The Train of Small Mercies Read Online Free Page A

just as quick to say to a confounded patron, “Did you ever hear about the teacher I had that choked on a poem?” as her father looked on with enjoyment—and some sense of inadequacy, since she was producing new, remarkably detailed stories every day, and he was only recycling his, adding variations and side stories, yes, but he knew she had surpassed him as the better storyteller.
    â€œYou should start writing them down—the best ones,” he told her one night while closing the pub.
    â€œWhy would I go and do that?” she said. He had never mentioned such a thing to her before—out of fear of what her mother would say if Maeve ever brought it up.
    â€œThat’s what the best storytellers do,” he said. “How can you be known as a great storyteller if you don’t get any of them down?”
    â€œDo you? Write them down, I mean?”
    â€œNo,” he said. “But I run a bar, love. My telling stories is just part of the menu, if you see what I mean. I already have my livelihood. But there should be more to it for you. You’ve two gifts, Maeve: your way with babies and storytelling. And you can do both, of course. No one’s saying you can’t. But you’ve got a wonderful imagination that goes well beyond this pub or talking for fun back at the house. I’m just wanting you to know how grand you are, is all.”
    Two weeks later, as Maeve was drying the last of the shot glasses, a terrible clatter came from the kitchen. All night Larney had gotten the orders confused and said his head felt like it had been worked on by a potato masher. When Maeve and her uncle raced in, they found him doubled over on the rubber mat of the floor. He would only live for another couple of hours.
    With both her parents and now her husband dead, and her only sister having moved away to America, Maeve’s mother decided the only way to go forward was to start their lives anew and leave Ireland. By that point she had no interest in running her half of the pub, and her sister, Meg, had done fine opening up her own dress shop in a small town in Massachusetts. They packed up and moved just a few months after the burial.
    In that first year in America, no one could remember Maeve saying anything. She was fourteen and seemed to go about her life just waiting for it to be over. She was still attentive and good to her sisters, but at school she could barely look at anyone—not even the few boys who worked up the nerve to whistle at her in the hallways.
    Mostly Maeve found ways to avoid being around kids her own age, who bored her with their ridiculous fascination with “the Twist” and “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” and the Boston Celtics with all their championships, and she knew she could make money taking care of babies. The first time was for a family that owned two car dealerships in the state, and after that baby became a toddler, she became the nanny for a captain in the army and his wife, who had twins. Somehow she was even better with two babies at a time, but in another couple of years she was ready to move on. It wasn’t that she didn’t love the children once they could walk or say her name, but babies turned into children who wanted to know why the sky was blue and why fire was hot, and as they got older, they wanted to know why you weren’t married and where were your mother and father?
    Maeve had never told another story after her father died, and keeping that so had become important to her, though she knew how disappointed he would have been. But not having him as an audience, or a reader, would have taken any pleasure out of the telling. Anyone could make up things, she reasoned. She wasn’t interested in impressing people she didn’t know or would never meet. And as he had said, there was another gift she had, and that had taken her far away, after all. In recent weeks she had even begun to wonder if it could take her as