"So you didn't," Ann said at length. "And now?"
"Now I'm going to make it work. No, that's wrong." She picked up another cookie, tapped it against her glass like a toast. "I'm going to make it fabulous. Pretenses is going to grow. In another year or two, I'll open a branch in Carmel. Then—who knows? A tastefully elegant little storefront in San Francisco, a funky shop in L.A."
"Still dreaming, Margo?"
"Yes, that's right. Still dreaming. Still going places. Just different places." She tossed her hair back and smiled, but there was an edge to it. "Under it all, I'm still the same Margo."
"No, you're not." Ann crossed over, cupped her daughter's chin in her hand. "You're not, but there's enough of the little girl I raised that I recognize you. Where did you come from?" she murmured. "Your grandfathers caught fish to live. Your grandmothers scrubbed floors and hung out the wash with wooden p
egs in high winds." She picked up Margo's hand, studied the long, narrow palm, the tapering fingers accented with pretty rings. "My mother's hand would have made two of yours. Big and hard and capable it was. Like mine."
She saw the surprise in Margo's eyes that she should speak so freely, so casually of people she had never spoken of at all. From selfishness, Ann had come to realize. Because if she didn't speak of them, it didn't hurt so deeply to be without them.
Oh, she'd made mistakes, Ann berated herself. Big and bad mistakes with the one child God had given her. If it stung to try to fix them, it was only just.
"My mother's name was Margaret." She had to clear her throat. "I didn't mention that to you before because she died a few months after I left Ireland. And I felt guilty about leaving her when she was ailing, and about being unable to go back and say good-bye. I didn't talk to you of her, or to anyone. She would have been sad to know that."
"I'm sorry" was all Margo could say. "I'm sorry, Mum."
"So am I—for that and for not telling you sooner how she doted on you in the little time she had with you."
"What—" The question was there, but Margo was afraid to ask it, afraid it would be brushed off again.
"What was she like?" Ann's lips curved in a quiet smile. "You used to badger me with questions like that when you were a small thing. Then you stopped asking, because I never answered. I should have."
She turned away, crossed to the pretty eyebrow windows that offered the sounds and sights of busy streets. Her sin, she realized, had been one of cowardice, and self-indulgence. If the penance was the pain of remembering, it was little enough.
"Before I answer, I want to tell you that I never did before because I told myself not to look back." With a small sound of regret, she turned and walked to her daughter. "That it was more important to raise you up right than to fill your head with people who were gone. Your head was always filled with so much anyway."
Margo touched the back of her mother's hand briefly. "What was she like?"
"She was a good woman. Hardworking, but not hard. She loved to sing, and she sang when she worked. She loved her flowers and could grow anything. She taught us to take pride in our home, and in ourselves. She wouldn't take any nonsense from us, and she doled out whacks and hugs in equal measure. She'd wait for my father to come home from the sea with a look in her eye I didn't understand until I was grown."
"My grandfather? What was he like?"
"A big man with a big voice. He liked to swear so that my mother would scold him." A smile ghosted around Ann's mouth. "He'd come home from the sea smelling of fish and water and tobacco, and he'd tell us stories. Grand stories he could tell."
Ann steadied herself, brushed a few crumbs from the table. "I named you for my mother. My father called her Margo when he was teasing with her. Though I can't see her in you, nor much of myself when it comes to it. The eyes sometimes," she continued while Margo sat silently staring. "Not the color of them, but the shape and that stubborn look that comes into them. That's me right enough. But the color's your father's. He had eyes a woman could drown in. And the light of them, sweet Jesus, such a light in them it could blind you."
"You never speak of him."
"It hurt me to." Ann dropped her hand and sat again, tiredly. "It hurt, so I didn't, then I got out of the habit, and robbed you of him. It was wrong of me not to share him with you, Margo. What I did was keep him for myself," she said in an unsteady voice. "All for myself. I didn't give you your father."
Margo took a shaky breath. It felt as though a huge, hard weight was pressing on her chest. "I didn't think you loved him."
"Didn't love him?" Shock came first, followed by a long, rolling laugh. "Mother of God, girl, not love him? I had such a love for him my heart couldn't hold it. Every time I looked at him it flopped around like one of the fish he'd toss on the table after a catch. And when he'd sweep me up as he liked to do and swing me around, I wouldn't be dizzy from the spinning, but just from the smell
of him. I can still smell him. Wet wool and fish and man."
She tried to picture it, her mother young and laughing, caught up in strong arms and wildly in love. "I thought… I assumed that you'd married him because you had to."
"Well, of course I had to," Ann began, then stopped, eyes wide. "Oh, had to. Why, my father would have thrashed him within an inch of his mortal life. Not that he didn't try, my Johnny," she added with a quick smile. "He was a man, after all, and had his ways. But I had mine, as well, and went to my wedding bed a proper, if eager virgin."
"I wasn't—" Margo picked up her glass, took a bracing sip. "I wasn't the reason he married you?"
"I was the reason he married me," Ann said with a lilt of pride in her voice. "And I'm sorrier than I can say that you had that thought planted in your head, that I didn't realize it until this very moment."
"I thought—I wondered…" How to put it, Margo wondered, when there were so many emotions spinning? "You were so young," she began again. "And in a strange country with a child to raise on your own."