Uchenna's Apples

  Outside, the wind rose a little, and out in the back, Uchenna could hear leaves rustle. She thought of the apple tree, suddenly hearing again something Jimmy had said last night: Sure they’d never eat anything that didn’t come from a supermarket. At the time she’d been annoyed by that. But now she thought, When have I ever eaten one of those apples? She remembered her Mam warning her about them last year, when they got here in the spring: “Watch out for those, they’ll make your stomach ache something terrible if you eat them green…” The problem was that they were always green, even when they were ripe. The challenge lay in figuring out just when that was.

  I’ll try one tomorrow, Uchenna thought as she got up to put on some pajamas before going online to investigate in more detail just what horses ate…

  *

  It took her a long time to get to sleep, and so she probably shouldn’t have been surprised when the first thing she heard was her Mam’s voice outside the bedroom door: “Sweet, time to get up, it’s eight thirty, this is the third time I’ve called you now, you have to get washed up and I have to get you to the bus, will you come on—!”

  Uchenna sat up in bed in utter shock. Emer was going to text me?! she thought, and rummaged under her pillow for her phone. How did I not hear this go off?!

  As she popped the phone open, she checked to make sure that it had been turned up on high. But it was, or at least as high as she ever set it for under-pillow alerts: higher would be heard down the hall in the master bedroom. “Feck feck feck feck,” Uchenna said under her breath as she jumped to the text menu and saw the last message to come in:

  They re stil here!!!

  She’s getting overexcited again, Uchenna thought as she she hit “details” and the phone showed her when the message had come in. 0617. Holy God but she wasn’t kidding about getting up early! Uchenna thought. Hurriedly she texted back, Overslept, OMG so sry, how were they?

  She dropped the phone on the bed and went across the room to get her bathrobe off the hook behind the door. Uchenna hardly had time to get the robe on before the phone made the SMS Morse-code beep of an incoming message: she leapt for the phone and picked it up. They’re fine, hungry still, apples really not enough, aren’t you going to be late?

  Uchenna shook her head. How does she text that fast? Unless she had it ready to go. But how would she know what I was going to say? She laughed under her breath and texted back, Right as always, gotta go, text you in the car.

  As she dropped her phone on the bed again and headed for the bedroom door, from outside her Mam shouted, “Uchenna, come on!”

  “Here already,” Uchenna said as she came out, in a voice intended to let her Mam know she was fussing for no reason. But her Mam just nodded and turned away, saying as she headed for the stairs, “Good, now hurry up, when you’ve showered there’s just time enough to get some breakfast down you before you go….”

  Her Mam sounded stressed, much too much so for a Saturday morning. But it wasn’t just the Saturday. All that fighting again last night… Uchenna thought: for this was another of the things that the master bedroom was too close for her to avoid hearing. Uchenna sometimes wished that if her folks wanted to fight they’d just go down to the pub and do it, like everybody else in Ireland seemed to do. She sighed. They’re a rule unto themselves, she thought, going into the bathroom and shutting the door.

  It had been about work again. In the shower, Uchenna shook her head helplessly, for her Dad and Mam were fighting about this all the time lately. It’s not like anybody’s going to repossess the house, Uchenna thought. She’s a doctor, he’s a high-end software guy, they’re both doing okay, in front of me they’re all about how it’s the other one who’s working too hard— But everybody knew that Ireland was getting expensive to live in: more expensive than it had ever been. “Couldn’t believe it, went to Geneva last month on that outservice and it was less expensive than here,” was one of the things Uchenna had heard through the walls last night. There followed a great deal more discussion that Uchenna didn’t understand about expense accounts and how they didn’t go as far as they used to. That she found peculiar: the whole idea of expense accounts, she thought, was that your boss gave you as much money as you needed to do what the boss wanted when you were traveling. Weird. Well, hope it’s nothing serious. Please, God, don’t let it be anything serious…

