that adults spent decades learning to disguise and which children performed in plain sight because no one had yet suggested they oughtn't. She was not alarmed. She was not curious in any animated or reaching sense. She was simply looking, thoroughly, with the application of someone who understood that looking was how information arrived and who had not yet found any reason to be embarrassed about wanting it.
Kee looked back at her. She became aware of her own face and what it might be doing and made a brief, internal adjustment toward something appropriate, and then was not sure what appropriate looked like for a two-year-old and came out the other side of the adjustment approximately where she had started. She lifted one hand in a small, slightly uncertain wave, which felt immediately wrong in a way she couldn't specify, and lowered it again.
"Howya," she said.
Dolly considered this. She said nothing. She continued looking at Kee with the same level, unhurried attention, as if the greeting had been noted and filed and she would address it in her own time if she decided it warranted a response.
"She's brilliant, isn't she," Kee said, not quite to Sinead and not quite to herself.
"She has her moments," Sinead said, in the tone of a woman who meant the opposite.
Dolly reached up and took a loose strand of Sinead's hair and held it without pulling it, the grip of a child who wanted contact and had identified the most convenient form of it. Sinead turned her head slightly, just enough to look at her daughter's profile, and something passed across her face that was so private and so unhurried that Kee felt she had seen something not intended for an audience and looked away at the shelf of brushes rather than at either of them.
The shed was quiet for a moment. Outside, somewhere across the site, a dog was barking at something and then wasn't.
"Will ya have a cup of tea?" Sinead said.
It was said the way she said most things — without weight, without implication, placed into the air between them as a plain and practical thing that required only a plain and practical answer. The same register as the first invitation, on the road. Not an occasion. An extension of the afternoon by another ordinary increment.
Kee looked at the window. The light outside had gone the colour that meant she had less time than she wanted and more than she feared.
"Yeah," she said. "Go on."