She balances on a wobbling step-stool, sleeves shoved to her elbows, sliding picture wire over the tiny nails Niamh hammered into the fake wood paneling sometime in the nineties. The canvas’s weight tugs at her shoulders, a slow burn from too many nights at the easel, while the bar’s neon clock over the taps clicks toward opening time with a smug red blink every minute, as if it’s keeping score.
The back room is half-lit, Christmas lights on one side, the overhead fluorescents on the other still off, so the paintings look like they’re surfacing from shallow water. Stacks of beer crates line the opposite wall, shrink-wrap crackling under her boots when she shifts her weight. Somewhere out by the bar, the soda gun hisses and the faint clack of ice in a metal scoop carries through the doorway. Niamh’s voice rises and falls with a regular’s, the cadence of a joke without the words, which is almost more unnerving.
“Mind you don’t kill yourself. I can’t explain ‘death by step-stool and notions’ to your mother,” Niamh calls, not quite loud enough to be officially helpful.
“I’ll leave a note,” Ríonach says, eyes on the wire. The joke lands in the stale air and goes nowhere.
She adjusts the frame by millimeters, squinting at the edge where plaster bulges under the paneling. The painting looks too serious for this room with its plastic shamrocks and signed Mets poster. Her fingers, already smudged with Payne’s gray from a last-minute touch-up, leave faint oily crescents on the white border when she presses the canvas flush.
The lingering sting of bleach from the morning’s mop-up makes the paint smell thin, almost medicinal, as if she’s hanging X-rays of someone’s insides rather than her own. Through the doorway, a couple of regulars pause, pretending to check the TV listings while their eyes flick past her, curious and careful not to stare.
Each piece goes up in an awkward choreography: lift, breathe, find the one patch of level wall in a building that’s been settling for a century. She squints along the top edge, eyeing the warped paneling as if it’s a rival with its own ideas about horizon lines, then straightens the frame by instinct more than measurement. Step back, tilt her head, step forward again; her body knows the dance better than her brain does.
Her fingertips, already glossed with a permanent film of linseed and pigment no amount of scrubbing removes, leave faint, oily crescents along the white borders where she steadies each canvas. She wipes them on her jeans, uselessly. The bleach sting lodged high in her sinuses from the morning mop makes the paint smell thin and sterile, like something in a hospital corridor, X-rays of the neighborhood’s insides instead of the grand, “heritage” oils the Manhattan gallery keeps hinting she should make. It’s the wrong kind of clean for art, she thinks, but maybe the right kind of clean for confession.
Niamh ghosts through the doorway in short bursts of motion, topping up ice bins, flipping bar mats, checking taps with the practiced flicks of someone who counts time in shifts, not hours. Each pass comes with a remark lobbed over her shoulder, “That one’s big,” when Ríonach wrestles a larger canvas into place; “Mind the thermostat, the lads’ll roast,” when she nudges it half a degree without looking. Nothing that could be mistaken for opinion. Their words skim the surface, safe as bar rules and weather talk, brushing past everything thickening the air between them: the latest tax bill folded under the till, the unspoken question of what’ll actually sell tonight, the silent ledger of who owns what and who just works here.
In the bar mirror’s warped rectangle she catches them in slices settling onto their usual stools like they’re clocking in. Conversations stall mid-sentence, then resume at a lower hum as heads tilt, not quite looking. Art show, wake, fundraiser: same room, different kind of trouble.
She angles the clamp a millimetre this way, that way, letting the beam glide over ridged pigment until it finds the one obedient slice of light. The remark lands anyway, soft as a barstool jab but barbed. She smiles at the canvas, not the doorway. “No roofs at all,” she calls back, too lightly, praying no one notices the one half-finished gable in the corner.
She stops anyway, the ladder of her spine locking for a beat as her eye snags on the canvas near the end of the line. It’s smaller than most of the others hung at just about eye level where someone nursing a pint wouldn’t have to crane their neck. A neat cluster of whitewashed cottages sits beneath an indecently lush green sky, the kind of saturated jade that never once appeared over Sunnyside and probably not over Galway either, but which Americans recognised from travel brochures and whiskey labels. The brushwork is careful, almost delicate. The paint lies flat and obedient where everything else tonight is roughened with palette-knife scrapes and underlayers trying to punch their way through.
She remembers how long she’d sanded that surface, buffing out any accidental ridges. How she’d leaned back in a grad-school studio that smelled of gesso and someone else’s takeout, squinting at it and thinking: safe. Professors had called it “evocative.” A gallerist once said “timeless” and meant “marketable.” Her own stomach had knotted with a faint, shame-faced relief. That one had gone into storage, then into a hallway closet, then somehow onto Niamh’s inventory list when they needed something “more Irish” for a fundraiser. She’d let it travel here without protest, busy arguing for the bigger, messier pieces.
Under the Christmas lights it glows, almost smug. The cottages line up like well-behaved cousins at a Confirmation photo, doorways dark with implied welcome, no damp creeping up the plaster, no broken slates, no cigarette butts ground into the verge. No people at all, in fact. Her signature sits small in the corner, earlier, tidier handwriting. She can feel the prickle of it between her shoulder blades: the choice she’d made there, the compromise baked into that smooth, untroubled sky.
The sight of it doesn’t just remind her; it yanks her straight back into the brownstone kitchen two years ago, the way a bad smell can pull you through time. The light had been too harsh for the hour, the overhead fixture buzzing faintly as if it disapproved. Her father sat at the head of the table in his shirtsleeves, the crystal tumbler a damp ring on the placemat, ice half-melted in good whiskey he’d pretend was just “a drop.” His voice had come out in that careful, papery tone he used for wills and eulogies, not for his only daughter. He’d gestured with the glass, not quite looking at her. She had, he said, a responsibility (to the family, to the community) to “honor where we came from, not wallow in ugliness for shock value.” The phrase slid out as if he’d rehearsed it in the locked office downstairs. He’d quoted a priest, then an aunt, then some long-dead grandfather who “never forgot his people,” all of them enlisted to stand between her and the canvases stacked drying in the next room.
She’d been by the sink, sleeves shoved up, fingers raw and gummy with turpentine and dish soap, a chipped mug of brushes soaking beside the cereal bowls. She tried, halting at first and then faster, to explain that the flooded basements and eviction notices she’d started painting were also “where we came from,” that the mildew creeping up Sheetrock and the pink FINAL NOTICE stamps were as much the family inheritance as any framed cottage print in the hallway. She said the postcards and calendar scenes felt like lying, like erasing half the story so tourists wouldn’t flinch. Her father’s jaw had only clenched tighter, the muscle ticking as if each word were something bitter he was refusing to swallow.
It had been Niamh who broke first, slapping a fan of bar invoices down between them so the numbers bled through the thin paper. Her eyes had flashed (hurt, not just anger) as she told Ríonach how easy it was to linger over mouldy walls and bare cupboards when the brownstone’s mortgage never so much as brushed her own bank account, when the “hard stuff” she loved to paint never once came hunting her for rent.
At the time she’d felt the heat rise in her face, some indignant part of her wanting to itemize every sacrifice. Every graveyard-shift gallery job, every night she’d painted until her wrists ached. But the words had stuck anyway, burrowing in past defense. Now, staring at the safe green sky and storybook roofs, she can’t un-hear the charge of ease, of insulation masquerading as courage.
She’d laughed it off when Niamh said it, chin tilting up in that old, brittle way that signaled the argument was done whether or not either of them believed it. A practiced little arch of the neck, a performance of indifference she’d learned somewhere between prep school critiques and parish bake-sale committee meetings: I hear you, I rise above you, we move on. It had worked on teachers, on curators, on aunts who muttered about “all that modern shite.” It had not worked on Niamh.
Now, in the too-quiet studio, the gesture feels ridiculous, something a girl in a mirror might rehearse. The words she’d tried to shrug off slip back under the door, under the baseboards, scraping along the moldings like a draft: It costs you nothing, love, not really.
She can still hear the exact cadence of it, Niamh’s voice roughened by a long shift, the “love” not tender so much as tired. Not an endearment, not quite an insult. A verdict. You can afford to paint disaster. The language of it had lodged in Rí’s chest in a way the invoices themselves hadn’t, more cutting than the line items for keg deliveries and ConEd arrears. The math she could abstract; the intimacy of the accusation she could not.
“It costs me,” she’d wanted to snap back. Her wrists, her sleep, her dignity at certain gallery openings. Years of knowing that half the people who praised her brushwork were really praising the story of the plucky Irish girl from Queens, neatly packaged and grant-ready. But even then she’d known that wasn’t what Niamh meant. This wasn’t about hours or tendons or the price of paint.
Here, surrounded by canvases and the soft thud of her own heartbeat, the sentence lengthens in her mind, filling in the implied clause: It costs you nothing you can’t easily spare. Not the bar. Not the roof. Not the way the family looks at you across a wake, calculating quietly who can be leaned on next.
She pads across the paint-slick floor in her socks, as if moving might shake it loose. The trust’s paperwork is in a locked office downstairs, a tidy stack of vellum and signatures that never sees turpentine. She has never once been late with rent because there is no rent. Her “struggle” exists mostly in the gaps between shows, in the curl of her gut when someone asks, so how do you afford all this, anyway?
There is, she realizes, an obscene freedom in being able to turn hardship into composition without risking waking up under that ceiling yourself. She can walk into Flannagáin’s, drink on the house, sketch the man at the end of the bar whose layoff has turned him into a permanent fixture, and then walk back here, lock the door, and arrange the scene on canvas until the light is flattering and the grief reads as tasteful.
It costs you nothing. The phrase keeps testing the corners of her defenses, trying each one in turn: intention, empathy, the thin claim that she’s “raising awareness.” Niamh would snort at that. The bar is full of people already well aware; it’s not awareness they’re short on.
She thinks, suddenly, of someone else standing in this room. Not her father or some trust-fund collector wanting “a slice of authentic Queens.” Someone who actually has to count tips at the end of the night, who knows which landlords take cash in envelopes and which don’t. Someone who won’t be impressed by the skylight. Someone who, if she paints a shut-off notice wrong, will say so.
The thought drops into her like a stone, sending out small, undeniable ripples: it’s not that she wants an audience. She wants a witness who isn’t family, who isn’t obliged to be proud or scandalized on schedule. Someone who can look at what she’s made and, without the politeness she’s been cushioned in her whole life, tell her whether any of it feels like the truth.
She lets her gaze drag along the row of canvases leaned three-deep against the wall. Fog-soft fields dissolving into a vague western horizon, fishermen poised in that mythic, grant-panel-approved stoop of endurance, bars that look suspiciously like Flannagáin’s if Flannagáin’s had better lighting and none of the fluorescent fatigue. Under the skylight they all glow in a flattering, gallery-ready way, their chipped plaster and worn wood edited just enough to be picturesque.
Heat crawls up her neck as she takes in how carefully she’s framed things to stop short of the truly unbeautiful. No eviction notices taped crooked over deadbolts, no bounced-check envelopes stabbed open with a butter knife on a Formica counter, no men at the far end of the bar quietly drinking their pension down to an arithmetic of dregs and IOUs. She’s painted rain on windows, not the mildew behind it; loneliness in posture, not in the stack of final notices on the table. The absences feel louder than the images themselves, every tasteful brushstroke suddenly suspect, like she’s been airbrushing the bruise off a body she doesn’t have to live inside.
It’s not just cowardice, she thinks, though there’s that too; it’s a kind of curating of her own risk. The worst that can happen, here, is a frown from an aunt or an awkward silence over coffee while the lawyer pretends not to listen from his little glass-walled office. No landlord will retaliate, no hours will be cut, no cousin will quietly lose the bar because of something she dared to pin to a wall she technically owns. Her supposed boldness has been fenced neatly inside acceptable controversy, suitable for newsletters and grant applications. She’s never painted anything that might make a buyer walk away on principle, or a relative walk out because they recognize themselves and don’t forgive it.
What she wants, suddenly, is not another exquisitely hedged email from a curator or a puffed-up blurb about her “handling of texture,” but for one of the bar regulars to stand under the buzzing, unforgiving track light in Niamh’s back room, squint at a canvas she has not mercifully edited, and say exactly what they see, without once reaching for manners, myth, or mercy.
Not to spare her feelings, not to ask what the title meant, but to say, like they were judging a shift schedule or a rent hike, whether she’d gotten close or missed by a mile. To tell her if the light was wrong, if the barstools were too clean, if the quiet looked anything like the kind they go home to.
She cuts across toward Skillman, the rumble of the 7 overhead rattling the loose panes of second-floor windows so hard she can see the reflections shiver. The train grinds past like a long, bad thought that never quite finishes, steel on steel, a scream folded into the ordinary. Down at street level the air is its usual blend of fryer oil, car exhaust, and last night’s spilled beer slowly moldering in the gutter. Somewhere a vent huffs out steam that smells like boiled cabbage and dish soap. It’s not romantic (not the way the grant panels like to imagine “gritty” Queens) but it’s specific, and specificity is what she’s supposed to be good at.
Her fingers twitch for a pen she hasn’t brought. She jams them into the pockets of her coat, feeling around automatically for the familiar cylinder that isn’t there. Of course she left it on the kitchen table beside the mug ring and the unopened envelope from the lawyer. Tonight is meant to be a night off from work, she’s told herself twice already, like that’s a thing artists with trust funds are allowed to complain about. No sketchbook. No charcoal staining the pads of her fingers. Just her, the street, and the part of her brain that won’t stop framing everything like it’s already half-primed canvas.
She catalogs details anyway, because stopping would feel like pretending blindness. Sodium-yellow light pooling on the wet stripe of the bike lane. A delivery guy straddling his e-bike, scrolling his phone with an expression of pure, practiced boredom. The way the rain from earlier has left tiny mirrored worlds in the cracked asphalt, each one reflecting a piece of green-white trim or a tired neon OPEN sign. She tells herself she’ll remember but she knows memory rounds off edges, sands down the uglier bits, makes even the roaches at the bodega threshold look symbolic instead of just hungry.
Outside a bodega with a hand‑painted shamrock fading above the Lotto signs (its once-bright green now the color of old dishwater) she catches a young couple mid-argument. The woman’s in pale blue scrubs, patterned socks shoved into cheap white sneakers, a deli coffee clutched in front of her like a shield or a badge. The man’s hoodie is paint‑spattered in a way that doesn’t look remotely curated: thick white drips, drywall dust at the cuffs, a smear of something the color of dried blood on one elbow. He’s talking too fast, too big, his gestures slicing the air wide enough to nick passing strangers, but the train claws over their heads just then, drowning out the words and leaving only the choreography of it.
Even without sound, their bodies are legible. His shoulders rounded, leaning in as if proximity will make whatever he’s saying more convincing. Hers pulled back and tight, chin up, weight shifted onto one hip in that stance Ríonach recognizes from nurses on smoke breaks: exhausted, furious, absolutely not impressed.
She plants the heel of her hand in the middle of his chest, not playfully, a proper shove that rocks him back half a step so his deli coffee sloshes up under the plastic lid and freckles his hoodie. For a beat he stays there, arms splayed a little, blinking down at the brown dots blooming across yesterday’s paint stains, looking less like a man in a fight and more like a kid caught out. Something in his face shifts (he says something Ríonach can’t hear but can almost lip‑read, a crooked apology or a stupid joke) and the woman’s mouth betrays her, the corner hitching first, then giving way. The fury collapses into that helpless, exhausted laughter people fall into when they’re simply too tired to keep holding the line.
She drifts a little, letting herself be passed on the sidewalk so she can watch unobserved: the unthinking way her head finds his shoulder, their coats rasping together, the overfull grocery bag bobbing between them like shared ballast. Already she’s roughing in a composition. Shoulder line, curve of spine, neon bleeding everything into tired, beautiful blocks of color, domestic and defiant at once.
If love meant anything, it would look like that, she decides: not rescue, not patron saint and supplicant, but two people leaning into the same lousy weather with the same overstuffed plastic bag cutting into their fingers. Not one hauling the other out of some flood, or worse, down into it. The thought lands like both wish and indictment as her own keys find the brownstone lock.
The brownstone’s front door gives that soft, well-bred click behind her, the kind of discreet, expensive sound hardware makes when it’s been chosen out of a catalogue and installed by someone with health insurance. It always makes her think of a lid going on a jewelry box. Tonight it feels more like a vault sealing, pressure equalizing on the wrong side.
Cold air clings to her coat for a second longer than it should in the narrow entryway, then is swallowed by central heating set to a temperature she’s never had to think about paying for. She shifts the plastic grocery bag in her grip, the handles carving into the grooves of her fingers, the weight of canned tomatoes and discount store-brand pasta suddenly absurd in a hall lined with oil landscapes her grandmother bought at charity auctions “to support the parish.” A painted Connemara cottage watches her pass with its neat thatch and impossible blue sky, while the real Queens wind still stings the tip of her nose.
Her boots click on the polished wood, echoing more than seems polite in a house meant for carpets and parties and the murmur of people who know where their next mortgage payment is coming from. The hall runner (Persian, technically, though her grandmother always called it “the good rug”) softens the sound halfway to the kitchen. She debates toeing off her boots, decides against it out of something like spite. Let there be salt streaks. Let there be evidence that the world outside still exists.
The basement tenant’s television hums faintly through the floorboards, some canned laughter laugh‑tracking its way up through three generations of ownership structures and tax abatements. Above that, the house is quiet in the particular way of expensive insulation: not absence, exactly, but curated silence. Even the old clock they kept “for character” has had its ticking suppressed by a modern mechanism. Time passes here without bothering anyone.
She tugs at the sleeve of her coat with her free hand, aware of the crusted line of Prussian blue along the seam, of a smear of ochre on the cuff that no dry cleaner will ever fully coax out. The thrift‑store T‑shirt under her tailored wool itches where sweat is starting to chill between her shoulder blades. Her grandmother’s mirror by the entry catches her halfway down the hall, offering back a woman who looks like she wandered in out of a different story: hair escaping its pins in paint‑streaked wisps, grocery bag dangling from one arm like a set prop, trust‑fund coat hanging open over a ten‑dollar band logo.
Some part of her always expects the reflection to correct itself, to smooth and straighten into the polished, gallery‑opening version of herself the house seems built to contain. It never does. Instead she gets the same freckled face, the same narrowed eyes, the same fractional tightening at the mouth when she notices the faint tremor in the plastic bag handles. Too long watching other people haul their lives down the street; not enough food that wasn’t a granola bar.
She snorts (at herself, at the mirror, at the whole performance) and the sound dies quickly against the high plaster ceiling. The framed landscapes don’t snort back. The polished floors don’t roll their eyes. Only the plastic mutters its thin protest as she readjusts her grip and keeps moving toward the kitchen, dragging her cheap groceries through the corridor of accumulated value like contraband.
The lights are too quick to please; they bloom on before she’s properly crossed the threshold, all soft, obliging glow along the underside of the cabinets, picking out the blue willow plates and the good Waterford like they’re on permanent display. Glass fronts gleam, polished that morning by a woman whose name her parents always forget, and every reflective surface in the room seems to agree that this is what a proper kitchen should look like. The fridge hums its low, confident hum, commercial‑grade, tax‑deducted, bought after a tasting menu consultation, and its brushed chrome skin throws back a faint, warped version of her face as she shoulders past.