  Uchenna finished up in the bathroom, got dressed in her hockey clothes, stuffed normal clothes in her change bag, and ran downstairs to breakfast. Half an hour later she and her Mam were in the SUV on the way to the bus pickup, which was in the parking lot of a small shopping center about a mile outside of town, on the far side of the train station— too far to walk if you were in any kind of hurry, as Uchenna was this morning. She spent the ride with her Mam texting Emer, which her Mam was used to. But when they pulled up in the parking lot and saw the minibuses there with most of Uchenna’s hockey team and Uchenna’s hockey team’s Mams gathered around it, suddenly her own Mam looked stricken. “I knew there was something I was forgetting,” she said. “Sweet, we still haven’t shopped, there’s nothing in the house, we’re going to waste away to nothing. I’ve got things to do this morning—” What, I wonder? Uchenna thought. “But this afternoon I should go to the Tesco: if we leave your Daddy to do it, all he’ll come back with are CDs and PC magazines, and sandwich stuff, and bread for toast. And I think he’s going to be busy. You want to come with me after hockey?”

  Uchenna’s first thought was, What a shame. Now I can’t go online and try to order hay… “Sure, Mam,” she said, hurriedly kissing her and then bouncing across the seat to pop open the SUV’s door and climb out. “I’ll text you when we’re on the way back.”

  “Okay, sweet, see you then…”

  *

  “Then” was around two in the afternoon. As Uchenna climbed out of the minibus with the rest of the team and saw that her Mam was alone in the waiting SUV, she was suddenly glad her Mam hadn’t called Emer’s and asked to let Emer come along shopping, as she sometimes did. Earlier, Uchenna had been just as glad that Emer hadn’t come to the game, for the same reasons: she’d made some really bad plays during the game, and had Emer been there she would have started teasing her again, telling Uchenna that she should take up baseball. As it was, she was going to hear about them soon enough anyway, from Emer and everybody else at school who cared about team sports. But Uchenna’s team had won: she’d made two of their four goals, and so made up for her scattered state of mind earlier in the game. The Mammy Horse, the Mammy Horse, had been the thought singing through her head all that morning, until the sheer physical exertion of the game drove it out of her brain. What are we going to do about her?? But still, no ideas were coming, and Uchenna was feeling uncharacteristically stupid. She might not be a fast thinker, like Emer, but she usually managed to work out a plan eventually when she set her mind to it.

  Maybe I should ask Mam—

  Oh please, she thought immediately after that. I’m not that desperate. Besides, she’d just come up with some good reason I shouldn’t be getting involved—

  As they drove off towards the Adamstown Tesco, Uchenna pulled out her phone and reviewed some of the earlier texts from Emer, trying to think of something useful. Was he there?—was one of the first texts she’d sent after hearing the horses were all right.

  Yeah.

  He okay?

  Yeah. Later.

  Uchenna had thought when she’d first seen the message that it was a little unusual for Emer to be so terse. Now she wondered what had been going on between Emer and Jimmy out there in the field past the Condom Ditch. Nothing bad, or she’d have said. Something else is going on…

  …& the Mammy Horse??

  She’s OK. Looks bigger.

  That had thrown Uchenna off balance. How can she be bigger? She’s like a blimp already. Has she got twins? Oh God, this is terrible!

  They pulled into the parking lot of the Tesco supermarket and got out. This wasn’t one of the biggest Tesc
os—one of those gigantic outer-suburb places big enough that you thought maybe you could see the curvature of the Earth. But it didn’t have to be that big: just big enough to satisfy all of Adamstown’s needs—and that it did very well. It was also absolutely brand spanking new, and people did come in from other towns up and down the Naas Road to see what the “next generation” of Tescos was going to look like, and to pick up specialties carried by the Adamstown branch that you couldn’t get except in the really fancy supermarkets up in Dublin.

  “Get us a cart, sweet?” Uchenna’s Mam said, handing her a two Euro coin.

  “How big, Mam?”

