Meet Me Under The Ombu Tree Read Online Free

Bible and a bundle of old letters - and spent every penny he owned on a one-way ticket to Argentina. At first his daughter believed him when he said he would only stay with her for a few weeks, but as the weeks
    rolled on into months she realized that he had come for good.
    Anna Melody was named after her mother, Emer Melody. Dermot loved her ‘tuneful’ name so much that he wanted to call their baby simply Melody O’Dwyer, but Emer thought Melody on its own sounded like the name you’d give a cat and so the child was christened Anna after her grandmother.
    After Anna Melody was born Emer believed that God decided they didn’t need any more children. She would say that Anna Melody was so beautiful God didn’t want to give them another child to live in her shadow. Emer’s God was kind and knew what was best for her and her family, but she longed for more children. She watched her brothers and sisters raise enough children to populate an entire city, but her mother had always taught her to thank God for whatever He saw fit to give her. She was lucky enough to have one child to love. So she poured the love she had inside her for a family of twelve onto her family of two and suppressed the nagging envy she felt in her heart whenever she took Anna Melody to visit her cousins.
    Anna Melody enjoyed a carefree childhood. Spoilt by her parents, she never had to share her toys or wait her turn, and when she was with her cousins she only had to whimper if she didn’t get her way and her mother would come
    running over to do whatever was necessary to make her smile again. This made her cousins suspicious of her. They claimed she ruined their games. They begged their parents not to have her in their houses. When she did appear they’d ignore her, tell her to go home, tell her she wasn’t wanted. So Anna Melody was excluded from their fun. Not that she minded. She didn’t like them either. She was an awkward child, happier out on the hills by herself than in a claustrophobic group of shabby youngsters running about the streets of Glengariff like stray cats. Up on those hills she could be anyone she wanted to be and she dreamed of living the fine life like those movie stars she saw at the flicks, all shiny and glossy with beautiful dresses and long, sparkling eyelashes. Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, Deborah Kerr. She would look down onto the town and tell herself that one day she’d be better than all of them. She’d leave her horrid cousins and never come back.
    When Anna Melody married Paco and left Glengariff for ever, she barely cast a thought to her parents who suddenly found themselves alone in a home with only her memory to comfort them. The house became cold and dark without their beloved Anna Melody to warm it with her laughter and her love. Emer was never the same after that. The ten years that she suffered without her daughter were empty and soulful. Anna Melody’s frequent letters home were filled with assurances that she would visit, and these promises kept her parents’ hope alive until they knew in their hearts that they were shallow words written without thought or indeed, intention.
    When Emer died in 1958 Dermot knew that it was because her heart, sapped of its juices, had finally broken. He knew it was so. But he was stronger than she was and more courageous. When he set off for Buenos Aires he wondered why the hell he hadn’t done it years before; if he had, perhaps his beloved wife would still be with him today.
    Anna (only Dermot O’Dwyer called his daughter Anna Melody) watched her father rummaging around in the flowerbed and longed for him to be like other children’s grandfathers. Paco’s father, named Hector Solanas after his grandfather, had always been beautifully dressed and cleanshaven, even on weekends. His sweaters were always cashmere, his shirts from Savile Row in London, and he possessed a great dignity, like King George of England. To Anna he had been the nearest thing to royalty and