She lets the grocery bag drop onto the veined marble with more force than she meant. The slap of plastic and cans against stone ricochets up into the crown molding, too loud in a room that usually only hears the quiet closing of catered containers and the hiss of an induction kettle. For a second she actually winces, absurdly certain she’s disturbed something, ghost, portrait, ledger entry, meant to lie undisturbed.
The oven door throws back a warped, stainless-steel Ríonach: paint-smeared knuckles whitening around the plastic handles, hair working its way out of pins one stubborn curl at a time, her ancient band T‑shirt sulking out from under a tailored coat that never quite agrees with the slope of her shoulders. “Ah, for feck’s sake,” she mutters at herself, the words coming out in that flattened Queens growl her cousins tease her for, dragged at the edges by her grandmother’s Galway vowels. The sound lands wrong in here, like builder’s dust on polished silver. It’s an accent that belongs to subway platforms and fryer stations, not to imported stone and under‑cabinet lighting, and hearing it echo off custom cabinetry feels, for a second, like an impersonation.
The echo of that borrowed lilt turns the kitchen into a witness box. She pictures some woman from the sidewalks she just cut through (smelling of fryer grease and bus exhaust, hands cracked from sanitizer and winter) standing where she stands, clocking trust‑fund tile and inheritance molding and a mortgage‑free roof long before she ever gets to the person inside the clothes, inside the body, inside the name, and finding the whole scene guilty on sight.
The thought is ridiculous and still it lodges, heavy as a stone behind her breastbone. She knots the cheap grocery bag shut again, fingers clumsy on crinkled plastic, and tells herself for what feels like the thousandth time that to bring someone from that other life into this cushioned one under the banner of feeling would be self-indulgence masquerading as generosity. A kind of theft in the language of flowers and late‑night texts. They’d pay in unease and small humiliations while she played tour guide to a world she didn’t build and can’t disown. The unfairness of it sits so plain she can almost taste it, metallic at the back of her throat, and she resolves, again, uselessly, to want better of herself than that.
Flannagáin’s looks wrong with the lights up. The afternoon bulbs are still off, only a grey ribbon of daylight threading in past the front door, catching on the dust over the bottles. The TV above the bar plays an old hurling match on mute for no one in particular, grainy men in helmets clashing and sprinting in a world with sound, while here the only noise is the soft rasp of pages and the low whine of the fridge.
Ríonach leans on the inside of the bar, careful not to smudge any paint from her nails onto the polished wood. Niamh’s got the ledger open like it’s a confession, columns of numbers marching grimly down the page. Her cousin’s mouth is set in that line Ríonach remembers from wakes and family meetings: somewhere between patience and execution.
“Don’t hover,” Niamh says, not looking up.
“I’m not hovering. I’m… present.”
“Same difference.”
She finishes scribbling, then snaps the ledger shut with enough force that the bar-top jumps. The sound echoes in the half-dark like a gavel. Ríonach startles, straightens; the whole moment has the feel of being called into the principal’s office, late homework in her bag and a lie already forming on her tongue.
Niamh finally levels her with a look. “We’re changing Friday.”
“Changing it how?” Ríonach asks carefully. Fridays are fragile things in this place.
Her cousin jerks her chin toward a folded letter from the city propped beside the till, PROPERTY TAX ADJUSTMENT glaring in block caps like a shouted insult.
“Changing it into keeping the lights on,” Niamh says. “That’s how.”
Ríonach reaches for the letter, but Niamh’s hand slaps lightly over it first, as if she’s afraid the ink might burn. “Don’t bother. It says what they all say: pay up or else.”
“Is it… bad?” The word feels childish the second it leaves her mouth.
Niamh snorts without humor. “Bad enough that your big arty opening on Friday is now also a fundraiser. We need a crowd. Pints poured, raffle tickets, the works. Or we’re properly fucked come quarter’s end.”
The curse sits heavy in the air. Ríonach hears the capital letters in “we,” feels the invisible ledger that has nothing to do with the one on the counter. Shares and trusts and who owes whom what.
“And by ‘crowd’ you mean…?”
“Union lads, nurses, off-duty EMTs, the old crew’s families. Anyone who’ll drink and maybe throw a tenner in a bucket if we guilt them right.” Niamh finally slides the letter toward her. “Your art’ll get more eyes on it than those Manhattan blow-ins anyway.”
Ríonach stares at the city crest on the page, thinking of her grandmother’s neat Gaelic script in those boxes upstairs at home, of streets bought cheap when nobody respectable wanted them. The ink swims for a second.
“So it’s an opening that’s not really about the art,” she says.
Niamh’s shrug is apologetic and merciless at once. “Welcome to the service industry, cuz. Everything’s double duty now.”
Niamh’s mouth twists, and she jerks her chin toward the folded city letter propped beside the till. “That,” she says, “is the difference between us limping along and me putting a ‘For Lease’ sign in the window. So your big ‘opening’ Friday?” She hooks the word in the air with two fingers, quotation marks sharp as knives. “It’s now a fundraiser first, art show second. Maybe third. Whatever comes after keeping the heat on.”
Ríonach feels heat crawl up her neck. “A fundraiser,” she repeats, dry-mouthed. She’d imagined quiet, maybe a few critics or curious gallery kids wandering in to look serious at her canvases, not buckets and raffles and the smell of damp coats.
Niamh nods once, definitive. “We need a night where every arse in a seat is paying for the privilege. Tickets at the door, 50/50, maybe a hamper or two for a draw. You hang your mad paintings, I’ll pour the pints, and between us we’ll see if this place wants to live another quarter.”
Ríonach, already queasy about her work being drafted into service as bait for drink sales and communal sentimentality, feels her stomach lurch as Niamh starts ticking names off on her fingers. “Got the transit lads from the depot, the union reps from Local 3, couple of the oncology nurses, your man who runs the EMT night shifts in from Elmhurst, half the parish committee, and whatever cousins I can guilt into dragging their friends,” she says. “Anyone who’ll pay a cover and drink like it’s Lent tomorrow.”
Ríonach pictures her largest canvas hung behind a raffle table, her careful layers of oil reduced to background noise for 50/50 draws and plastic cups of beer, and the room tilting slightly with the thought.
Niamh cuts off Ríonach’s half-formed protest with a snort and a rough pat to her shoulder, the kind that lands halfway between comfort and shove. “It’ll be grand,” she says. “The more bodies wedged into that back room, the better. If your mad yokes on the walls can loosen wallets as well as tongues, then art’s finally paying rent, isn’t it?”
By the time Friday limps around, the flyers and WhatsApp messages have done their work; the place starts filling before the lights are even turned down in the back room. An EMT called Sadhbh, eyes ringed purple from night shift, lets a grinning coworker tow her in, muttering promises of cheap pints, decent craic, and “some artist girl’s mad paintings” in the back.
The back room hums with low conversation and the soft clink of glass, the air already thick with spilled beer, cheap red wine, and the faint ozone of fairy lights overheating. Someone’s cousin has commandeered the Bluetooth speaker, and tinny fiddle music leaks out between bouts of 2000s pop. Ríonach stands on a rickety chair that wobbles every time someone leans on the other side of the wall, one paint-streaked hand braced against the low, nicotine-stained ceiling, the other wrestling a warped frame that refuses, out of sheer spite, she’s decided, to sit straight on the nail she and Niamh hammered in that afternoon.
The canvas lists a degree to the left, as if it’s had one too many. Ríonach squints, tilts her head, tilts the painting, squints again. From this vantage point she can see the whole improvised gallery: seven large canvases hung in a row along the back wall, edges almost kissing the Christmas lights. The room smells faintly of dust disturbed from old wake banners, and on the far table, paper plates and store-brand crackers huddle around a sweating block of supermarket cheddar. “Hold still, you bollix,” she mutters at the frame, nudging its bottom edge with the side of her fist. The nail complains with a small, traitorous squeak. For a moment she’s seized by the image of the whole thing tearing out of the wall and toppling down in front of everyone, proof positive that she can’t even hang her own work without the building objecting.
Behind her, someone laughs too loudly at a joke, the sound ricocheting off the low ceiling. A glass taps against another in accidental toast. Ríonach breathes in, tastes old wood and new nerves, and tells herself, not for the first time tonight, that this is good, this is real, this is not some Manhattan white cube with a catered bar and silent walls.
The canvas dips left again, stubborn as an uncle at Christmas. She grits her teeth, fingers slipping slightly on the rough frame, her forearm burning from holding it in place. “You and me both,” she says under her breath, to the painting or to herself, it’s not entirely clear.
A burst of laughter from the main bar rolls through the thin wall like a dropped keg, rattling the fairy lights. It’s followed by Niamh’s unmistakable bellow, cutting clean through fiddle and pop and conversation: “Ríona, c’mon, say a few words before they get locked, will ya?”
There’s a cheer at that: half encouragement, half blood sport. Ríonach flinches as if someone’s just shone a spotlight directly at the back of her neck. Of course Niamh would improvise a speech. Of course she wouldn’t warn her.
“Grand,” Ríonach mutters, giving the crooked canvas one last, useless nudge as if shame alone might shame it plumb. It slews back into its old lean, stubborn as the wall it’s hanging on. “Traitor,” she tells it, and hops down from the chair, knees jolting at the short drop.
For a heartbeat she stands there, suspended in the stale-lit back room between the safety of her work and the roar on the other side of the door, listening to the murmur of her own name rising again: this time with clapping.
She drags her paint-smeared palms down the sides of her black coat out of pure reflex, knowing it’s pointless, the oil’s long since married the fabric, but the gesture makes her feel marginally more like someone who belongs in front of a room. There’s a faint tackiness where today’s ultramarine hasn’t fully dried; she resists the urge to check if it’s visible, if everyone will clock her as the girl who can’t keep her work off her own clothes.
She snakes sideways past a leaning stack of extra chairs and the battered upright piano with its missing keys, shoulder grazing chipped wood, heart thudding with that tight, hollow dread reserved for pop quizzes, surprise toasts, and any sentence that begins, “Say a few words.”
Pushing the back-room curtain aside with her wrist, she steps into the brighter noise of the main bar, blinking as the TV glow and Christmas lights smear into one jaundiced halo and the hum of regulars’ voices swells around her like steam. The air is sharper here. Beer and fryer grease overlaid with winter coats just shrugged off, bodies turning to look.
In that half-second of adjustment she moves forward without looking, and almost collides chest-first with a short, hollow-eyed woman in a faded EMT hoodie being good-naturedly hauled toward the bar by a laughing coworker. Their shoulders glance off one another, a soft thud through winter layers, and Ríonach catches the smell of cold air and hospital disinfectant before her brain properly assembles a face.
Ríonach’s apology catches in her throat as her gaze snags on the laminated hospital ID swinging from the woman’s collar, the photo washed-out under fluorescent glare so that the face there looks like a ghost of the one in front of her. Same jaw, same stubborn mouth, flattened and blurred by institutional light. Her name, Sadhbh something, the rest obscured by the plastic clip, flashes once as the badge twists on its lanyard, then spins away.
Below it, the frayed edge of an EMT patch curls up like a hangnail, half-peeled at the corner as if it’s been through too many laundry cycles and not enough proper rest. The navy of the hoodie’s gone that tired, uneven shade you get when industrial detergent and cheap machines have had their way with it. A faint line of salt traces the shoulder seam, dried sweat or old snowmelt, hard to tell under the bar’s jaundiced light.
The apology that had been rising, automatic, polite, something about not looking where she was going, hits that evidence of other people’s emergencies and sticks behind her teeth. She has the ridiculous, intrusive thought that she’s just body-checked someone who spends her nights running toward the kinds of collisions other people run from.
Her eyes flick, unbidden, to the small round of a burn mark on the hoodie’s front pocket, to the stitched-on union logo half-faded at the edge, to a thin, pale groove around the woman’s wrist where a watch or glove band has rubbed a permanent line into the skin. None of it matches the soft, curated grit of the art kids who sometimes wander in on Skillman; this is functional wear, the kind you earn one twelve-hour shift at a time.
Ríonach swallows, throat suddenly dry, apology rearranging itself into something that will have to account for the fact that this woman’s day has almost certainly been harder than her own.
Her eyes drop for a beat: scuffed work boots gone gray at the toes in that permanent salt-bleached way, the leather cracked where it’s had winter and warehouse floors ground into it. The laces are mismatched, one end tied off in a hard little knot where it must’ve snapped mid-shift and been rescued with whatever was at hand. Her jeans have a faint white tide line at the hem, old snow and street slush dried into a map of commutes, and the denim’s thinned at the knees, not by design but by repeated contact with van floors and sidewalk edges.
The cuff of the hoodie’s ridden up above one wrist, exposing fingers nicked and raw, the skin around the nails sandpapery and chewed. There’s a faint yellowed bruise on the back of one hand, half-mooned like it came from the recoil of a stretcher handle, and a crease pressed into the palm where latex gloves have been peeled off and on too many times.
Then her gaze travels back up to the woman’s face just in time to catch the way her eyes move. One swift, practiced sweep that takes in the whole room, not just a casual look-around but a cataloguing. Doors, first: the main one, the unmarked fire exit at the back, the narrow gap where the curtain to the side room hangs. Crowds: who’s clustered at the bar, who’s already halfway to noisy, who’s sitting alone with a hunched-in posture that might turn into trouble later. Staff: where the bartender is, how close, what kind of night it’s likely to be.
It’s the kind of scan Ríonach has seen cops do, security guards, Niamh on a Friday when the match is on and the wrong cousins are in town. But here there’s no authority in the woman’s stance, no claim; just a wary, automatic assessment, as if her body hasn’t yet understood she’s off the clock.
The woman’s shoulders are still tight, bunched up near her ears like she’s waiting for someone to shout her name over a radio, until her glance snags on the handwritten sign over the bar, TONIGHT: $4 PINTS FOR THE FUNDRAISER, the marker gone a little fuzzy at the edges from being wiped and rewritten too many times. Something in her jaw eases; the muscle that had been ticking near her ear lets go, just a fraction, wariness thinning into a quick, almost guilty relief. Four dollars means she can stand here with a glass in her hand and not spend the whole night running mental math over tips and MetroCards and overdue notices. One blessed evening where beer isn’t a line item, just…beer.
Sadhbh (because Ríonach can just make out the name on the badge now) registers, in the same blink, the sharp black wool coat a little too good for the room, the smear of ultramarine under the stranger’s thumbnail, a constellation of paint flecks along her wrist where her cuff’s pushed back. Not dish-suds, not printer ink, proper, stubborn oil paint, the expensive kind that doesn’t wash out, clinging to soft, well-moisturized skin that’s clearly never met a fryer burn or bleach rash.
She clocks, too, how the regulars unconsciously tilt their stools, how a path opens up a half-second before the woman even needs it, nods and half-smiles following like she’s on some invisible payroll of affection. That kind of ease is inherited, not earned, Sadhbh thinks. In her private ledger the stranger goes down as bar royalty, owner-adjacent, neatly shelved under not my world, not my problem, and therefore safe to ignore.
The stranger stops short when the crowd bottlenecks between the bar and the back room, momentum checked so abruptly that the shoulder of her coat brushes Sadhbh’s arm. The narrow passageway (ice bucket on one side, high-top table on the other) turns into a little cul‑de‑sac of bodies and winter layers and sloshing pints. Someone behind them curses cheerfully about “traffic on the forty‑third,” and then can’t get past either.
For a heartbeat they’re close enough that Sadhbh catches the faint smell of turpentine under expensive perfume: citrus top notes, something floral and department‑store safe, and underneath it the sharp, solvent edge she remembers from art rooms in school. It hits oddly familiar, like chalk dust and antiseptic, and her brain does that quick accounting trick but the turpentine muddies the equation. Soft hands, sure, but hands that hold brushes, maybe, not just credit cards.
The woman feels the catch of it too; Ríonach can practically hear the scrape of gears as the line of people swells behind them. Her back is to the bar, to the register she knows by sound alone, to the low murmur that will turn into Niamh’s put‑upon shout if this clog doesn’t clear. She can feel Sadhbh’s sleeve under her fingers where she’s reached out automatically to steady the other woman when someone jostled from behind; realizes, belatedly, that she’s still holding on.
“Sorry,” she says, dropping her hand like it’s suddenly registered as inappropriate, heat prickling up the side of her neck. She shifts sideways, but the high‑top has no give and the guy on the stool guarding it looks determined not to surrender an inch of territory. Ríonach can’t go forward without barreling directly into Sadhbh, can’t go back without slamming into the pint glasses inching by in someone else’s tray.
Sadhbh huffs out a breath that’s not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. “Bit of a one‑way system, is it?” she says, half to the stranger, half to the room, voice dry as the bar mats. The sound of it (local, lived‑in, with the flattened vowels of Queens and the ghost of Kerry in one syllable out of ten) lands in Ríonach’s ear like a dropped brush handle.
She has the absurd urge to explain herself, to point at the back room and say, That’s mine, the paintings on the walls, I’m not just…in the way. As if her presence required a receipt. Instead she tries for a polite, neutral smile that probably reads as apologetic and overbred. “We’ll be through in a second,” she offers, to no one in particular.
The man with the tray of pints tuts behind them, good‑natured but impatient, beer foam listing dangerously. The music from the back room (fiddles being tuned, a bodhrán tested with a soft, dull thump) floats over their heads, just audible under the televised match at the other end of the bar. They are, Ríonach thinks with a flicker of claustrophobic irony, stuck exactly at the junction where art meets alcohol and both are supposed to be moving briskly.
She can feel the other woman’s gaze on her in quick, cataloguing passes: coat, hair, the dried paint at her wrist she’d forgotten to scrub properly. Ríonach resists the urge to tuck her hands into her pockets and hide the evidence. Being seen as “the artist” in this bar is one thing; being seen as the kind of artist who smells like solvent and money in the same breath is something else altogether.
Niamh materializes at Ríonach’s shoulder with the uncanny barmaid’s knack for exploiting any six inches of air as a viable corridor, a tray of empties balanced on one hip. She clocks the stalled knot of bodies in a single sweep. Pints held aloft, the ice bucket wedged, Sadhbh and Ríonach squared off like two people who’ve bumped carts in the middle of a supermarket aisle and can’t agree on who reverses.
“Jesus, the two of ye are blocking the money from getting to the till,” she announces, cheerfully brutal, twisting sideways to slide the tray past the guy with the drinks like a practiced dance move. “Either move or start paying my taxes.”
There’s an automatic ripple of chuckles from the regulars within earshot; they’re used to being conscripted into Niamh’s running patter about bills and licenses and Con Ed robberies. To them it’s a joke about the city bleeding you dry, about everything in here, beer, bodies, even the air, having to earn its keep. To Ríonach, it lands with the familiar, leaden double-meaning: tax as in liquor licenses and rent, and tax as in her.
Heat crawls up under Sadhbh’s collar at the word money, at how easily it gets tossed out like part of the act, like everyone here is in on the joke of being broke together. Her parents’ rent, the last Con Ed notice stuck to the fridge with a magnet from this very bar, the GoFundMe link she’d clicked and closed twice this morning. All of it trips over itself in the back of her throat. Before she can stop herself she says, low but not that low, “Didn’t know there was a cover charge for charity,” the consonants coming out flatter, harder than she meant. Her eyes stay on the scuffed floor, but her voice edges just enough to carry.