  Her mother sighed. “Better be one of the jumbo ones, I guess.” She grinned a rueful grin. “I just have to laugh at all your dad’s promises to shop last week! Only thing he’s shopping for right now is more software people…”

  While her mam walked into the store, Uchenna ran over to the long line of locked-together carts in front of the store, stuck the coin into the slot-box fastened to the cart’s handle, pushed in the coin and pulled the cart loose when the chain let go. Uchenna caught up with her mam inside: she was standing in front of a big rack of glossy magazines, pointedly ignoring the ones about PCs and computer games. Her attention was on the ones that had to do with food. “How long has it been since I actually cooked anything?…” she said softly.

  “Mam, it’s okay,” Uchenna said. “You made us cake last month.”

  “Oh, that’s not cooking, sweet!” her Mam said. “That came out of a box.” She sighed as they pushed the cart along into the produce aisle, down among the heaps of gleaming polished red and yellow peppers and the bright red and green apples, the leafy lettuces and cabbages, the big twenty-pound bags of potatoes. “I’m just so tired when I get home at nights, it’s all I can do to stand up, sometimes. I feel guilty…”

  “Mammy, cut that out!” Uchenna said. “Don’t you ever be guilty! You spend all day helping people. And carrying the baby around!”

  Her Mam smiled a little at her, maneuvering the cart over toward the vegetables. “Well, it is a little like carrying a basket of washing all day! Not a really huge basket, just yet.” She sighed. “But getting bigger…” Then she turned an analytical eye on the salad greens. “Meanwhile, let’s get some of these, my sweet one. We’ve been eating nothing but meat, meat, meat all this week.”

  “There was rice last night…”

  “Please. Your daddy’s starting to think rice is a whole food group by itself.” Uchenna’s Mam chuckled. “I should be grateful. At least now he believes in a food group besides potatoes.”

  They took turns pushing the cart up and down the aisle, popping things into it. Uchenna’s mam had a list and tried to stick to it, but Uchenna took delight in distracting her from it, continually showing her Mam cool new things and teasing or sweet-talking her into getting them. Then Uchenna’s mam would groan about what a softie she was, and try to get back to paying attention to the things on her list again. But Uchenna made sure these attempts were short-lived.

  Finally they got up to the checkouts. The Tesco made a big deal of having “sweet-free” checkout lines, where theoretically your kids wouldn’t be tempted by the dazzling array of candy bars and gum. But Uchenna, gazing blankly at them as she and her Mam rolled up, realized that for once she didn’t really have an appetite for any of them. She went right down to the bagging end of the checkout where her Mam had wheeled up, pulling the box of cloth and canvas shopping bags out of the collapsible box so that when the groceries came down the conveyor belt she could start to bag them up. But there was a fundraiser for one of the local charities going on, and a little blonde girl from one of the Naas primary schools—who along with other Naas kids was bagging so that the customers could reward her with a contribution for the charity—came up beside Uchenna and gave her such a pitiful look that Uchenna abandoned the bagging to her and walked off down the line of checkouts toward the door.

  There Uchenna paused by the community bulletin board, looking idly at the cards and laser-printed posters stuck up there. Ads for babysitters, pictures of people’s cars for sale and lost dogs, notices about church meetings and charity raffles and lawnmowing…

  Uchenna yawned and started to turn back toward her Mam. Then she froze.

  Beside her, the automatic door that led out toward the parking lot was making frustrated clunk, clunk, clunk noises as it tried to close and then kept pushing itself open again because Uchenna was still standing too near the door’s sensor. Lawnmowing, Uchenna thought. And what’s a lawn made from?

  Grass. Which is what the horses don’t have!

  But if you mow lawns and take the grass away—

  She stood there stunned. It was almost too simple. But what if I’m wrong about something? I don’t know that much about horses—

  Her Mam caught up behind her. “Thought you’d want some gum, sweet…”

  “Trying to get Emer off that, Mam!” Uchenna said. “Makes her look like a camel.”

  Her mother looked at her and burst out in uproarious laughter.

  Uchenna stared at her. “What?”

