the way you stop hearing a clock. I heard it now.
Connor would be home at seven. Connor was the man I had been living with for three years, who was a set designer with good hands and a patient face, and who had not met my family because I had never offered and he had not asked. He would say of course you have to go and mean it, and he would be a little hurt that I had not asked him to come, and he would manage the hurt because he was decent, and the decency of him would be the thing that made me want not to be looked at when I packed.
I got up and I went to the bedroom. The suitcase I kept under the bed was the one I had brought over from Galway fifteen years ago. It was a green hardshell thing with a corner rubbed to grey. I put it on the bed and opened it. There was nothing in it except a plastic bag with a pair of tights I had forgotten about and a ticket stub from a play I had seen in 2019.
I packed badly. I packed like someone who had not been asked what the weather was like there. I put in a wool jumper that was too good for the house and a pair of boots that were too good for the yard and two paperbacks I would not read. I put in a bottle of whiskey I had been given as a wrap gift, which was a mean bottle as whiskeys went, but it was what I had. I packed my laptop and the charger and a notebook. I did not pack anything black. I would not pack anything black. I was not going over to bury him. I was going over because my mother had asked me, in a voice stripped of asking, on a Tuesday afternoon in the wrong hour.
When Connor came in I was standing in the hall with the suitcase upright by the door as though I were about to leave that evening, which I was not, and he saw it and he saw my face and he did not say of course you have to go. He said, "Which one of
🤖 The author declared this story as written with the help of AI.