Someone in the back room calls, “Rí, you alright there?” and the name lands in the pause like a dropped coin. Ríonach flinches as if pegged, midnight paint under her nails flashing when her hand clamps white‑knuckled around her bag strap. The week’s exhaustion and the knowledge this “fundraiser” barely plugs one leak in a sinking ship knot together. “The art’s free if the taxes aren’t,” she snaps, voice coming out brighter and harder than she’d rehearsed in her head, the words tasting of solvent and old family arguments the second they hit the air.
Sadhbh’s head snaps up before she can stop it. Her gaze meets Ríonach’s full on, a flinty, assessing look that seems to cut a clean line through the bar’s blur of jerseys and glassware. Heat pricks at Ríonach’s neck; Sadhbh feels it too, something hot and electric sparking between them. They both break eye contact in the same instant, as if burned, shoulders angling away just as the press of bodies surges and jostles them apart, leaving the charged remark hanging there, unresolved, like feedback humming under the music.
Niamh clocks the empty chair, the sagging cardboard sign (SUGGESTED DONATION, the marker bleeding where someone’s beer has sweated on it) and the plastic bucket sitting there like a neglected holy well. The teenager she’d stuck there twenty minutes ago is now visible through the front windows, smoke curling up as he scrolls his phone, oblivious. She swears under her breath in Irish and English both, then snaps a stack of pint tickets out of the drawer hard enough to make the register rattle.
“Jesus, Mary, and the revenue service,” she mutters, already leaning over the bar. Her arm snakes out between two regulars arguing about a match, fingers landing on Sadhbh’s shoulder with that particular mix of gentleness and non-negotiable pressure older cousins perfected somewhere between babysitting and bartending. Sadhbh turns, eyebrows up, half a question on her mouth.
“You’re promoted,” Niamh says, jerking her chin toward the folding table squeezed in near the back room doorway, where the bucket sits in orphaned isolation. “Donation duty. Smile, take the money, don’t let anyone walk off with the markers. I’ll comp you a shift meal.”
“I’m not. Sadhbh hesitates just a beat, glances toward the door where the cool air is, then sighs and threads her way toward the table, already rolling up her sleeves.
On her way there, Niamh spots Ríonach making herself small behind a tray of empties, angling toward the kitchen like a busser who’s just remembered another section. Niamh’s hand shoots out, catching a cuff of tailored black coat. “You, óirín, stop hiding: sit,” she orders, voice light but edged, steering her toward the table with a palm at the small of her back, guiding and brooking no argument.
On her way there, Niamh intercepts Ríonach as the younger woman tries to slip past with a tray of empty glasses balanced like a shield, her gaze fixed on the kitchen door as if it were a fire exit.
“Not a chance,” Niamh says, already reaching. Her fingers close around the fine wool of Ríonach’s sleeve, two quick tugs bringing her up short. Up close, the paint under Ríonach’s nails is obvious; so is the way her shoulders tense, the instinctive twist as though she might still wriggle free if she’s just polite enough about it.
“You, óirín, stop hiding. Sit,” Niamh orders, the endearment landing like a warning. Her tone is easy, almost joking, but her grip has all the give of a locked tap. She plucks the tray from Ríonach’s hands and dumps it on a passing barback without looking, already redirecting her cousin toward the folding table.
A firm palm settles at the small of Ríonach’s back, steering her through the knots of bodies with practiced efficiency, the kind that leaves no graceful path of escape that isn’t straight into the chair waiting for her.
In three brusque motions that brook no consultation, Niamh slaps a roll of neon beer tickets into Sadhbh’s paint‑chipped hand, the paper thudding softly against her palm. “Mind them,” she says, already reaching for the next thing. A fan of cheap photocopied flyers, KEEP FLANNAGÁIN’S OPEN stamped in bold above a crooked photo of the bar, slides across the table toward Ríonach, edges catching on an old ring of lager. Ríonach’s fingers close around the stack a heartbeat late, as if they’ve remembered, belatedly, how to be useful.
Then Niamh hooks the dented metal donation bucket with two knuckles and drags it into the narrow no‑man’s‑land between them, setting it down with a hollow clang that makes both women glance up, caught in the same startled frame.
“You. “You: tell them it’s for the bar, not your fancy paints or whatever fecking tragedy you’ve canvased this week.” Her gaze flicks between them, sharp. “And don’t let anyone walk off without paying, even Father bloody Keane.”
Niamh doesn’t wait for agreement; she’s already gone, swallowed by the press near the bar, her braid a dark periscope vanishing into the noise. The chair bites the backs of Ríonach’s knees as she sits. Across from her, Sadhbh shifts, the table shimmying between them, the bucket’s scuffed metal lip catching the light like a reproach neither of them has words for yet.
The comment lands with more precision than volume, a little dart loosed in the general bar‑roar. A couple of regulars glance over, judge it not their business, and swivel back to the match on the TV.
Ríonach hears the shape of the words before she makes out each bit: charitable, heritage, empire. Old vocabulary, new weaponry. She feels the heat rise under her collar anyway.
“It’s not. Her thumb, streaked in a residue of ultramarine she hadn’t managed to scrub off, skims an invisible line along the rim of the donation bucket as if testing a horizon. She drags her voice down to something that doesn’t quite match Sadhbh’s volume. “That’s not how it works.”
Sadhbh arches a brow, letting the silence hang just long enough to be impolite.
“Oh yeah?” she says. “You donate a bit of soul, they knock it off the inheritance tax?”
“The gallery takes their cut,” Ríonach says, too quick, too practised, as if she’s in conversation with an accountant rather than a woman in a fraying union hoodie. “Then the IRS takes theirs. Nobody’s doing me any favours.”
“Except the family trust,” Sadhbh says lightly, “and the grandparents who bought half this postcode when it was tenements and rats.”
The bucket, innocently full of damp quarters and crumpled singles, becomes suddenly, excruciatingly visible.
“Anyway,” Ríonach goes on, because if she doesn’t keep talking she might start defending things she doesn’t actually believe in, “it’s not exactly pro bono, hauling canvases up Niamh’s stairs because no insurance company will touch this place.”
She nods toward the low ceiling, the fire exit half‑blocked by a stack of beer crates and an electric heater humming with the air of a lawsuit.
“Right,” Sadhbh says. “Your delicate artistic back. Terrible hardship.”
Ríonach feels a laugh bubble up in spite of herself. “Have you ever carried a six‑foot stretcher frame in a snowstorm?”
Sadhbh snorts. “Have you ever carried an actual stretcher with an actual person on it up four flights of stairs because the elevator’s busted and the landlord ‘never quite got round’ to fixing it?”
The jab lands, but there’s something in the way she says it. More claim than boast, weary rather than triumphant. Ríonach’s gaze drops to Sadhbh’s hands, the blunt‑cut nails, the network of fine white scars over the knuckles. She imagines them pressing to someone’s chest in a stairwell that smells of bleach and despair and cheap weed.
“That’s…” She hesitates, annoyed to find herself groping for a word more honest than impressive. “That’s work that matters.”
“Unlike painting sad bogs for hedge‑fund lads who just like the word ‘sláinte’ on a wall,” Sadhbh returns, but her tone has softened by a degree.
“I don’t paint bogs,” Ríonach says, offended on behalf of her entire portfolio. “And they’re not hedge‑fund lads, mostly. Some of them are women.”
“Oh, well,” Sadhbh says. “Equality achieved.”
A fresh cheer explodes from the far end of the bar; someone’s team has scored, or avoided catastrophe. The wooden floor shudders. A shoulder smacks into Sadhbh’s chair, jostling her closer to the table. Her knee knocks Ríonach’s under it; both of them flinch, neither pulls away first.
“You think this is easy for me?” Ríonach hears herself say. The words come out rawer than she intended. “Standing here with the bucket, like I’m the face of (” she gestures vaguely, encompassing the bar, the flyers, the weight of the surname that lives on the deed) “all of this? That I just swan in from Manhattan with a tax deduction and a sob story?”
“You live in Queens,” Sadhbh says, but without much force. She’s watching Ríonach now, properly, not just the clothes and the paint under the nails. “And you do sort of swan.”
“That’s just how my coat hangs,” Ríonach mutters.
It wins her the smallest huff of laughter from Sadhbh, quickly smothered.
“Look,” Sadhbh says, tapping the roll of beer tickets against the table, paper softening at the edges from the damp in her palm. “I’m not saying your thing isn’t real. I’m just saying: some of us don’t get to have a ‘thing,’ you know? We get jobs. Shifts. Rotas. Your gallery offer falls through, you still have a house. My EMT exam goes sideways, I’m back doing doubles at three different places hoping nobody cuts my hours.”
Ríonach’s throat tightens; the instinct is to apologise, which seems both pathetic and inadequate.
“You could still…” She falters, then forces the words into the space between them. “You could still call what you do work. Real work. If that helps.”
Sadhbh’s mouth twitches, not quite a smile. “Oh, thanks, boss. Permission from on high.”
“That’s not. “Christ. You’re very good at making a person feel like a villain for existing.”
“Only the ones who can take it,” Sadhbh says, and this time there’s no mistaking the glimmer of reluctant amusement. “Relax. It’s just, where I’m from, art’s what you do after. After the shift, after the kids are asleep, after you’ve checked the bank balance and decided you can afford the subway instead of walking.”
“And where I’m from,” Ríonach replies, “art’s what you’re told is a charming hobby until it starts making money, and then it’s a family asset.” She folds one of the flyers in half, then in quarters, pressing each crease with careful, almost surgical precision. “Some of us didn’t choose the empire either.”
The word hangs there, oddly gentle, its sting turned inward.
Sadhbh regards her for a moment, as if reassessing the outlines. “So what do you paint, then, if it’s not bogs and thatched cottages for St. Patrick’s Day?”
“Night shifts,” Ríonach says before she can stop herself. “Stairwells. The backs of buildings where the lights never quite work. People who are…between things.”
A loud laugh breaks from the next table; someone slaps the bar. Sadhbh’s brow furrows.
“Sounds like you’ve been following me around on my routes.”
“Only in my head,” Ríonach says, then realises how that sounds, and winces. “I mean, I listen. To Niamh. To the regulars. I’m not exactly in a garret in SoHo.”
“No,” Sadhbh says slowly, eyes flicking to the donation bucket, then toward the nebulous direction of the brownstone a few blocks away. “You’re in a trust‑fund turret in Sunnyside.”
“And an unheated studio,” Ríonach says, bristling, then adds, because it’s true, “with very bad coffee.”
Sadhbh’s laugh this time is real, quick and surprised. “Okay. I’ll give you that. The coffee smells like it’s seen some things.”
A man in a faded Local 3 jacket leans over, aiming for the bucket. “What’s this for again, love?”
Both women pivot, their earlier verbal sparring shunted aside by the interruption. For a heartbeat, they glance at each other: some tacit agreement sparking between them, something like: later.
“For the bar,” they say, in almost perfect unison.
Ríonach’s mouth tightens; she pushes a strand of hair back with a paint‑smeared thumb and leaves a faint blue streak along her temple without noticing.
“That’s, ” She hears the defensiveness in her own voice, clamps down on it, drops her volume to something that won’t carry past their little island of table and bucket. “That’s not how it works.”
She can feel Sadhbh watching her, weighing the words like a bartender checking a dodgy twenty.
“The gallery takes their cut,” she goes on, the explanation coming out in the flat cadence of having said it too many times to too many people with better shoes than this. “The IRS takes theirs. The lawyers take a slice for drawing up the papers so it all looks very benevolent on letterhead.” She snorts softly. “Nobody’s sitting down with a quill going ‘ah yes, Ríonach Ó Dálaigh, patron saint of tax evasion.’”
Her thumb traces the rim of the bucket, circling the dented metal.
“Anyway,” she adds, sharper now, “it’s not exactly pro bono, hauling six‑foot canvases up Niamh’s stairs because no insurance company will touch this place with a ten‑foot bargepole.” She tilts her head toward the low ceiling, the crooked EXIT sign, the fire extinguisher zip‑tied to a pipe. “Apparently spontaneous combustion is a ‘known risk factor.’”
“Must be desperate altogether,” Sadhbh says, dry as the empty pint glass she nudges aside with two fingers. “Hauling your suffering heritage around Queens like a carry‑on. Some of us just do the overnights at Elmhurst and call it a day.”
She doesn’t pitch it loud, but the word lands between them with a little clink, same as the glass. Heritage. It tastes like something stuck between her teeth: church raffles, funeral Masses, landlords with Mayo surnames and Manhattan mortgages. The brochure word for the thing that’s been chewing through her parents’ rent.
“Tax‑deductible trauma,” she adds, half under her breath, testing how far she can push. “Must be nice, getting credit for what the rest of us are just trying to survive.”
“Overnights,” Ríonach repeats, seizing on the safer word like a rope. “You’re actually doing EMT runs? Sirens, compressions, puke in the back of the rig, the whole thing? And you still come here after?” There’s real bewilderment under the edge. When Sadhbh shrugs (“Real work, you know yourself”) Ríonach bristles, leaning in. “You think twelve hours with a brush isn’t work just because nobody codes it blue on a chart? Because it doesn’t beep when it flatlines?”
The argument frays instead of explodes; each jab lands beside something tender, not quite on it. Sadhbh, almost against her own rules, finds herself describing the metallic hospital light at 3 a.m., the chemical tang in her throat, the old Irish guy who died clutching a plastic rosary in traffic on Queens Boulevard while she counted compressions in her head. Ríonach, cheeks hot, admits, almost defensively, how many grants she’s turned down because they wanted shamrocks and famine cottages on command, weeping red‑haired girls in doorways, “heritage” in thirty‑point font. Somewhere between another round of raffle tickets, shouted over their heads, and a sticky spill they wordlessly mop up together with too‑thin napkins, their barbed asides soften into wary, sideways questions, half‑joking, half‑serious, that neither of them would’ve dared ask if Niamh were still hovering at the table, arms folded, catching every implication.
By the time the last winning number is shouted over the commentators on the muted match, the energy in the room has dipped from fundraiser‑frenzied to end‑of‑shift stubborn. The regulars have settled into their grooves along the bar, the young professionals have drifted back toward the 7 train, and the back‑room tables are a wreck of plastic cups, rolled‑up strip tickets, and abandoned pencil stubs worn down to gnawed wood.
At the far end, the raffle girl from the parish (sixteen, maybe, with glitter eyeliner and the thousand‑yard stare of someone who has said “one for five, three for ten” four hundred times) hands over the last fistful of cash and coins with a theatrical groan. “That’s it, I’m defecting to the Ukranian bingo down the block,” she announces, then staggers toward the bathroom, pausing only to hug a pillar for balance.
Niamh prises the heavy metal box out from under the till, sets it down with the kind of thunk that suggests both profit and headache, and flips the lid back. What confronts her is not so much bookkeeping as modern art: wads of green bills folded into damp clumps, quarters rolling loose, strips of unpulled tickets stuck together with spilled Guinness, and a half‑filled legal pad on which three different handwritings have attempted, and abandoned, arithmetic. One set of tallies trails off mid‑column in what might be a phone number or a cry for help.
She stares at it, squinting as if a more judgmental gaze will cause the numbers to arrange themselves. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, who taught ye eejits to count?” she says, not bothering to lower her voice. A couple of old lads at the corner snort into their pints; one raises his glass in a sloppy toast to incompetence.
It takes her another beat to remember she, technically, was in charge. That she’s the one who kept being called away: to change a keg, to break up a near‑row over a bad call on the screen, to make sure Old Tommy didn’t nod off into the chip fryer. Half the volunteers she’d drafted after Mass are now three pints and a couple of whiskey backs past legible, clustered in a booth, singing along to a rebel song the TV is not actually playing.
She peels a stuck ten off the inside of the lid, sighs, and feels the dull throb at the base of her skull that means tomorrow’s headache has filed its notice. “Of course,” she mutters, mostly to the cash box. “Of course.”
She drags the ledger toward her, the cardboard cover gone soft at the corners from years of spilled drink and hurried thumbs, and flips it open with the air of a woman bracing for insult. The pages do not disappoint. Columns overlap like tracks in fresh snow, someone’s looping sixes mutating halfway down the margin into vague Gs, plus signs crossed out and replaced with frantic question marks and one large, despairing “???” in the middle of a page as if the scribe had briefly remembered there was a world outside arithmetic and chosen it.
Niamh presses the bridge of her nose, then looks up. The room’s thinned to the stubborn and the sentimental. At the near end of the bar, Sadhbh is propped on one hip, elbow on the wood, nursing the same pint she’s been guarding for an hour. Her eyes, though, are EMT-bright, tracking movement, counting bodies, cataloguing exits without thinking. A few stools down, half behind a pillar like she’s not sure she’s entitled to occupy full space, Ríonach hovers with a folded stack of silent‑auction sheets under one arm, a smear of black marker ink at the tender inside of her wrist where she’d been relabeling minimum bids whenever someone miscounted zeros. Their glasses, neglected, are mostly foam and regret; everyone else’s gleam amber and high-risk.
“You two were nearest the money all night and not legless,” Niamh declares, snapping the cap back onto her pen like it’s a weapon, then jabbing it at them. “You’ll have to help me make sense of this or Father Donal’ll think I ran off to Atlantic City with the parish funds.”
Sadhbh snorts. “He’d only be jealous he didn’t think of it first.” Still, she pushes off the wall and slides onto a stool, boots hooking on the rung, shoulders squaring as if someone’s just called for a medic.
Ríonach murmurs, “Of course: whatever you need,” the words reflexive, a little too quick. She sets the auction sheets down with exaggerated care and reaches for the bent stack of notes, fingers already sorting denominations from damp chaos.
Between peeling apart damp bills and trying to match stray twenties to half‑legible names. ‘Mairéad’? ‘Mike who owes me from last Christmas’?”: it becomes obvious the ledger’s too far gone for a quick fix. Every page throws up another missing ticket book, an unpaid round mis-marked as a “donation,” until Niamh groans, rubs her temples, and says, “Right, I’ve work in the morning. One of ye take this home, and tomorrow we’ll redo it with proper heads on us, not whatever this is.”
There’s a beat where no one volunteers, then Niamh jerks her chin at Ríonach. “You’ve the big quiet table at the house. Use it. Sadhbh, you know what the EMT lads actually handed over and who stiffed us. Go up after your shift. I’ll text what I remember before I forget the rest.”
Sadhbh lifts her chin. “Grand, but it’s just for the fundraiser, yeah? Numbers and bollocks like that.”
“If you’re free, we can… straighten it all out then,” Ríonach adds, tucking hair behind her ear, voice going careful, professional.
The words bump awkwardly in the air, then arrange themselves into something respectable enough to nod at. An appointment, not a date. A chore, not a pull. It lands with sufficient duty wrapped round it to smother, almost successfully, the small bright flicker neither of them intends to name.