  “No, no, it’s just…” Her mother laughed some more, waving a hand as she pushed the cart out the door. “Sorry, you took me by surprise…” She actually had to stop outside the door, just by the little curb-cut that made it easier for carts to get down onto the crosswalk that led to the parking lot, and wipe her eyes. Uchenna stood there grinning: she couldn’t think when she last saw her Mam laugh so hard, and it made her feel good.

  From behind them, coming through the door, a voice spoke suddenly, all tangled up with the jangle and clatter of grocery-cart wheels. “Aah, wouldja ever get outta the way and go back where ya came from, ya great black slag?”

  Uchenna and her Mam both looked over their shoulders in utter shock. “Come here ta have yer chisler, have ya, wasn’t one enough for ya that ya had to have another?” said the man behind them as he pushed past them and into the crosswalk that led to the parking lot. He actually glared over his shoulder at them as he passed. “Want twice the benefit cheque every week? G’wan back home ta Africa an’ let them pay ya fer havin babbies!”

  Uchenna’s mam just stood there a moment, watching him head away. Then she pushed the cart off toward the nearby aisle of the parking lot where she’d left the SUV, in the opposite direction from the way the man was going. Uchenna was hot with fury as she followed her. “Mam,” she said, “you just gonna take that from him?”

  “I’m not taking anything, sweet,” Uchenna’s mam said. “Insults are like drinks. They don’t affect you unless you accept them.” And she smiled a little, sadly, as they came up beside the SUV. “Besides, why should I yell at that poor man? He’s frightened enough of me already. He thinks I’m here to take his job. Or else he thinks I don’t have one, and he’s angry that he might be paying his tax money to support me.”

  Uchenna snorted, indignant. “He thinks you don’t have a job? I bet he doesn’t have one! Look at him and his bag full of beer and his shiny shell suit! He looks like a career slacker.”

  Uchenna’s mam bleeped the SUV’s doors unlocked. “Maybe he is, sweet,” she said. “Maybe he’s just got a habit he can’t break. You see someone else who doesn’t have the habit, maybe it makes you angry at yourself, huh?”

  Uchenna scowled. Her mam’s softly-softly attitude bothered her sometimes. If she tried letting insults go by like that at school, she’d be a mass of bruises every day: the other kids were entirely too good at punishing what looked like weakness. But maybe it helped when you were a full-grown woman six feet tall, with a job where people respected you and didn’t give you trouble. Though I might be six feet tall someday, Uchenna thought. Now if I can just get the second part of it right…

  She didn’t have much to say on the way home. It was just as well: neither did her Mam. They made their way past the broad lawns of the houses right outside Adamstown on the road north to Naas, the very old houses that weren’t part of the developm
ent. One or two of these were world-famous: people came from all over to see them and their grounds. The nearest of them, Old Adams House, had a front lawn that was bigger than Uchenna’s whole circle, and a couple of guys were buzzing up and down it with big ride-on mowers, striping the lawns in lighter and darker green. As she glimpsed them, some of the anger from the parking lot incident fell off Uchenna, slowly being replaced by excitement. Lots of people don’t have anyone to do that for them, Uchenna thought. And it’s the weekend. We could get started right away—

  But first she had to talk to Emer and Jimmy. Uchenna fidgeted in her seat until they pulled into the house’s driveway, and the instant the SUV stopped she was out of the door like a shot to help her Mam unload the groceries. “My, we’re being helpful today,” her Mam said, giving Uchenna one of those sly sidewise looks she came up with when she found something funny.

  Uchenna just smiled an I’m-being-a-dutiful-daughter smile as she toted in the last of the cloth bags stuffed full of shopping. “Do you want me to help put them away?” she said to her Mam, who had started unloading the contents of the bags onto the kitchen table.

  “Oh, no, sweet,” her Mam said. “Not till I have time to do another tutorial with you about where things go. Remember how long it took us to find the toilet paper last month?” Her Mam made a shoo-ing gesture with one hand. “Go on, I can tell when you have something else you’d rather be doing…”