The next afternoon, the brownstone kitchen feels too bright and orderly for the smeared fundraiser ledger between them; the marble countertop might as well be an altar, and the spiral notebook with beer-ring ghosts and ketchup fingerprints an inappropriate offering. Ríonach sets a chipped parish-mug of pens beside a sleek calculator, the mug’s faded “Our Lady of Knock – Pray for Us” haloing a tangle of highlighters and half-dead biros. The calculator looks like something her father’s accountant would approve of. She punches in a string of numbers with more force than necessary, pretending intense absorption in sub-totals so she doesn’t keep glancing at the other woman’s hands. The ink has worked down into the creases of Sadhbh’s knuckles, a faint blue-black map over raw skin from dishsoap and winter air. She’s using her thumb to flatten each crumpled receipt before reading it out, muttering dates and amounts in a voice that’s still rough from too little sleep.
“Four pitchers, two dozen wings… that was the union lads on Friday.” A pause, the faint hitch of a laugh. “They left twenty bucks on a three-hundred tab. Tell your cousin I said she’s a saint.”
Ríonach hums without looking up, the sound lodging somewhere between agreement and apology. The ledger paper crackles each time Sadhbh turns a page; the noise scrapes pleasantly at Ríonach’s nerves, something real and irregular against the smooth hum of the refrigerator and the distant muffled traffic.
She risks a glance. The backs of Sadhbh’s fingers are speckled with ballpoint where a pen must have burst in her hand earlier, a tiny constellation across bruised-looking knuckles. There’s a smudge along the side of her palm where she’s dragged it over fresh ink. Ríonach’s own fingers, neat and paint-free for once, hover above the calculator keys, suddenly self-conscious in their softness and the faint ghost of an expensive manicure grown out.
“Sorry, my writing’s shite,” Sadhbh says, squinting at a note she’d scrawled in the margin: something like “J. Murphy IOU???”. And looking faintly embarrassed.
“It’s legible,” Ríonach answers, a little too quickly. “You should see some of my aunt’s checks. It’s like the BVM herself descended to write in spirals.”
Sadhbh huffs, half a laugh, pushing another receipt forward with her ink-marked fingertip. “You lot and your saints.”
Her lot. The old-money, brownstone-owning lot. The word pricks, but Ríonach just nods and taps numbers, letting the rhythm of addition cover the way her gaze keeps catching on those stained hands, on the way the tendons flex when Sadhbh folds a page back. She tells herself it’s just observational habit, the artist’s eye cataloguing detail. Any tug low in her chest is, obviously, just caffeine withdrawal.
Sadhbh perches on the edge of the chair like it’s on loan and likely to be repossessed, the strap of her bag sliding off her shoulder and hitting the tiled floor with a solid, ungraceful thump. The sound makes her wince; it feels too loud in here, in this kitchen where even the dish soap is probably the good kind. She’s aware, annoyingly aware, of every scrape of her own boots against the chair rung, every cough, every breath.
She tells herself she’s only noticing things because she’s wrecked from the morning shift and running on diner coffee. That’s why the way the winter light slants in through the south-facing window makes her blink. That’s why she registers, in far too much detail, how it catches on the curve of Ríonach’s cheekbone, turns a stray auburn hair at her temple to copper wire, throws the pale scatter of freckles into low relief.
It’s exhaustion, she decides. Not the fact that Ríonach has rolled up the sleeves of a shirt that probably cost more than Sadhbh’s month of MetroCards, baring forearms that are more familiar with paintbrushes than bus trays. Not the contrast between those clean, fine-boned fingers on the calculator and her own ink-ruined knuckles hovering over the ledger.
She drags her gaze down to the numbers, to the smudged columns and looping half-legible notes. The marble under her elbows is colder than she expected. She flattens one palm against it, as if to ground herself in something solid and non-Ríonach-shaped, and thinks, sourly amused, that she has no business being this aware of anyone’s cheekbones in a house where the countertops probably have a better credit score than she does.
“You weren’t joking about the big quiet table,” she mutters, the words half-swallowed, eyes ticking up once to take in the high ceilings, the moulding, the framed prints that are probably worth more than her parents’ car. Her mouth twists; she drops her gaze so fast it’s almost a flinch, fixing it hard on the jumble of figures instead. The pen in her hand clicks, nervy and sharp. She taps the ledger with a bitten-down nail, as if she might physically knock it into sense. “Right,” she adds, a shade too brisk, “show us where your cousin thinks the money went,” making a joke of it, like it’s only the bad handwriting and the bar tabs knotting her shoulders, not the room itself.
Ríonach bends nearer to the ledger than the numbers warrant, letting her hair fall like a curtain between them. She traces columns with the back of her pen, not the tip, as if ink might make it more official. Her voice goes accountant-flat, dates, totals, “miscellaneous”, because the alternative is saying, I know this is mad, this kitchen, I’m not trying to lord it over you, I swear.
Their hands collide over a crumpled receipt, skin against skin for a bare second, both of them snatching back like the paper’s live wire.
“Relax, I don’t bite,” Sadhbh says, too fast. “Unless it’s in the contract.” The smirk is deliberate, crooked armour over the small electric jolt.
Ríonach’s laugh comes out a note too high. “Tea?” she blurts, already half-standing, reaching for the kettle with a relief so sharp it’s almost shame. The scrape of the chair legs, the clatter of the tap (blessed, ordinary noise) give her a moment to breathe, to let her face settle before she turns back.
Sadhbh keeps her coat on longer than makes sense in the overheated kitchen, shoulders hunched as if the worn canvas can do anything against crown moulding and inherited silence. The radiator ticks and hisses like it’s arguing with her, but she just fists the lapels tighter each time she shifts. Her phone lies facedown by her elbow like a little black shield, screen deliberately dark, notifications smothered. Every so often her fingers drift toward it, thumb skimming the edge, like muscle memory wants her to swipe herself out of here.
One boot is hooked around the rung of the chair, heel braced hard, giving her body a ready-made exit plan. She rocks on it in tiny increments, not quite enough to creak, just enough to feel the tension in her calf, to remind herself she is not nailed in place by the polished floor or the heavy quiet. Her eyes don’t wander much. When they do, it’s quick, a flash to the high ceilings, the neat row of spice jars that all match, the art on the walls that she’s almost sure is real. Her gaze lands back on the ledger like it’s a life raft.
The coat, the phone, the hooked boot: each is a little refusal. She will not hang her jacket on the smooth hook by the door like she comes here all the time. She will not turn her phone over and let its cracked screen look shabby beside the marble. She will not let both feet rest easy under this table, not yet.
Instead she leans forward, making a joke about “rich girl spreadsheets” under her breath, roughening her voice with humour so it doesn’t shake, as if the mess of receipts and numbers can stand in for the far more embarrassing arithmetic of what this house costs and who gets to call it normal.
So when she finally lets herself look up, it’s not at the paintings or the mouldings or the antique sideboard with its glassy, reproachful sheen. It’s at the island, too white, too clean, currently buried under a small avalanche of receipts, napkins, and the kind of curling till paper that leaves grey smudges on your fingers.
“Jesus,” Sadhbh says, snorting, the sound soft but edged. “You’ve weaponized the rich girl spreadsheets, have you? This where the trust fund’s hiding? Under ‘miscellaneous’?” She taps one of the more hopeless piles with a bitten-down nail, mouth quirking as if she’s trying the joke on for size and finding it almost fits.
The words land like a pre-emptive strike, neat and efficient. They slice through the apology Ríonach’s been silently rehearsing. About the countertops she didn’t buy, the house she didn’t earn, the fact that even her chaos happens on imported stone. There’d been a whole speech forming: this isn’t really mine, you know, I’m just… keeping it warm. Sadhbh’s throwaway line wipes it off the board before it can embarrass them both.
Ríonach hears herself laugh again (too bright, too brittle) and the sound clangs against the quiet like dropped cutlery. “Tea?” she repeats, already fumbling for mugs. “Or coffee. I’ve beans from. Or there’s biscuits. Cookies. Both. Somewhere.” She opens the wrong cupboard first, then another, then a third, not looking at Sadhbh, just letting the doors thud and click so her hands have something to justify their shaking.
She lines mugs up with unnecessary precision, as if the right geometry might add up to humility. The kettle’s not even on yet, but she’s talking over the silence anyway, piling up options like a barricade: herbal, black, oat milk, sugar, honey. Hospitality as performance, as apology, as stall for time.
Sadhbh bats away each option with a crooked grin, “I’m not here for room service, princess, I’m here for the numbers”, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. They keep skimming the high ceilings, the mouldings, the framed prints Ríonach knows are originals, a quick, involuntary inventory of every quiet reminder of the distance money builds and then calls normal.
Finally, with no more cupboards to rattle, Ríonach forces herself onto the stool opposite, spine too straight, tucking her paint-streaked fingers under the island like contraband. She inhales once, lets the old performance of hostess settle over her shoulders, and hears herself say (lighter than she feels) “Right, then. Let’s make sure I haven’t completely fucked this up,” tugging the ledger between them like a shared indictment.
At first it’s almost soothing: columns and rows instead of critics and cousins. Sadhbh calls out the figures in a steady rhythm, and Ríonach taps them into the battered calculator whose zero key sticks if you don’t hit it dead center. The scratch of pen on paper fills the kitchen while the ghost of the bar hums faintly through the floor: muffled shouts, the rise and fall of laughter, the clink of glass on wood. It feels like being underwater, listening to another room’s life.
“Forty-two fifty, cash,” Sadhbh says, pen hovering, her voice gone practical and flat in the way of someone who’s done tills in three different boroughs.
“Forty-two fifty,” Ríonach echoes, thumb pressing hard. The machine coughs the number onto the tape with a tired whirr. Little white curls gather beside her elbow like shed skin.
They move through the pages: pints, shots, the one ill-advised round of espresso martinis the visiting cousins demanded. Tips left in sloppy piles, cards run and signed. The ledger is a familiar accusation in Niamh’s looping hand and block capitals: MICK – TAB, DON’T LET HIM SLIDE; BERNIE – FUNERAL; RÍONACH – CANVAS.
The numbers mostly behave, docile under Sadhbh’s neat additions, until they don’t.
Halfway down a column of cash totals, Sadhbh’s pen stalls. Her brows knit, a small furrow that makes her look suddenly younger and exhausted at once. She drums blunt nails against the paper, thud, thud, thud, then shifts the notebook so the overhead light hits cleanly.
“Hold up,” she says, squinting. “This doesn’t match what Niamh rang in.”
Ríonach leans forward, shoulder brushing Sadhbh’s, catching a faint salt of sweat and fryer oil beneath the detergent. “Maybe I miskeyed something,” she offers too quickly, pulse ratcheting up in time with the nails on paper.
Sadhbh doesn’t answer right away. She runs the line again, lips moving silently, then flips back two pages, cross-checking. The easy rhythm of figures breaks, replaced by a searching, brittle quiet that makes the walls feel nearer.
They chase the numbers in circles for another ten minutes, following Niamh’s looping arrows and exasperated underlines, cross-referencing drink tickets that still smell faintly of beer. Ríonach rewrites columns, double-checks tips that turned into rounds for staff, hunts for the comforting slip of an obvious mistake. Transpose a digit here, miss a twenty there, some small human error that would let them both unclench.
It doesn’t arrive. The gap sits in the middle of the page, stubborn as a stain.
Sadhbh’s jaw works while she adds the last column again, lips moving, pencil smudging the edge of the paper. When the same wrong total stares back up at her, something in her expression hardens.
“Jesus,” she breathes, half a laugh, half an exhale of disgust. “That’s what happens when you mix art kids and money.”
She says it like a joke, tossed down between them with the loose change, but her gaze slides off Ríonach’s face and fixes on the tasteful pendant light instead. The words land with more weight than she’s apparently prepared to own.
Heat needles the back of Ríonach’s neck; she feels it creep up into her ears, hot and betraying. Her spine snaps a little straighter, as if posture could turn the moment into a misunderstanding instead of an insult.
“Art kids?” she repeats, aiming for dry and landing closer to brittle. Her fingers curl under the island edge, knuckles whitening. “You mean the art kid who’s been here since four, or the one who had to jump the bar and play bouncer because someone walked off mid-shift to break up a fight in the smoking alley?”
She keeps her tone level, almost conversational, but there’s an edge of steel she usually saves for gallery meetings. The kitchen’s soft light suddenly feels like an interrogation lamp.
Sadhbh’s jaw sets. “Yeah, well, some of us don’t get to let lads smash each other’s faces in on our watch and call it atmosphere. Not everyone can shrug and have the family lawyer mop it up.” She taps the margin with her pen, sharp little jabs. The ledger stops being ink and columns and becomes a border, each side of the table a country they’re half-sworn to defend.
The jabs get pettier, more pointed. Sadhbh mutters about “trust-fund spreadsheets and magic balance sheets,” and Ríonach hears herself snap about people who “treat the bar like a side gig, not a responsibility.” Each hit lands nearer the raw parts they never name until even the clink of glasses in the bar sounds distant, muffled by the thickening quiet.
The fight stutters there, knocked off its rails by the confession. The words land in the middle of the kitchen like something dropped and breakable, and Ríonach hears, with a kind of distant horror, how small her own voice sounds. It’s the sort of thing she has never said out loud: never to Niamh, never to her parents, certainly never to someone she’s known three weeks and already managed to offend.
She doesn’t look up to see what it does to Sadhbh’s face. Her gaze stays pinned to the ledger, to the damp warp of the paper where someone’s pint ring bled through the last few pages. The calculator cord snakes across the counter and she hooks it automatically, winding it tight around her fingers until the plastic bites. It’s an old, childish motion, like fingering rosary beads, except this litany is numbers and margins and the quiet terror of not being enough.
“I came back here,” she says, more to the smudged ink than to the woman across from her, “because Niamh asked. Because this place. “If she thinks I’m treating it like some… like a backdrop…”
The cord loops again, cutting crescents into her skin. The kitchen hums on around them: muffled sports commentary through the door, the rattle of the ice machine, a burst of laughter from the bar that sounds miles away.
“She’s been carrying it since she was what, twenty-one? Before I’d even figured out how to stretch a canvas properly.” The corners of her mouth twitch, not quite a smile. “I get to hang things in the back room and call it heritage. She’s the one signing checks when the city decides property taxes need a little hike for the greater good.”
The words spool out, thin but steady. “If I mess up her margins, if she has to cover for me, again, she won’t say it. She’ll just… look at me. Like she did when Grandda’s will came through. Like I’m proof they backed the wrong horse.”
Her thumb rubs at a flake of varnish on the countertop, worrying it until it lifts and curls. “I can live with people in Manhattan thinking I’m a fraud,” she says, barely louder than the compressor kicking on. “I don’t know how to live with Niamh thinking I’m careless. With what they built. With what I got handed.”
She exhales, a short, frayed breath that fogs the glossy surface of the calculator screen. “So, yeah,” she finishes, the attempt at wryness faltering, “I triple-check the decimals. It’s the least I can do while everyone’s very politely not mentioning the fact that my name’s on deeds I’ve never signed.”
“She already thinks I’m a bit of a tourist behind the bar,” Ríonach says, the words coming out hoarse, like she’s been gargling sawdust. Her thumb keeps working at the chipped edge of the laminate, scraping at it as if she could smooth the whole situation down to clean, factory-new. “You know: let me pull a few pints on a Friday, fuss with the chalkboard, and then I disappear back to the brownstone while she locks up and argues with Con Ed.”
The admission hangs there, tacky as spilled beer. Her mouth twists. “It’s not like she’s wrong. I swan in with my little spreadsheets and talk about ‘allocating for repairs’ like I’ve ever had to pick up the phone and beg a landlord for an extra week.”
Her fingers still, knuckles white against the counter. “I’m the soft one. The Ó Dálaigh cousin who gets to ‘help out’ when it suits and call it contributing. If the numbers go sideways, she’s the one paying for it. I’m the one who gets to pretend I worked.”
The honesty leaches some of the heat out of Sadhbh’s anger, as if someone’s cracked a window in a room she hadn’t realized was airless. She watches the tight set of Ríonach’s jaw, the way her shoulders hunch like she’s bracing for a slap that never comes, and recognizes, with an unwelcome jolt, something she knows too well: the sick churn of not wanting to be the problem, the one people mutter about when they think you’re out of earshot.
It’s a look she’s seen on her ma, on lads handing over rent they can’t afford, on herself in the bathroom mirror before double shifts. Responsibility sitting on someone who never quite asked for it, and still apologizing in advance for dropping it.
“I only. “I only said that because I hate owing anyone anything,” she manages, the words tumbling faster now, tripping over each other. “Feels like they’re keeping a tab on you all the time, ticking up in the background, waiting to be called in.”
She forces herself to look up, actually meet Ríonach’s gaze, and the last part comes out smaller, like she’s ashamed to hear herself say it. “From people like…you.” The words sag in the middle, stripped of bite, more diagnosis than insult. It lands between them not as a slur but as a weary confession of how much the distance frightens her.
They bend over the ledger again, the cheap ballpoint wobbling between them as Sadhbh taps at a column halfway down the page.
“Here,” she mutters, nail clicking against the paper. “You’ve got the sales tax on the kegs rounded one way on this page and another way on the next. That’s where it’s off.”
Their heads are close enough now that Ríonach can see the faint coffee stain darkening the frayed end of Sadhbh’s hoodie string, a small brown tide line against worn grey. She smells not just the bar’s usual background (spilled beer, bleach, fryer oil lodged forever in the wood) but the sharper, more specific note of cheap shampoo on still-damp hair, the ghost of cigarette smoke clinging from someone else’s break outside.
“Do I?” Ríonach leans in further, squinting, pen-smudged fingers braced on the bar top. The column swims for a second, numbers blurring at the edges. “Christ. No wonder Niamh thinks I’m cooking the books.”
“She thinks you’re useless at the books,” Sadhbh says, automatic as breathing, but there isn’t much acid in it. Her mouth twitches like she half-regrets the jab as soon as it’s out. “Different sin.”
“Comforting,” Ríonach says dryly. Her voice is level, but her hand shifts closer on the page until their fingers almost share the same margin. “So I round like a posh eejit instead of a criminal. Good to have that cleared up.”
Sadhbh huffs something that might be a laugh. “You’re not posh, you’re: well. You are. But you’re not…you know. Not the worst of them.” Her fingertip traces the line of figures again, slower this time. “See? If you’d stuck with the first way you did it, you’d have balanced out three pages back. But no, you had to get creative.”
“Artistic interpretation of tax,” Ríonach murmurs. “They’ll love that on the audit.”
“Don’t joke,” Sadhbh says, quick and low, eyes flicking up to hers, the shared awareness of consequences tightening the space between them. “Some of us can’t afford jokes like that.”
The pen stills. Ríonach swallows, nods once, and the two of them bend closer over the same stubborn line of numbers, the air between them humming with things that have nothing to do with math.
Sadhbh’s shoulder nudges Ríonach’s as she shifts for a better angle, meaning to move away immediately, some old reflex about not taking up space that isn’t hers kicking in. But the press of warm, worn cotton against Ríonach’s tailored sleeve doesn’t break; it holds for a slow, unaccounted-for second that feels oddly separate from the rest of the night. Separate from the bar’s noise, from the mutter of commentary at the match on the TV, from the clink of glasses being racked behind them.
Ríonach goes very still, as if any sudden movement might startle them both back into the safe distance of jokes and ledger lines. She can feel, with an embarrassing clarity, the slight tremor in Sadhbh’s muscles where they touch, the faint give of her weight leaning in just a fraction more than necessity demands. Sadhbh’s hoodie is rough against the fine wool, smelling faintly of laundry detergent that has to stretch between too many loads. The contact is nothing, objectively, a crowded-bar accident, but it lands in Ríonach’s skin like a question she is not prepared to answer.
The ledger swims a little at the edges, not from the cheap ink but from the sudden, hyper-specific awareness of the shallow pull of Sadhbh’s breath by her ear, the tiny hitch when she counts under it, lips moving soundlessly. Their hands have arranged themselves into a stalemate: Ríonach’s pen angled down the margin, Sadhbh’s blunt fingers braced just above the same circled figure, the space between them so narrow it feels like it ought to make a sound. Millimeters, nothing, the kind of distance a draft could erase, and still it crackles. If she shifted half an inch, the back of Ríonach’s knuckles would graze the soft, work-rough skin of Sadhbh’s hand. She doesn’t move. Neither of them does.
Under the faint, automatic dab of perfume she’d put on in the hallway mirror, there’s the more honest residue: linseed, turpentine, the mineral tang of gesso, paint ground into the cuffs no dry cleaner can quite bully out. Sadhbh registers it with a small, unwelcome jolt. This is the same stubborn smell that clung to the canvases crowding the back room, the ones she’d pretended not to look at too closely.
Neither of them says anything. The silence is brief but edged; their jaws set for entirely different wars. When Sadhbh finally clears her throat and eases back that grudged inch, the absence she leaves is oddly cool, air rushing in like a draft. The ledger between them reverts, with almost comic brutality, to columns and ink instead of pulse and heat.
Sadhbh’s fingers drum once against the ledger, a dull little tattoo against the paper, then go still as if she’s caught herself in the act. She pulls in a breath like she’s priming some deflecting joke, something about “getting out of the boss’s way” or “leaving the rich cousin to her sums”, and Ríonach can almost feel the shape of it forming, the familiar scaffolding of sarcasm sliding into place between them.
But then Sadhbh’s gaze flicks up, quick as a flinch and just as impossible to hide. Whatever line she was about to throw dies there, behind her teeth. Her eyes snag on Ríonach’s face: the slightly smudged eyeliner, the ink-mark on her wrist from an earlier note, the way her mouth has settled into a neutral line that is, for once, not quite a defense.
The ledger, for all its tidy, damning columns, loses ground for a moment. Sadhbh’s throat works around words she doesn’t seem to want to taste. She looks away, then back, as if she’s testing the weight of some alternative that doesn’t involve the usual exit ramp into mockery.
“Jesus,” she mutters under her breath, a barely audible exhale that could be about the numbers, could be about the way Ríonach is still close enough that Sadhbh can see the faint spray of paint freckles at the edge of her cuff. Whatever it is, it seems to tilt something. Her shoulders, tense from the lean-in over the bar, loosen by a fraction.
She shifts her hand off the page, palm flattening against the worn wood instead, fingertips brushing the sticky ring a glass left behind. The move opens a tiny pocket of space between ledger and skin, an invitation or a retreat; Ríonach can’t quite tell which.
Sadhbh inhales again, more carefully this time, as if selecting a different register.
“You, uh… you got that studio upstairs, yeah?” she says, the question coming out softer than she meant. “Since we’re already here… would you mind showing me?”
“You, uh… you got that studio upstairs, yeah?” she says, and the question comes out softer than she seems to have intended, as if it’s slipped its leash halfway through. Her eyes don’t quite meet Ríonach’s; they track somewhere just over her shoulder, toward the ceiling, the pipes, anywhere that isn’t the raw request hovering between them. “Since we’re already here…” Her fingers drum once more, then still. “Would you mind showing me?”
Ríonach blinks, caught off guard; for a second her gaze flicks toward the stairs as if checking some invisible boundary, teeth catching at the inside of her cheek. She can feel the reflexive no rising. The practiced laugh, the line about the place being a disaster, the promise of “another time” that never materializes. The studio is the one floor of the brownstone she has stubbornly kept unserious, uncurated; it is also, inconveniently, the truest thing she owns.
But Sadhbh is watching her with a kind of tentative, sideways bravery, like someone leaning over the guardrail of a too-high bridge. Ríonach feels the balance of the moment tilt.
“Yeah,” she hears herself say. “All right. Come on, so.”
Ríonach blinks, caught off guard; for a second her gaze flicks instinctively toward the stairs, as if there might be an actual velvet rope strung across them instead of just the family’s unwritten rules and her own hoarded privacy. Her teeth catch at the inside of her cheek, the old, nervous habit that’s ruined more lipstick than any crying jag ever did. The instinctive no rises fast: self-deprecating joke queued up, apology about the mess on her tongue, all the usual escape hatches lined in a row.
But Sadhbh’s question hangs there, unrescued by sarcasm. Ríonach feels it like a hand lightly resting on a door she’s kept shut. The idea of saying yes terrifies her. The idea of refusing terrifies her more.
Whatever calculation she’s making resolves faster than she’d like to admit; the breath in her chest slips out in a quiet, shaky exhale she hopes doesn’t read as relief. She gives a quick nod before she can second-guess it, feeling a small, almost disobedient smile tug at the corner of her mouth, cracking clean through her usual, carefully neutral composure.
“Sure,” she says, the word coming out low but steadier than she feels. She steps out from behind the counter, wiping suddenly self-conscious palms on the sides of her coat, and tilts her head toward the stairwell. As she passes, her shoulder brushes Sadhbh’s, light, electric, then lingers just a heartbeat too close before she moves ahead, the invitation humming between them as they start up together into the narrower, quieter dark of the stairs.
On the first landing she misjudges the distance, one hand closing on the cool rail, the other hovering in useless midair as though there might be a brush there instead of nothing.
“Full disclosure,” she says lightly, hearing the tightness in her own voice, “I only ever feel properly brave in front of a canvas. People are. “Much more likely to complain.”
It is meant to land as a joke. It comes out sounding too honest, the kind of line you’d tuck in a grant application under ‘Artist Statement’ if you’d already decided you didn’t want the money.
The stairwell smells faintly of bleach and someone’s overcooked dinner from two floors down. The narrow window on the landing throws a stripe of streetlamp light across Sadhbh’s buzzed head, picking out the dark patch where her hoodie is still damp from the drizzle. They’re boxed in together between floors: no music, no bar noise, no paintings to stand between Ríonach and the person she’s just invited upstairs.
She adds, because silence will only underline the confession, “So, you know. Fair warning. If you start bleeding or posing dramatically, I’ll be grand. If you ask me a straightforward question, I may have to flee.”
There. That’s better. Make herself ridiculous before anyone else can.
Sadhbh’s mouth curves, not quite a smile, more the reflex of someone surprised into amusement. A soft huff escapes her, the kind you’d let out over a customer’s terrible joke at the end of a long shift.
“Deal,” she says, after a beat. “Long as we’re confessing, I’m way better at patching up strangers in the back of an ambulance than talking about my own shit.”
Her gaze drops to the worn edge of the next step as she speaks, boot toe nudging a scuff in the paint, as if the admission will go down easier if delivered to thirty-year-old wood instead of Ríonach’s face.
Sadhbh’s laugh is more an exhale than anything, the sound you make when the alternative is a groan. She keeps her eyes on the wood, thumb brushing at a fleck of white paint as if it might yield to pressure.
“Yeah, well,” she says, the words coming out careful, like she’s testing ice, “I’m…way better at patching up strangers in the back of an ambulance than talking about my own shit.”
She gives the step an unnecessary little kick with the toe of her boot, a dry smile ghosting across her face and vanishing again.
“Like, you tell me you’ve been stabbed in the thigh? Grand. I know where to put my hands, what to say so you don’t pass out. You ask me how I’m doing?” She lets out another breath, a crooked almost-laugh. “Now I’m looking for the exit.”
The admission hangs there between them on the landing, not quite a joke and not quite not, the kind of throwaway line you only use when the truth of it feels too close to touch directly.
Above them the stairwell tightens, the plaster closing in, paint gone shiny where countless hands have trailed. From the bar comes a muffled cheer, the clink of glass; up here, the air feels almost private. Ríonach takes the next step a touch too slowly, as if the altitude requires caution, and hears herself say, quieter than she intended, “Sometimes I think the paintings are just. Dress-up. Like I’ve put a clever costume over the fact it’s all paid for already.”
The admission arrives without permission, surprising her more than Sadhbh. It slips into the space between their bodies and the wall, heavier than she meant it, heavier than the casual tone she’d aimed for, and then just hangs there, stubborn, refusing to pass as a joke.
Sadhbh’s hand slides along the rail, slowing her, as if her fingers have hit some invisible checkpoint. “I get scared of…” She grimaces, hunts for the phrase. “Of getting used to all this. Your…kind of ease.” She lifts her chin toward the unseen apartment. “Liking it. Knowing I’ll never be able to pay for it without feeling like I sold something I can’t get back.”
They reach the top landing and stall there, not quite shoulder to shoulder, the stairwell suddenly feeling too narrow for how much they’ve said. Neither of them steps back. The nearness prickles: not contact, not exactly, but the ghost of it, a charged, precarious stillness where the last few sentences still vibrate, raw and oddly steadying, between them.
Ríonach fumbles the keys once before she finds the right one, metal scraping lightly against the plate. The hesitation is long enough to notice, short enough she can pretend it was just the lock being finicky. She angles her body so she’s half-blocking the doorway, as if her spine might count as a tasteful partition.
“It’s. Uh. Just ignore. The old latch gives with a soft, grudging click.
The smell hits first: oil and turpentine and something faintly metallic under it, like rain on old railings. It rushes out into the narrow landing, claiming back the air they’d just cleared between them. Ríonach feels heat crawl up her neck anyway. “Sorry,” she mutters, pushing the door open with the side of her shoe. “It’s a disaster. I meant to, ” She makes a vague wiping gesture that could encompass the whole chaotic room or her entire life. “: tidy. At some point. In the mythical future.”
The apology is automatic, overly well rehearsed. It buys her two seconds to step in first, to kick aside a roll of bubble wrap and a stray mug with a dead paintbrush leaning out of it like a drowned flag. Light from the skylight knifes down onto the paint-spattered floor, picking out paths where she’s walked the most, worn ghost-footprints in color.
“Watch your step, there’s. “Everything. There’s everything on the floor.”
She hears how breathless she sounds and hates it, hates that this feels more intimate than taking off clothes in someone else’s bedroom would. The studio is the only place she doesn’t curate for company; bringing Sadhbh over the threshold feels like letting her read a diary Ríonach hasn’t edited for metaphor yet.
She steps aside, finally, leaving Sadhbh the full doorway, no more human shield between her and the mess.
Sadhbh steps in like she’s expecting some glossy loft from a TV show, one big ironic joke she can rib Ríonach about later. She makes it three paces before the joke evaporates.
She turns in a slow circle, boots whispering over the paint-slick floor. Unstretched canvases lean in ragged ranks against the walls; paper curls up at the edges on every flat surface. It isn’t abstract color-fields or tasteful bog landscapes. Faces crowd the room instead, half-finished and too familiar, Mrs. Kavanagh from the deli, that old transit guy who drinks seltzer at Flannagáin’s, a nurse in a plastic gown with her mask pulled down, mouth set in a line Sadhbh’s seen on late shifts.
Her eye catches on a hallway washed in institutional green, lit that sour fluorescent hospital color that makes everyone look already half-dead. Another canvas: an orange city marshal sticker slapped on a tenement door, the paper buckling as if it’s trying to breathe. A bar front shuttered, the metal gate striped with rust and hand-lettered pleas to “support your local.”
“Jesus,” Sadhbh says softly, no tease in it at all.
She hears herself laugh, thin and wrong. “These aren’t. Not to… you know. The people with white wine and business cards.”
Her hand flutters at the walls, at Mrs. Kavanagh’s furrowed brow, at the shuttered gate. “These are the ones that stay up here. The block. Niamh. Your: people like your folks. The stuff that’s… not postcard material.”
The words scrape coming out, but once they start she can’t stop. “I keep telling myself I’m just… documenting. Bearing witness, or some grant-speak like that. But it’s your rent notices and Niamh’s overdue invoices and that nurse from the ER on Queens Boulevard, and I’m safe upstairs turning them into… this.”
She swallows. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Or if I’m stealing.”
Sadhbh’s jaw works once, twice, like she might swallow it back. Instead she hooks a hip against the table, eyes fixed on a canvas of an ambulance pinned beneath the 7 train’s steel ribs. “We lost a guy,” she says, voice flat. “Training run, supposed to be supervised. I, ” Her hand twitches. “I blanked. Ever since, I keep thinking next time I’ll freeze and someone’ll pay for it.”
She hears her own voice describing the clauses in the will, the quarterly deposits that appear like weather, how every brushstroke feels suspect because the lights will stay on whether the painting sells or not. Sadhbh answers with numbers. The air between them tightens and softens at once; some sly, easy current drops away and what’s left is raw and oddly careful, a shared sense that they’ve stepped over an invisible threshold and can’t quite go back.
She feels the heat crawl up her neck before the words are even out. “First time someone said it I was in a black car I didn’t pay for, going to a room I didn’t pay for, wearing a dress my mother’s lawyer had expensed as a ‘professional necessity.’”
She gives a quick, breathless grin that’s nowhere near amused. “Some gala on the Upper East. Marble floors, staff in white jackets, those tiny lamb chop things that disappear in one bite. The curator had this… benevolent smile, like a priest before confession. Told me he admired the way I’d overcome adversity to speak for my people.” Her fingers mime quotation marks around the last three words, then fall uselessly to her lap.
“I knew exactly which adversity he meant,” she goes on. “The famine sketch in the catalogue essay. That quote I gave about my gran coming over with nothing. The bit where I said the block was ‘under siege.’ They had it all printed next to the donor list. I’d signed off on it. I’d watched the galleys go by in my inbox over cold brew.”
She scrapes at a fleck of dried paint on the table. “And I’d also let the trust office book the car, and I knew there was a line item in some portfolio report: ‘Gallery-related expenses, R. Ó Dálaigh.’ I could see the numbers in my head when he said hardscrabble. I could see the apartment upstairs. The mortgage that doesn’t exist.”
Her throat tightens around the next part, but she forces it. “I smiled. I said, ‘Thank you, that means a lot.’ And I let him introduce me to three different hedge fund people as ‘the voice of the neighborhood.’ Then I went home, threw up, and painted until sunrise like penance. Like if I worked hard enough, it would wash the money off.”
Sadhbh doesn’t look at her. She tracks a ring of moisture staining the table’s scarred surface, thumb worrying the grain like she could rub through to somewhere else. “My ma was short on the rent last winter,” she says, quiet enough that the TV commentary from the bar proper almost covers it. “Not by much. Couple hundred. ‘Til the overtime kicked in, she said.”
Her mouth twists. “So I’m in my room at three in the morning, dumping out tips. Singles stuck together with somebody’s spilled whiskey, stinking of fryer grease. Counting and re-counting ‘til I’ve got this sad little wad that’s all the difference between ‘we’re grand’ and ‘we might have to move to Yonkers.’”
She draws a breath that’s half laugh, half something else. “I left it on the kitchen table, under the sugar bowl. My dad came in, made his tea, stepped around it like it was a mouse trap. Ma found it after. Called me ‘a good girl’ while she slid it into an envelope. Like she was proud and furious at the same time.”
“I think about…just torching it sometimes,” she hears herself say. “The folders, the ledgers. See who I am without quarterly weather reports.” The words land heavier than she meant; she flinches and adds too fast, “That’s: very arson chic of me, I know. Dramatic. I’d never, ”
“Don’t.” Sadhbh’s hand moves before her eyes do, fingertips skimming the back of Ríonach’s paint-roughened knuckles, leaving a faint cool trail. “You don’t have to tidy it up for me.”
Ríonach freezes, every instinct to make a joke suddenly useless.
“I believe you,” Sadhbh says, still studying the water ring instead of her face. “About the shame. I mean. I know it’s not the same as…counting tips. But I believe you feel it. That it costs you something.”
Sadhbh huffs a breath that’s not quite a laugh. “I’m scared of waking up one day and realizing I’m… someone’s soft project. Some rich girl’s… charity case.” Her throat works on the last words; they come out raw.
The old Ó Dálaigh reflex (the protest, the joke, the offer) rises and breaks. Ríonach just nods, lets it land. “You never will be,” she says, steady. “If it ever felt like that, I’d rather you walk than stay. I’d rather lose you than…own you.”
For a breath, nothing moves but the TV light stuttering over their joined hands. The quiet isn’t empty now; it’s strung tight and humming, like a wire between rooftops. Ríonach’s thumb shifts first, a barely-there stroke along Sadhbh’s calluses, curious and almost reverent. Sadhbh doesn’t flinch. If anything, her fingers settle more firmly over Ríonach’s, an answer without language.
“Careful,” Ríonach hears herself say, the words coming out lighter than the weight in her chest. “Another five minutes of this and we’re…emotionally solvent. Terrifying.”
It’s a bad joke, but it’s what she has. The corner of Sadhbh’s mouth twitches like she wants to stay solemn on principle and can’t quite manage it.
“Oh Jesus, no,” Sadhbh says, a quick, hoarse laugh cracking loose. “Can you imagine? Feelings in order, savings account, a five-year plan? I’d have to move to Jersey.”
“Don’t threaten me with New Jersey,” Ríonach answers, grateful for the script reappearing, even in tatters. “I’d have to paint…what is it over there, retail parks and emotional repression?”
“Yeah, and diners,” Sadhbh says. “Don’t knock the diners. Twenty-four-hour pancakes, that’s a class solidarity issue.”
They’re both laughing now: too fast, too bright, the way people do when they don’t know whether they’re laughing at the joke or at the fact that they didn’t just run. The bar sounds slide back into focus around them: someone shouting at the match on TV, the clink of ice, Niamh’s voice somewhere in the middle distance. The ordinary world, obstinately still there.
Ríonach realizes their hands haven’t moved apart. If anything, in the jostle of their own amusement, their fingers have rearranged themselves. Her ring finger slips between Sadhbh’s; Sadhbh’s thumb hooks over hers like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
The lacing happens the way ivy takes a wall. She can feel each of Sadhbh’s calluses individually now, the ridge from a long-ago burn, the roughened pad of her index finger. Sadhbh’s nails are short and uneven; Ríonach’s are stained with a ghost of ultramarine at the crescent.
“Sorry,” Sadhbh says, but doesn’t pull away. “I’m very…handsy, apparently.”
“Occupational hazard,” Ríonach replies, equally unwilling to move. “Mine too.”
Their palms settle together, warm and a little damp, an awkward, perfect fit. The wire between them hums quieter now, less like tension and more like a current finding its path. Neither of them names it. They just hold on, and let the moment stand.
They drift into stories the way people do into water they don’t quite trust: one foot, then the other, waiting for a shock that never comes.
It starts small. Ríonach admits, almost offhand, that she didn’t know the price of a subway swipe until she was nineteen because someone else always handed her a loaded MetroCard. Sadhbh snorts and confesses she used to ration swipes in high school, choosing between staying late for extra credit or getting home before dark. Neither of them laughs it off. They just look at each other for a second, the shape of the difference clear between them, and then move on: not away, just…forward.
They trade first-job legends: Ríonach’s disastrous stint in a Chelsea gallery where she mixed up two donors’ wives, Sadhbh’s night in a Midtown hotel bar when a guy tried to tip her with a business card and “exposure.” Quiet embarrassments follow: bad haircuts, worse kisses, the time Ríonach cried in a bursar’s office even though she was never at risk, the time Sadhbh lied about liking poetry because a girl with nose rings did.
Each confession lands gently, met with a low “yeah” or a wince of recognition, as if they’re comparing old scars rather than tallying points.
They skirt the usual landmines more than once and each time Ríonach feels the old instinct rise: make a joke, redirect, offer to pay and pretend that fixes it. Each time, Sadhbh’s jaw works like she’s swallowing something sharp.
“Look,” Sadhbh says finally, eyes on their hands, not her face. “You’ve got safety nets I don’t. I’ve got chips on my shoulder you don’t. We both know it.”
Ríonach’s first impulse is apology, grand and useless. Instead she exhales. “All right. We know it. I’d rather not…pretend we don’t.”
“And not throw it at each other when we’re wrecked or pissed off,” Sadhbh adds.
“Deal,” Ríonach says, and means it, even as some frightened, well-trained part of her hates how exposed that makes her.
The gaps in conversation stretch, not strained now but easy, like the spaces between brushstrokes where color breathes. They find they don’t need to narrate every thought; the warmth of the bench under them, the shared air, the weight and surety of their joined hands start to stand in for sentences. What began as accidental contact settles into a deliberate hold, small and steady as a promise.
The shift is nothing dramatic (a song dipping softer, the bar’s front door thudding shut, the train overhead shaking dust from the rafters) but it nudges them closer, shoulder to shoulder, breath to breath. In that leaned-in hush, the possibility changes texture; a first kiss, or some raw, unvarnished truth, no longer feels reckless so much as overdue.
The air between them tightens, not with panic but with a strange, fragile ease: like they’ve both arrived at an edge they’ve been circling for weeks.
It’s not the sort of tension Ríonach knows how to paint. In her work, edges are violent things: hard lines, torn canvas, wire pressing into flesh. This is quieter, soft around the borders, like the wet blur where one color bleeds into another because you were too impatient to let the first layer dry. Her pulse jumps anyway, the way it does right before a risky brushstroke. One move and the whole thing might come together, or be ruined.
She’s aware, acutely, of every point where they touch. The rough weave of Sadhbh’s hoodie against her bare wrist. The dry-warm press of Sadhbh’s palm in hers, calluses catching on the smoother parts of Ríonach’s skin. The faint tremor, not much, just enough, that lets her know she’s not the only one feeling like she’s stepped off a curb she hadn’t seen.
She hears the bar without really hearing it: a burst of laughter from the front, the commentary from the match on TV rising and falling like someone fiddling with a dimmer, a glass clinking in Niamh’s competent, distant orbit. Out here in the back room the noise has gone cotton-soft, muffled, as if the world has politely stepped a pace away to give them privacy.
Ríonach’s brain, ever helpful, queues up a list of wrong moves. Don’t crowd her. Don’t make a joke too big, it’ll spook the moment. Don’t say anything about money. Don’t bring up the fact that your cousins would explode if they walked in right now and saw. For once, she chooses not to listen to the committee in her head. Instead she pays attention to Sadhbh’s profile: the way her mouth is set, not tense exactly, but held; the way her gaze keeps dipping to their linked hands as if to check they’re real.
Sadhbh clears her throat, a tiny sound that feels disproportionately loud in the small room. They’re so close now that Ríonach can feel the movement of it in Sadhbh’s chest, can smell coffee on her breath under the cheap lager, can see where the buzzcut has grown out just enough to show the pattern of her cowlicks. Intimate, ridiculous details her painter’s brain files away automatically, as if planning some future portrait she pretends she’ll never actually paint.
She could lean in. It would be easy. Gravity’s already doing half the work. Just a tilt of her head and they’d be in the same breath, the same narrow strip of air. The idea flashes white-hot and then settles, not as fantasy but as available option, right there beside “say something honest” and “flee to the bathroom under pretense of washing paint off your hands you don’t currently have.”
The newness of having options at all, that she could ask, or kiss, or simply stay here, fingers laced with Sadhbh’s, without it being a joke or an accident, makes her dizzy. Her grandmother’s voice, sour and devout, mutters something half-remembered about girls and respectability from the back of her skull; her own, much smaller voice answers, stubbornly: And what about my respect? What about hers?
She breathes in, slow, feeling the question between them solidify into something that wants a shape, a name, a risk taken.
One of them moves first: or maybe they both do. It’s hard to tell, the shifts are so small. A thumb drifts, almost absently, over the ridge of a knuckle, then does it again in a way that’s undeniably on purpose. Skin on skin, testing. Sadhbh’s hand tightens once around hers, a quick, reflexive squeeze like someone steeling themselves before a door they’re not sure will open.
A breath that might be a laugh catches in Sadhbh’s throat. When she speaks, her voice has dropped, meant only for the narrow space between them. “This the part where you tell me it’s all for… artistic research?” There’s a ghost of a grin on the words, but underneath it, something fragile and serious.
Ríonach could take that as an out, let them both retreat into the safety of banter. Instead she hears the question under the joke, the quiet: Is this real? Are you serious, or am I about to be a story you tell on yourself later?
“So…” Sadhbh’s eyes flick from their joined hands to Ríonach’s mouth and back up again. “What are we doing, then?”
The answer doesn’t come in words at first.
It’s in the way neither of them lets go: fingers still tangled, knuckles whitening a little with the effort not to fidget. It’s in how their knees knock, how neither of them apologizes or shifts away. Breath shared, eyes searching, that faint, ridiculous pause where they both seem to check the exits one last time and, for once, stay seated.
Then there’s the lean. Slow enough to abort, deliberate enough not to be mistaken for an accident on a crowded bench. Not a movie swoop, no orchestral swell; just the quiet, almost careful narrowing of distance that turns potential into contact, like finally pressing a brush to canvas after hovering over the same blank patch for hours.
The first press of mouths (awkward, almost off-center, or the words that tumble out instead, low and hoarse and terrifyingly plain) doesn’t feel like discovery so much as belated acknowledgment. A startled, silent oh that runs through both of them, rearranging every half-joke, every held gaze, every careful almost-touch into a pattern that was there all along, waiting to be named.
When they ease apart, the world stays stubbornly ordinary: the clink of glasses from inside, a burst of laughter, the distant shriek of the 7 train grinding overhead. But the quiet look they trade has shifted, something steadier under the nerves, as if they’ve accidentally signed a contract. Not a grand declaration, just the dangerous, exhilarating sense that this might actually count.
On the walk back toward Sunnyside, their bodies seem to have made some quiet agreement their mouths are still too shy to sign.
They don’t hold hands but their shoulders keep finding each other like magnets with bad aim. A drift to the left, a sidestep to avoid a delivery bike, and the wool of Rí’s coat catches against Sadhbh’s sleeve. A tiny rasp of fabric, a shockingly loud sensation under all the street noise.
The first time it happens, Ríonach’s whole nervous system flares like a blown fuse. She makes herself keep her eyes on the sidewalk cracks as if they’re of great artistic interest. She does not apologize. She does not pull away. It feels, absurdly, like an act of will.
Beside her, Sadhbh adjusts the strap of her bag, a gesture that could have created distance. It doesn’t. The strap settles, their arms brush again, and this time Sadhbh leaves it, the quietest kind of permission.
The city helps. The 7 roars over them in a wash of metal and dust, rattling the air, giving them something to squint up at instead of each other. On Queens Boulevard, traffic lights smear red and green in the damp, the crosswalk timer beeping out an anxious countdown that herds them forward side by side. Every curb and corner gives them a fresh chance to separate. They keep not taking it.
Once, waiting for the light at 46th, a gust of wind drives a fine mist sideways under the awning, sharp and cold. Without thinking, Sadhbh steps half in front of her, taking the brunt of it. The move is automatic, EMT reflex more than romance, but it leaves them closer under the narrow shelter, shoulders pressed, the heat of Sadhbh’s body startling through two layers of coat.
“Sorry,” Sadhbh mutters, though it’s unclear what for: the jostle, the chivalry, the naked fact of caring.
“Don’t be,” Ríonach says, and hears how steady it comes out. She lets herself lean that infinitesimal fraction more into the contact, just enough that the shared warmth registers as chosen rather than incidental.
As they turn off the boulevard, the streets quiet a little, the noise dropping to a livable murmur of TVs behind thin walls and the clack of someone’s heels up ahead. Here, where the buildings lean in and the Irish flags in windows are more threadbare than ironic, the closeness feels more conspicuous. Like they’ve carried something fragile and bright out of the bar and into territory where people might actually recognize it for what it is.
Rí’s mind performs a quick, panicked inventory of who lives on which block, who might be looking out which window. Long habit. Long training. Her shoulder still doesn’t move.
Sadhbh notices the glance, the tightening at the corner of her mouth. For a breath, Rí thinks this is it, the spell will break, Sadhbh will crack a joke, pull away, put the whole thing back in the box of things That Definitely Didn’t Happen.
Instead, Sadhbh huffs out a quiet laugh, not at her but beside her, as if they’re in on the same private joke.
“Relax, Ó Dálaigh,” she says, voice low. “It’s just walking.”
But she says it like they both know it isn’t.
Conversation that used to skid along the surface, shift gossip, art jokes, family gripes, starts to snag on more vulnerable threads: half-finished confessions about money, fear, and what they’re each afraid of wanting. It happens in tiny slips.
Sadhbh makes an offhand crack about “rent roulette” and, when Rí doesn’t laugh, admits she’s two weeks behind and hoping her landlord likes her parents more than late fees. Rí hears herself say, “I’ve never written a rent check in my life,” and wants to claw the words back, but Sadhbh only nods once, like: there it is, named.
Later, over terrible deli coffee, Sadhbh traces the rim of her cup and says, “If I stick with EMT, I’ll never not be tired. If I don’t, I’m a coward who couldn’t hack it.” Rí, who spends entire days in a studio paid for by the labor of dead relatives and distant tenants, answers, “Every time I paint something that sells, I wonder if I’m just gilding my own guilt.”
They don’t solve anything. But the truths sit between them like fragile, shared contraband neither of them suggests putting away.
A few days later, when a printer delay threatens to derail Ríonach’s show she stares at the error message until the panic in her throat tastes metallic. The old reflex is to call the gallery, the lawyer, Niamh, anyone with an invoice number and a temper. Instead, her fingers move on their own and she texts Sadhbh a photo of the ruined prints with: “Crisis. Maybe.”
She expects at least a beat of delay, some weighing of obligation against an already brutal schedule. The reply arrives almost before she can lock the screen: “Tell me when to be there.” No emoji, no caveats. The plain certainty of it settles in her chest like ballast.
Favors accrete almost by accident. Sadhbh bikes across two neighborhoods with a replacement cable in her backpack and rain freezing on her buzzcut, waving off thanks with, “You’d do it for me, yeah?” On Sadhbh’s bar breaks, Rí drags napkins between beer rings, sketching possible layouts. They lean over the sticky table, wrists almost brushing, every near-touch a question neither quite answers.
The night before the opening, in the dim, cluttered back room, they stand shoulder to shoulder surveying bare walls and stacked canvases that still look more like storage than a show. Ríonach can hear Niamh’s dishwasher thundering through the wall. She hesitates only a heartbeat, then, pulse in her throat, asks if Sadhbh will stay and help her make the space into something worth walking into instead of past.
At first it’s awkward, Ríonach dragging out step-ladders and milk crates while Sadhbh shrugs off her coat and rolls up her sleeves, but once they start untangling the sagging strands of Christmas lights, their hands keep finding the same knots at the same time, fingers brushing, the two of them laughing at the ancient tape residue and stubborn bulbs that won’t come on.
The back room feels smaller than Ríonach remembers, its low ceiling pressing down the smell of old fry oil and bleach. The string of lights snakes across the sticky floor between them like something half-alive. She crouches by the outlet, fingers already smeared with dust and glitter from some long-gone holiday raffle, and says, “If this thing shorts, tell my solicitor it was Flannagáin’s negligence.”
“Your what?” Sadhbh asks, tugging gently at a tangle near the middle.
“My lawyer.”
“Oh, right. Forgot, you’re a person who has one of those.” There’s an arched look with it, but her mouth is soft. “Will he sue the lights?”
“He’s very versatile,” Ríonach says. “Specializes in inheritance, tax mitigation, and festive electrocution.”
A bubble of laughter catches them both off guard. The knot between them finally slips loose with a little pop and their hands skid over each other’s knuckles. Ríonach feels the calluses on Sadhbh’s fingers like a different kind of grit, something earned instead of inherited.
“Sorry,” they say together, instantly, and then both shake their heads.
“Stop apologizing,” Sadhbh adds. “They’re your lights. Or. Or the bank’s. I dunno.”
“Joint custody,” Ríonach says. “Between Niamh, the ghost of my grandmother, and the Con Edison guy.”
“Sounds crowded.” Sadhbh straightens to loop a freed stretch over the nearest nail. Her T‑shirt rides up just enough to show a strip of skin between hem and waistband; Ríonach looks away too quickly and nearly brains herself on the ladder.
“Jesus, careful.” Sadhbh’s hand lands on her forearm, firm and warm. “You’re not allowed to concuss yourself before your big night. That’s against union rules.”
“You’re not in a union,” Ríonach points out, a shade too quickly, because her skin has gone prickly under that grip.
“Yeah, well, if I was, they’d have a whole clause about temperamental artists and step-ladders.”
“I’m not temperamental,” Ríonach says, which is demonstrably false to anyone who’s ever seen her throw out a canvas at three in the morning. Sadhbh’s eyebrows go up, slow.
“Sure you’re not. This is you calm, is it?”
Ríonach reaches past her for another knot, just to have something to do. “This is me…moderately sedated by dust and nostalgia.”
“Fancy word for saying the bar smells like stale Guinness.”
“Layered sensory history,” Ríonach corrects, automatically academic, then hears herself. “God. Ignore me.”
“Not likely,” Sadhbh says. It’s casual, but it lands somewhere low in Ríonach’s chest and rattles around there.
They work closer as the line shortens, elbows bumping. Whenever another dead bulb turns up, they test it, shake it, then accept its failure with exaggerated grief.
“Emigration,” Sadhbh pronounces over one blackened bulb. “Gone off to a better socket.”
“Emigration implies choice,” Ríonach says. “This one’s clearly been evicted.”
“Look at you,” Sadhbh says, amused. “Doing politics with fairy lights.”
“It’s all I’m qualified for.”
“Thought that trust fund of yours came with, like, a minor in international finance.”
The word trust lands heavier than the joke deserves, but Sadhbh is still smiling, not prying, so Ríonach forces her shoulders to stay loose. “Please. If it did, I wouldn’t be here unpaid, scraping tape off your cousin’s walls with my fingernails.”
“Ah, so this is a solidarity action,” Sadhbh says. “Good to know. I’ll get a placard.”
“You’re the one volunteering your labor,” Ríonach points out. “You could be…what is it tonight? Saving lives in an ambulance? Delivering artisanal oat milk?”
“Big night in,” Sadhbh says. “Hanging wires with the gentry.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“But I’m good with knots.” She proves it by freeing another twist in the cord with efficient fingers. The motion brings them face to face, close enough that Ríonach can see the tiny pale line of an old cut across Sadhbh’s thumb.
She hears herself ask, quieter, “Where’d you get that?”
Sadhbh blinks, then glances at her own hand. “Oh. Glass. Bar shift in college. Guy dropped a pint and decided that was my fault.”
“And you decided to clean it up anyway.”
“Well, somebody had to.” She shrugs. “You don’t leave a mess for the next one.”
The simplicity of it lodges under Ríonach’s ribs. For a second the room narrows to the shared pool of light around them, the rest of Flannagáin’s a murmur of clinking glasses and distant commentary from a match on the muted TV.
The last knot gives. The strand falls open between them, a sagging, glittering line. They both steady it, hands overlapping on the plastic-coated wire. The contact is nothing, technically, no more than the touch of a subway pole they might both grab, but it holds.
“Moment of truth,” Sadhbh says, voice lowered like they’re at Mass. “Will your solicitor survive?”
“Only if the saints of Sunnyside are merciful.” Ríonach reaches past her to the outlet, but her fingers are slower than they need to be. She’s acutely aware of Sadhbh’s hand still on the lights, of the way her breath ghosts Ríonach’s temple in the cramped space.
She plugs it in.
Half the bulbs flare to life; a few stubborn ones sulk in the dark. The lit sections throw a soft, uneven glow over Sadhbh’s jaw, over the chipped paint and old tape scars on the wall.
“Not bad,” Sadhbh murmurs. She doesn’t move her hand straight away, and neither does Ríonach. The brief, shared stillness stretches, as fragile and bright as the working bulbs between them.
They fall into a rhythm: Ríonach squinting and measuring with a bit of blue painter’s tape stuck to her wrist like a hospital bracelet, calling out heights in inches and muttering to herself about center lines and sightlines, while Sadhbh muscles the heavier canvases up onto Niamh’s reluctant hooks.
“Forty‑eight from the floor,” Ríonach says. “No, forty‑seven and a half. The beam dips.”
“The beam dips,” Sadhbh echoes. “Is that in your fancy art math textbook?”
“It’s basic visual harmony.”
“Looks straight enough from the land of the mortals,” Sadhbh says through her teeth, gripping the frame. “Anyway, your ladder’s crooked.”
“The ladder’s morally ambiguous,” Ríonach replies. “Hold still or it’ll file for divorce.”
By the third painting, they’re trading this kind of nonsense so easily that the cramped room seems to expand around their voices. Sadhbh complains about “gallery people and their inch problems,” and Ríonach fires back about “civilians who think level is a feeling.” Dust motes drift in the cone of the back‑room light; the air smells of old beer, stale fryer oil, and the faint chemical tang of Ríonach’s drying varnish. Their words braid through it all, looping and snagging like the lights, until the silence outside the door feels like a different building altogether.
When a smaller piece tilts, Sadhbh steps in without thinking, one foot on a crate, one hand flat to the low ceiling as if she’s personally responsible for holding the whole room up. She nudges the frame with her wrist until it settles; Ríonach slides in beside her to check the sightline, shoulder to shoulder, close enough that their hips knock.
“Too low,” Ríonach murmurs.
“Too fussy,” Sadhbh counters. “Quarter inch left and you’ll live.”
“A quarter inch right and it won’t nag at me all night.”
“It’s a bar wall, not the Louvre.”
“Same difference,” Ríonach says, but she lets Sadhbh guide the frame that tiny bit. Their breath fogs the same cold patch of air, the shared attention making the adjustment feel improbably, absurdly important.
One of the bigger canvases lurches as they test its chain, the top edge yawing out like it’s making a break for the door. Sadhbh catches it with both hands, arms locking, jaw tightening. Ríonach lunges up to steady the far side, fingers closing over Sadhbh’s knuckles on the frame, the shared weight pinning them there, breath mingling, eyes catching too close in the dim tangle of colored lights overhead.
Sadhbh laughs first, a sharp little bark and Ríonach, too quickly, says she’d paint the workers’ comp form. The canvas settles; so do they. After that, everything slows. They trade stories to fill the space. First shifts, worst tips, half‑remembered wakes in rooms like this; grandparents in yellowing photographs, uncles who sang rebel songs off‑key, mothers who stretched rent with secret shifts. They talk in sideways pieces, never quite looking straight at each other, until the walls are full and they’re standing shoulder to shoulder, paint‑streaked and quiet, the makeshift gallery humming around them. The hush between them has changed. No longer an empty gap, but a shared, suspended inhale neither of them seems ready to let go.
The text comes in while Ríonach is still peeling dried paint off her wrist: a photo of an empty ambulance bay, fluorescent glare and concrete, and under it: come see the glamorous side of saving lives.
She stares at it long enough that another bubble appears.
you’re not scared of a little vomit are you princess
By the time she types back a noncommittal maybe, Sadhbh has already followed with the address and a You’re on the list now, don’t chicken out.
The EMT station is on the far side of Queens Boulevard, a squat brick building hunched between a shuttered bakery and a vape shop. Inside, the air is burnt coffee and disinfectant. A television murmurs in the corner over a pile of donated winter coats; a half-eaten pizza congeals on a metal table.
Sadhbh meets her just past the security door, hair mashed from a beanie, uniform shirt half‑tucked, eyes brighter than they have any right to be at midnight. There’s a clipboard in one hand, a Styrofoam cup in the other.
“Look who found Queens,” she says, like Ríonach has come from another planet rather than four stops away. “C’mere before someone with a badge sees you looking lost.”
She’s all business as she walks Ríonach to the desk. “This is my cousin,” she tells the bored guy in the navy sweatshirt, sliding a form across without waiting to be asked. “In from, uh. “Boston,” Sadhbh repeats, with just enough contempt to sell it. “Family wants to see what I actually do at night before they decide I’m wasting my life.”
The guy barely glances up. “Sign here. Don’t touch anything red, sharp, or that’s breathing.”
Sadhbh presses a battered reflective vest into Ríonach’s hands, two sizes too big and smelling faintly of bleach and cigarettes. As Ríonach shrugs it on, Sadhbh leans close enough that her breath warms the side of Ríonach’s neck.
“Family rides along all the time,” she murmurs, low and offhand. “Nobody asks too many questions if you look like you belong and don’t talk like a lawyer. Try not to do either.”
“I don’t talk like a lawyer,” Ríonach protests, automatically offended on behalf of her vowels.
Sadhbh’s mouth quirks. “You talk like someone who knows one on retainer. Same difference. Stick by me, yeah? And if anyone asks, you’re here for extra credit.”
“In what class?”
Sadhbh considers. “Real life. Advanced module.” She shoves open the bay door with her shoulder, the cold night rushing in around them, and jerks her chin toward the idling ambulance. “Come on then, cousin. Orientation starts when the siren does.”
Wedged into the jump seat, knees knocking every time they hit a pothole, Ríonach discovers there is no elegant way to sit in an ambulance. The ceiling feels an inch from her forehead; the belts and plastic compartments crowd her peripheral vision. Out the back windows the familiar streets smear into a jittery ribbon of sodium orange and deli neon, the neighborhood tipping into some harsher, fluorescent version of itself.
The first call is a drunk on Queens Boulevard, face scraped where he kissed the sidewalk too hard. Sadhbh hops down before the rig has fully stopped, voice brisk. “Hey, big man, you with me? What’s your name?” She snaps on gloves with a sharp, rubbery sound, all clipped questions and steady hands as she checks pupils, spine, dignity.
The second is a wheezing old woman in a walk‑up that smells like boiled cabbage, incense, and too many winters. Ríonach trails behind the stretcher crew, fingers white on the rail, watching Sadhbh’s sarcasm drain away into a calm, practiced murmur. “We’ve got you, a chroí. Nice and easy now. Long slow breaths.”
In the narrow lulls between runs, when the rig is backed into the bay and the 7 clatters overhead like cutlery in a drawer, they hunch over lukewarm bodega coffee gone bitter in its paper cups. They trade grandmothers first: who came in through which pier, who scrubbed which floors, who stashed dollars in coffee tins to buy slivers of these same blocks. From there it’s cousins: the ones already pushed to Yonkers, to Philly, to Florida; the ones clinging to rent‑stabilized leases like life rafts. They talk around money until they’re really talking about fear: the quiet, nauseous suspense of knowing the city is always, somehow, deciding whether you still count as part of it, or as clearance stock.
Each time the radio crackles and the doors slam, she feels the shift before she hears it: Sadhbh’s sarcasm shearing off in an instant, voice going low and level as she tapes gauze or settles an oxygen mask, shoulders squaring into quiet command. Ríonach’s chest pinches at that unshowy authority: nothing to do with galleries or grants, everything to do with keeping strangers breathing.
On a domestic call, a teen with a split lip and shaking hands won’t meet anyone’s eyes. Sadhbh kneels to his level, voice turned gentle as she nudges his story loose without ever saying the word “home.” Ríonach, wedged by the door, tracks the yellow‑green bloom of old bruises, the chipped banister, fear hanging in the hallway like summer humidity. Later, when the siren’s silence feels louder than its wail and Queens Boulevard widens out ahead of them, Sadhbh glances back to find Ríonach’s ink‑gritty fingers hovering over her sketchbook, not drawing, only memorizing. The concentration there is clinical, almost reverent, and Sadhbh realizes with a small, unnerving jolt that this is how the other woman works: mapping every street and wound with the same grave focus she once spent on anatomy diagrams, as if someone’s breath depends on getting the angles right.
The train rocks them back into Queens on a gray smear of morning, lights flickering over the drowsy, half-empty car. They sit hip to hip because there’s nowhere else to sit, knees almost but not quite touching when the 7 lurches over the East River and the windows turn briefly into a dull sheet of pewter.
Both of them are too wired to sleep, nerves still buzzing with siren echo and stale adrenaline. Sadhbh keeps jiggling one leg, heel thudding a restless, uneven rhythm through the floor. Ríonach pretends not to notice, tracking the motion anyway, sketching its jitter in the margin of her transfer-stained MetroCard with a bitten-down thumbnail.
Overhead, the announcer mumbles stations in a voice already exhausted for the day. As the train rattles out of Manhattan’s last tunnel and onto Queens soil, the carriage fills in little by little with early-shift nurses and line cooks, the faint smell of scrubs detergent and fryer oil threading through the stale air. A man in a Mets cap snores with his mouth open; a woman mouths a rosary under her breath, eyes fixed on the graffiti-scarred wall just beyond the glass.
“Next stop, forty-sixth,” the speaker crackles, and both of them stand at once. The movement knocks their shoulders together. Neither of them steps away.
When the doors sigh open at 46th Street–Bliss, the platform breathes out a draft of cold, damp air that cuts through the car’s fug. Outside, the world is washed in pre-dawn grey: sodium-orange puddles, pigeon-slick tracks, the metal taste of the el in their mouths. Somewhere below, a bakery has already begun its day: the sweet, yeasty warmth of rising dough curling up the station stairs to meet them.
They spill out onto the sidewalk under the tracks without discussing where they’re going. The avenue is more echo than traffic at this hour, storefront gates still down, yesterday’s flyers plastered limp against poles. They fall into step automatically, sneakers and work boots scuffing the same cracked concrete, their breath fogging in short, visible puffs.
Now and then a delivery truck growls past, headlights flaring white across their faces before sliding on. Ríonach shoves her hands deeper into the pockets of her paint-splotched coat, feeling the familiar drag of her keys against her palm, the weight of her studio only a few turns away. Sadhbh’s hoodie is zipped up to her collarbone, EMT jacket folded over one arm like she’s not sure yet if she’s done with the night.
They move through Sunnyside as it stirs awake around them: the rumble overhead, the whirr of a lone delivery bike, the murmur from a diner where the same three old men have probably been arguing about nothing since before either of them was born. Side by side, they let the block lines pull them forward, as if the route has been agreed on in some language neither of them has quite dared to speak aloud.
Halfway down Skillman, outside a shuttered laundromat whose windows are papered over with old concert flyers and a curling poster for Irish language classes, Sadhbh stops so abruptly that Ríonach takes two more steps before realizing she’s talking.
“I don’t. “I don’t do… girlfriends.” The last word comes out like something she’s picked up with tongs.
She gestures vaguely at the street, at the sleeping storefronts, at the sky paling over the el. “I mean, I’ve. Seen people. Hooked up. Had a few ‘this is casual, right?’ disasters. But every time I start to lean on somebody, it’s like the floor remembers it’s not actually attached. Just, ” She flicks her fingers downward in a little collapse. “Gone.”
Her laugh is quick and without much humor. “And I can’t, ” She glances at Ríonach, then away. “I can’t afford that. Not now. Not with my folks, the rent, the job. If I start needing you and it goes sideways, I don’t have a safety net. I just have concrete.”
Ríonach’s shoulder finds the chill of the metal and stays there, as if the cold might keep her mouth from running. She fixes on a strip of bubble-letter tag bleeding green under the streetlight and makes herself speak anyway.
“I don’t…” Her breath ghosts white. “I’m never fully sure if people actually like me. Me, or (” she lifts one paint‑scarred hand, circling vaguely) “the name. The house. The easy tab at Flannagáin’s.”
Her laugh lands flat. “It’s like there’s always this… calculation. Am I a person you want, or a life you can move into? I keep picturing waking up next to someone who stays because it’s… comfortable. Because the rent’s easier. Not because, you know.” She swallows. “Because they’d pick me if it was just a mattress on a floor.”
Sadhbh snorts, then the edge in her mouth eases; she scuffs at a cracked bit of curb like she wants to kick the whole topic into the gutter. “If this is a thing,” she says, “it can’t be a side quest in your gallery bio, or some rough patch you’ll ‘grow out of’ when a lad in a good coat and better portfolio wanders in.”
Ríonach’s heart goes rabbit‑fast at that, palms damp inside her pockets. “I don’t want a muse,” she manages, “or a tax‑deductible rescue project. I want someone who’ll call bullshit on me, loudly, and still come back to the bar after. Sit next to me when the lights are too bright and the regulars are too much.”
They stand there in the thin, pink‑tinted dawn, exchanging a look that feels like signing a contract no lawyer or parish priest would bless. They hash it out in overlapping starts and interruptions (no side quests, no fixer‑upper fantasies, no “phase” with an exit strategy) and agree, half‑laughing but deadly earnest, that if they’re doing this, it has to be for real. The walk toward Sunnyside turns sharper, brighter, every storefront and stoop suddenly looking like something they might both lose and, impossibly, be choosing.
The bar is already half‑stripped of its armor for the night (till counted, mats up, the last of the regulars peeled off into the cold) when Niamh hooks two fingers in the back of Ríonach’s coat and steers her into the narrow gap by the ice machine. The overheads are still at full, unflattering brightness; every smear on the mirror seems to be watching.
“Two minutes,” Niamh says, voice like a barstool leg dragged over concrete. She smells of fryer oil and cheap lemon cleaner. “You’re not legging it home just yet.”
She flattens a crumpled, city‑stamped notice on the bar between an overturned ashtray and a cluster of empty pint glasses, then adds a pristine, cream‑stock letter with a Midtown address Ríonach recognizes from envelopes that arrive at the brownstone. The contrast is almost funny, if any of it were.
“Read,” Niamh orders.
Ríonach obeys, eyes skimming words that might as well be a painting she hasn’t primed for: “assessment,” “adjusted valuation,” “delinquent if unpaid.” The numbers make her throat go dry. Her own surname appears in the fine print on the letterhead of the second page, wrapped in legal flourishes: trust, partnership, beneficial interest.
“Property tax is going up again,” Niamh says, leaning on her forearms, sleeves shoved to the elbow, jaw set so hard the muscles twitch. “They’ve decided this whole block’s the new bloody Shoreditch, or whatever word they’re using for ‘let’s squeeze the last bit of soul out.’ I can just about keep us straight as is. This (” she taps the notice with a blunt nail “) I can’t magic this.”
She slides the letter closer. “And then there’s this crowd. Glass‑box merchants. Sent along through your lot.” Her mouth twists. “Offer on the place. Very nice number. Polite as a priest at a wake.”
Ríonach stares at the figure that has its own comma, the way you’d stare at a wound on someone else’s body. Enough to wipe out Niamh’s debts, shore up the trust, put every cousin through school twice over. Not enough to buy back what would be lost when the windows go dark and the sign comes down and some brushed‑steel thing goes up in its place.
“It’d solve a lot,” Niamh goes on, quieter now. “Taxes, repairs, your aunt’s threats about buying me out. I could pay off what I owe, walk away with a bit of cushion. But it’s not…” She shakes her head, eyes flicking to the old photographs along the wall: the dockworkers, the christenings, three generations of bad haircuts in front of the same bar back. “It’s not enough for what it breaks. For all of that.”
Niamh starts in on mill rates and phased‑in assessments, ballooning arrears and the way interest compounds “like mould in the cellar,” and Ríonach feels her stomach drop in that familiar elevator‑shaft way. The bar is not just Niamh’s livelihood, not just the piano in the corner and the Christmas lights she wired herself last winter; it is another line item in the trust documents with RÍONACH Ó DÁLAIGH in twelve‑point serif, sandwiched between “brownstone” and some Long Island strip mall she’s never seen.
Every time Niamh says “they” about the silent partners, “they’ll want their cut,” “they’ll say sell now before the market turns”, Ríonach hears “you,” as cleanly as if Niamh had jabbed a finger in her chest. Your people. Your money. Your name on the deed.
She gropes for something honest and useful and finds only the language she’s been taught to use: “I’ll, um. I’ll look into it. With the lawyers.” The words come out stiff, professional, utterly foreign in her own mouth. They hang between them like the smell of bleach: not quite a comfort, not quite a threat, but sharp enough to sting.
On the rattling ride back toward Queens, her thumb still tacky with a mix of Guinness foam and photocopy toner, her phone buzzes in her pocket. Fiachra: a grainy JPEG of a flyer for some “Critical Diaspora Conversations” night at the parish-adjacent community center, all pull quotes and earnest fonts. His message underneath is clipped, almost formal, Would you speak on the panel? We’ll be talking about landlords, heritage profiteers, and who actually owns the ground under our stories.
He follows it with one more line: They mentioned you as “the artist from the old family.”
No emoji, no softener. Just that little label, sitting there like a dare (or an indictment) lighting up her cracked screen every time the train shudders under a streetlamp.
The carriage lurches and the flyer trembles in her hand, cheap ink ghosting under the strip lights. It’s a perfect little gallery, really: Fiachra curating her into his thesis on class, pinning her between glass like a rare, compromised specimen. Say yes and be flayed in public; say no and become exactly the coward he’s half‑written already.
By the time she steps back onto Queens concrete, dawn‑grey and smelling of fryer oil and rain, the outlines are brutally clear. Anything she and Sadhbh try to build will have to root itself in a neighborhood where her surname lives on the deed, the tax bill, and now a flyer accusing “heritage profiteers” of bleeding the place dry. No version of loving Sadhbh will be simple, or quiet, or plausibly private; every gesture will read as politics to someone, every kindness cross‑examined for where the money came from.
It starts with nothing, really: nothing either of them could point to later without sounding petty. A Tuesday night that’s really Wednesday morning, the bar’s metal gate already rolled down behind them with a groan and a clatter. The air on 43rd is damp and sour with beer and last buses; Sadhbh’s hoodie smells of fryer grease and cheap whiskey, Ríonach’s coat of cold wool and the ghost of turpentine.
They stand under the jaundiced streetlight, the quiet after the jukebox ringing in their ears. Sadhbh shifts her weight from one foot to the other, trying to coax a little feeling back into arches that have been protesting since midnight. Ríonach watches the way she rolls her ankle, the wince she tries to hide by cracking a joke about Niamh’s terrible taste in closing-time playlists.
The joke is midair when Ríonach lifts her hand, automatic as breathing, two fingers already out to catch the headlights of any passing cab. Her other hand is in her coat pocket, fingertips finding the smooth edge of her card case even before she’s thought about it: solve the problem, smooth the night, get her home.
She doesn’t even get as far as actually hailing one. Sadhbh’s shoulders go up, a tiny flinch under the thinning cotton of her hoodie. Her jaw sets the way it does when some drunk calls her “sweetheart” at the bar.
“The subway’s good enough for the rest of us,” she mutters, eyes fixed past Ríonach’s shoulder at the empty street. The words are light on the surface, a shrug in sentence form, but they land with a dull, specific weight. “It’ll survive me one more night.”
Ríonach’s hand hangs there for a second, half‑raised, the gesture suddenly obscene under the streetlamp. She forces it down to her side, fingers closing around nothing, and laughs too brightly, as if they’re just bantering. Sadhbh’s boots scuff the pavement, and neither of them looks quite directly at the other, as if the crack between “us” and “the rest of us” might widen if examined straight on.
The cab slows the instant she lifts her hand, as if it’s been waiting for her all along. The driver barely glances at them before nodding, meter already ticking by the time the door clicks shut.
Inside, the silence feels overfurnished. The vinyl seats smell faintly of stale smoke and pine cleaner; the partition’s scratched with numbers and names, little ghosts of other nights. Streetlight and deli neon flicker over Sadhbh’s face in passing stripes, her profile set in a way Ríonach’s starting to recognize: jaw tight, mouth thin, eyes on some middle distance that has nothing to do with Queens Boulevard.
“I just don’t want you stuck waiting on the platform at three a.m.,” Ríonach offers finally, aiming for breezy, for reasonable. “It’s. Her gaze stays fixed on the window. “I’ve been doing that for years.”
The word sits there, years, like a ledger line. All the nights before Ríonach, all the shifts, all the platforms. Somewhere between them, a different word tries to form, “we”, and then doesn’t. Neither of them reaches for it.
A few nights later, they’re wedged hip to hip on the brownstone’s fire escape, knees brushing the rusted railing, cheap beers sweating in their hands while the 7 line rattles somewhere in the dark distance. The bricks at their backs radiate stored heat; below, someone curses at a delivery truck, a siren yelps and fades. Sadhbh tips her head back to look up at the orderly rows of windows, the careful molding, the little patch of herb garden on a neighboring sill.
“Trust fund fire escapes,” she says, half‑laughing, beer bottle tapping the metal rung. “Safety and scenery included.”
Ríonach’s answering laugh starts on cue, then stalls, catching on something sharp and wordless in her chest. She swallows, looks out over the street instead, and asks abruptly whether Sadhbh ever thought about leaving New York.
Alone afterward. They thumb through half‑written texts they never send, drafting and deleting apologies, jokes, explanations, and replay each exchange in punishing detail, certain she’s already proven the worst suspicion the other must secretly nurse.
Old voices crowd the late-night quiet: for Sadhbh, her mother at the kitchen table warning that “their kind only remember you when they need to feel good about themselves,” for Ríonach, uncles at holiday dinners sneering about people who “only come round when there’s a handout,” old catechisms of contempt recited over ham and boiled potatoes. By the time they see each other again, jokes land with an extra beat’s delay, hands hover before touching, and every small kindness feels double‑checked for motive, each of them too proud, and too afraid, to ask if the other noticed the crack or if she’s already stepping away from it.
The buzz in her pocket comes just as the espresso machine finally quiets, the lull between the last lunch stragglers and the first wave of commuters. Sadhbh wedges the portafilter back in its place, wipes a streak of foam from her knuckles onto her apron, and fishes out her phone with the other hand.
The text is from Luis on dish, a link bracketed by three crying-laughing emojis and: yo you’re famous now, don’t forget us. She snorts, already composing some crack about Hollywood, and taps it open with the flat of her thumb.
The page stutters, then loads: a grainy header in black and white, a title about “the last Irish corner of Queens,” the byline, Fiachra Fionnlagh, and her stomach does a small, traitorous dip. Of course it’s him.
She scrolls with an absent swipe, leaning her hip against the counter. Flannagáin’s front window appears first, the green neon sign haloed in drizzle, the gallows glow of it reflected in the wet sidewalk. Another shot: the row of barstools through the glass, all dark silhouettes and one old man’s cap in perfect focus. The next: an ashtray on the outdoor ledge, three lipstick-smudged butts, a crumpled losing scratch-off tucked underneath. She can hear the caption in his voice even before she reads it. Something about “ghost wages” and “heritage on the rocks.”
Her jaw tightens. Cute. Him and his sociology degree that didn’t come with rent.
The last image takes a second longer to come in, pixels blooming into color. At first it’s just the doorway, the familiar chipped frame, the warmth inside blowing out onto the sidewalk. Then the shapes sharpen and resolve into people: her own profile in three-quarter view, head tipped toward Ríonach, mouth open on some half-joke she can’t remember. Ríonach beside her, caught in mid-turn, hair pinned up, paint-flecked black coat pulled tight, one hand lifted and just (just) reaching for Sadhbh’s bare forearm.
The light has done something tender and unasked-for to them, made them look like a scene instead of two women dodging a delivery guy and a puddle. Like they’re in on something together.
Underneath, in neat, self-satisfied type: Who inherits the neighborhood and who serves the drinks?
Her throat goes dry. For a second all she can hear is the soft hum of the refrigerator and the clink of cutlery from the back. The urge to laugh rises first, of course he went there; of course he used that line, and collapses in on itself, leaving a hot, pricking silence behind her eyes.
She flicks up again and stares at the byline, as if it might change. It doesn’t. The share counter ticks up in real time.
Behind her, the bell on the café door jangles and someone calls, “Hey, Sadhbh, you on register?” She jabs the side button, blacking the screen just as her own frozen profile winks out, and shoves the phone back into her pocket like it’s burned her.
“Yeah,” she says, voice coming out brighter than she feels. “One sec.”
By the time the afternoon regulars drift in, the essay has done the circuit: group chats, private Facebook groups with names like “Sunnyside Born & Bred,” WhatsApp threads of cousins who only talk when someone dies or gets married. It arrives at Flannagáin’s on a cracked iPhone, the brunch place’s server sliding it across the damp wood like contraband.
“Is that…?” she starts, thumb already zooming.
Niamh leans in, bar towel slung over her shoulder, mouth primed for some joke about influencers and ring lights. The laugh gets as far as her teeth and stops. The doorway, the familiar sag of the awning, and there, Ríonach’s profile, the line of her coat, Sadhbh tipped toward her, all soft-focus and story-ready.
“Ah, for, ” The “Ó Dá–” curls up behind her tongue and turns into a swallow of air instead. Her jaw works once, twice. On the TV above them, a real estate ad chirps about “historic Sunnyside charm” over drone footage of some other block’s brick.
She reaches for the remote, thumb jabbing the volume down to a mute crawl. “Top up?” she asks, voice flat but polite, already moving to refill the nearest glass as the server’s screen lights up with another notification: four new shares, three new comments, the first one starting with, Wait, isn’t that Flannagáin’s…
Across town, Ríonach doesn’t get it as gossip or a DM but as a hyperlink tucked three lines down in an email from a fellow artist, subject line: lol Fionnlagh finally named you. The body is all breezy solidarity, He’s coming for you now, huh?, with a winking emoji she pretends not to see. She clicks.
The slideshow unspools: barfront, ashtray, old men, all the usual Fiachra anthropology. Then the doorway. Her own blurred half-profile, Sadhbh turned toward her, that almost-touch. The caption snaps into focus beneath it and she feels a flush climb from collarbone to scalp, a cold draft chasing after. Their bodies flattened into premise and proof.
The gallery email pings over the top of it, chirpy and precise: Love the organic buzz around your work/neighborhood: are you prepared for some controversy? This could be…useful, if handled correctly. She stares at the word useful until it stops looking like English.
In group chats and WhatsApp threads, co‑workers and cousins start dropping comments (some teasing, some edged enough they don’t land as jokes) about “dating up,” “trust fund girls,” and “free PR.” Sadhbh fields three versions of “so that’s your fancy artist, huh?” before she stops replying, the kitchen‑table warnings about Ó Dálaigh money humming under each ping until she’s staring at the frozen doorway again, unable to tell if she’s angrier at Fiachra for taking it, at herself for standing there so open, or at the small, treacherous part of her that wonders if this is just what people like Ríonach call material.
That night at Flannagáin’s, the air feels a shade thinner; regulars eye the door each time it opens, Niamh moves with a deliberate neutrality that reads as distance, and when Ríonach finally slips in, pulses skittering, she catches the faintest hitch in Sadhbh’s posture: a half‑step back, a joke aborted on her tongue. They talk weather, shift schedules, paint deliveries; every sentence steers carefully around phones facedown on the bar, around the image both of them have already memorized and misread in different directions. Laughter comes half a beat late. Under the low TV glow, each carries the new, wordless fear that whatever is sparking between them has just been drafted, without their consent, into a public argument about class, ownership, and who is allowed to call this place home.
The first people through the door were loud in the way only the already-drunk and recently vindicated could be. They tumbled in from the cold, cheeks flushed, jackets half-zipped, carrying that particular high of having something new and outrageous to pass around.
At their center, like the eye of a sloppy little storm, was Fiachra.
He had his tweed coat open over a fraying sweater, hair damp from mist or sweat, and a sheaf of still-warm pages clutched in one ink-smudged hand. The smell of toner came with him, sharp and cheap. He looked, Ríonach thought, unreasonably pleased with himself: like a man who’d finally loaded the right bullet.
He slapped the first stack down on the nearest table with an almost theatrical flourish. “Fresh off the press, lads. Read it while the ink’s still bleeding.” His voice carried, softer than the others but clearer somehow, carving a path through the bar’s hum.
Niamh’s head lifted from the taps, eyes narrowing. “What are you at, Fiachra?” she called, not yet angry, but already wary.
“Public service,” he said mildly, already moving, the crowd fanning out around him. He dropped copies in front of pensioners, off-duty nurses, the pair of twenty-something teacher-types who came in for “local color” once a month. “You’ve a right to know who owns the roof over your pint. Or the roof over your ma’s head.”
He hit the far end of the bar last, laying one down by a cluster of regulars who always paid cash and tipped in coins. “Have a read. It names names. Ó Dálaigh trust, the brownstone, this fine establishment’s silent partners.” He tapped the header: bold font, no logo, just a link to his site. “All quite legal, of course. That’s half the charm.”
Niamh’s jaw set. “You’re not selling papers in here.”
“Not selling,” he said. “Giving. Ordered a round, didn’t I?” He lifted his chin toward the taps. “For the workers, not the landlords.”
That got a laugh, a mean, delighted sort from one of the younger men in a hi-vis jacket. Someone clapped him on the back; someone else whistled low.
Ríonach, halfway through a conversation she wasn’t really in, watched a copy land on the table beside her elbow. Her own surname reached up at her in black and white before she dared read the sentence around it.
It started, as these things always did, with somebody who’d had just enough to feel brave and not enough to be tactful.
“Hold on, hold on a second.” Paddy-in-the-cap, she never remembered his real name. Squinted blearily up at the wall above Ríonach’s head, where last month’s show flyer still curled at the corners. He lurched to his feet, slopping foam over his knuckles, and jabbed a finger at the printed letters. “That’s you, innit? Ríonach Ó, ” He sounded it out like something stuck in his teeth. “Ó Dálaigh. Same as in this yoke.”
He flattened Fiachra’s printout beside the coaster, triumph blooming on his face as if he’d solved corruption itself. “Would ye look at that. ‘Ó Dálaigh Trust.’ ‘Family holdings.’ Jaysus. You’re all over it.”
A hush didn’t quite fall, but the sound in the bar went thin around the edges. Heads turned, then bodies. Someone gave a low, impressed whistle.
“So that’s the craic,” a woman from the nurses’ table said, not quite loudly enough to be kind. “Your lot owning half the block while the rest of us get priced out.”
“It’s always the artists,” one of the hi-vis lads added, half jeer, half joke. “Paint us a mural on the eviction notice, why don’t ye?”
Heat needled up Ríonach’s neck. The white of the flyer above her seemed to glow. Around her, conversations faltered and re-formed in small, sharp knots, every second person sneaking a glance at her face and the article by her glass, fitting the pieces together. Or deciding they already had.
Niamh got there before anyone else could decide what to think of it. She reached across two pint glasses, yanked the nearest sheet out from under a regular’s hand, and slammed it back down on the bar in front of Fiachra.
“You absolute gobshite,” she said, color rising high on her cheeks. “You put my name in this, in my own place, without one word to me?”
“It’s all public record, Niamh,” he replied, infuriatingly calm. “City deeds, tax assessments. Your liquor license renewal. You said yourself (what was it?) ‘We’re asset-rich, cash-poor, but rich all the same.’” He mimed quotation marks. “I couldn’t have put it better.”
A murmur went up. “Asset-rich,” someone repeated thoughtfully, as if tasting betrayal on the phrase.
Sadhbh barely had time to get her change from the bar when a girl from the coffee shop, off early, drunk already, thrust a copy into her hands. “Didn’t know you were seeing a landlord,” she said, sour with envy. “Nice to have a safety net, yeah?”
Heat climbed Sadhbh’s throat. She tried to laugh it off, but the words lodged. Her gaze dragged, against her will, to where Ríonach sat pinned under everyone else’s curiosity. For a heartbeat they were the only two people in the room; then Sadhbh’s face tightened, shutters slamming down, and she broke the look, staring hard at the scuffed floor as if it were her only line of defense.
“Are you just here to slum it for material, then?” someone called, half-dare, half-sneer. A few laughs, brittle and eager. Fiachra’s camera lifted a fraction, the glass eye bright, like he was framing the line for later. Ríonach’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth; before any words came, Niamh said, tight and level, “We’ll talk about this later,” which, to every listening ear, sounded exactly like yes.
The words land like a slap she can’t quite turn her face from. For a second, she has the absurd impression that the whole place has lurched a few degrees off-level: that the dark line of the bar is no longer straight but tipping, the brass rail sliding away from her. It’s only her own balance going, of course, knees loosening, the muscles around her mouth seizing up. Her tongue feels like it’s been rolled in sawdust. She could use one of the pints sweating in front of her, but lifting a glass would mean admitting she has hands.
Heat surges up her neck, the precise, nauseating burn she remembers from being caught out lying as a kid. Only this is worse, because technically nothing in that sheet is a lie. The shame isn’t about exposure; it’s about the math that every person in the room is now silently doing with her life.
She can feel their looks, that prickle along the skin between her shoulder blades: the regulars who’ve watched her hang canvases in the back room, the younger ones who’ve only ever seen her here on show nights, even the girl from the coffee shop who used to ask how much paint costs like it was some romantic hardship. All of them, just now, seeing the dollar signs Fiachra has so helpfully itemized. Trust. Estate. Holdings.
Invisible numbers seem to float a few inches above her head, over her coat, her boots, the stool her grandfather once took his pint on. An appraisal sheet no one needed until he printed it out for them. Asset-rich. Cash-poor. Rich all the same. The phrase sits in the air like a bad smell. She hears it repeated, can almost see the recalibration behind people’s eyes. What they’d ask of her, what they’ll never forgive.
Her whole carefully rehearsed alibi, that she is here because she belongs, because this place is muscle and marrow and not a set she’s wandered onto with a sketchbook, buckles under that “later.” It’s only one word; Niamh barely raises her voice. But in the instant it leaves her mouth, it acquires subtitles: we’ll handle this among ourselves, we don’t contradict the papers in front of outsiders, she’s one of ours but don’t mistake that for innocent. Guilty but family.
The room seems to accept that translation as if it’s been circulated on a group text. The regulars who used to clap her on the back after a show, the old fellas who called her “our artist” with a pride that always embarrassed her, even the broke twenty-somethings she’d mentally filed as her peers that she earns, in some quiet ledger, her right to this bar. Crumbles into so much damp cardboard under the pressure of one syllable.
His face doesn’t move enough to call it a smile: just that infinitesimal tightening at one corner of his mouth, the kind people like him must practice in the mirror so no one can accuse them of gloating. The camera stays lifted, patient, the red record light a pinprick she can feel drilling into her forehead. She recognises the look, though. It’s the way she studies a half-finished canvas when some ugly, undeniable truth has bled through the layers by accident.
He’s got it now, whatever “it” is in his notes: rich girl caught out, the room’s temperature dropping around her, the story he’s been angling for finally obliging him. Cause and effect. Mask and reveal. A neat, vicious little arc.
It lands with a clean, slicing certainty: it will never matter what she puts on a wall: how raw, how careful, how steeped in the same streets and funerals and jokes as everyone else. The first brushstroke anyone will register is the number at the bottom of the family ledger. The canvases will always be footnotes to the balance sheet.
Between the barstools and the doorway she notices, belatedly, that she’s already in flight: her body canted away from the knot of them, voice misplaced somewhere behind the beer taps, fingers cinching the lapels of her coat like she’s testing armour. It isn’t a decision so much as a drift, the first fine, treacherous threads of distance tugging her out of the room.
She registers the tableau in shards.
Niamh first, because she is the most familiar wound: the set jaw, the muscles working just beneath the skin as her cousin dries a glass that has been dry for far too long. Not looking over, not intervening, not offering the brisk, defusing joke she has pulled out a thousand times to save other people from themselves. That absence lands harder than any shouted word could. It says: I am tired. It says: you made this bed with the papers you signed and the keys you took. It says: I cannot keep rescuing you from the fact of what you are.
Then Fiachra, the lens a dark, unblinking pupil in the air between them. The camera is not quite on her now, angled away, aimed at the room, but she knows she’s in its peripheral vision, the blurred rich-girl ghost at the edge of his essay about authenticity and betrayal. He isn’t gloating, because proper documentarians don’t gloat; they “capture.” They “bear witness.” He’ll file her under context: the landlord’s granddaughter flinching as the rent arguments grow teeth. An illustrative aside.
And Sadhbh: well. Sadhbh is turned sideways on her stool, bent toward someone Ríonach doesn’t fully see. A regular, maybe, or one of the EMT classmates; broad shoulders, an elbow on the bar, Sadhbh’s buzzcut head tilted in listening. The corner of her mouth twitches up at something he says. It is nothing, probably. It is absolutely nothing. It feels, however, like the world’s smallest, neatest door swinging shut.
She cannot spot a single seat, a single square inch of sticky bar top, that does not come pre-loaded with her surname and the deeds it stands for. There is no angle at that table from which she isn’t the landlord’s proxy, the walking trust fund, the complication everyone is too polite or too exhausted to name outright. Any place she might squeeze into would buckle under the weight of what she brings with her.
The knowledge settles, icy and weirdly simple: here, in this room she thought of as safe, her presence is, at best, a tax everyone else quietly pays.
The bar’s noise recedes with unnerving efficiency, as if someone has shut a heavy door between her and the rest of them. The match commentary on the television flattens into a distant, tinny roar. Laughter thins out, no longer something she’s inside but something she’s observing, like a sound check from the street. Even the clatter of glass on wood acquires a strange clarity: each pint set down, each shot poured, a neat little proof that gravity and camaraderie are functioning perfectly well in her absence.
People lean across one another, shoulders touching, conversations braiding and knotting without any gap where she might fit. A joke lands at the far end of the bar; heads tip back, the wave of reaction moving right past the space she occupies like water routing itself around a rock.
It strikes her, with the painful lucidity of a hangover that hasn’t fully started yet, that the night isn’t waiting on her to decide anything. The story will trundle on, the regulars will tab out, the lights will snap off, whether or not she’s here to witness it.
Her mouth works once, uselessly, then shuts. A dozen versions of the speech unfurl and wither in the same heartbeat: the one where she explains compound interest and rezoning, the one where she swears she never asked for any of it, the one where she promises, hand to God, to fix everything with this one big commission. She can hear them already in the room’s imagined reply, each clause curdling as it leaves her: poor little rich girl with her ethical migraine; landlord’s granddaughter wants you to know she feels really bad about the mortgage. Even the truthful bits would land, she knows, like a grant application read aloud over pints. Not an apology. A petition for indulgence. A bid.
When she finally makes herself look properly, Sadhbh isn’t looking back; she’s mid-laugh at something the broad-shouldered man has said, then catches movement in her periphery and goes very still. Her shoulders rise a fraction, tightening, not turning. Exactly the half-flinch of someone expecting Ríonach to do what rich people and unreliable shifts both do best: disappear just when you start to lean.
Her hand closes around the cold metal, and in that small, practical contact she feels the gap yawning. Between the version of herself who’d walked in here rehearsing solidarity speeches and grant-free futures, and the woman now backing out through the side door on a river of inherited exits. It isn’t just distance; it’s muscle memory, ossified.
The laughter and clink of glasses from the bar proper swell as the door eases in her hand, then thin to a dull, underwater roar once it clicks shut behind her, making the back room feel abruptly airless. Sound that a minute ago had read as comfort, proof of life, of community, of “a good turnout”, now presses in through the cheap wood like something she’s excluded herself from on purpose. In the hush that’s left, the Christmas lights over the sagging tinsel garland don’t look festive so much as embarrassed, caught out in the act of trying too hard.
Her paintings seem to have crept closer in the changed acoustics, as if the canvases had leaned in while her back was turned. The big triptych over the folding table, the women on the pier in Connemara, hands in aprons, staring down some invisible horizon, has lost whatever tenderness she thought she’d put in their faces. Tonight their eyes have hardened, gone inspector-general: three panels of ancestral HR conducting a performance review.
Along the opposite wall, the mixed-media piece with the layered eviction notices and Mass cards, the one the grant panel called “unflinching,” now reads simply as busy. Tape seams glare. The threads she stitched in red to echo old parish registers twitch accusingly in the corner of her eye, little arterial reminders that none of the stories she’s borrowed ever belonged to her in the same way the deed to half this block does.
Even the cheap plastic cups she’d set out beside the Costco hummus look wrong, parched, abandoned, like evidence of a party she’d thrown for herself and then fled. Every nail hole in the back-room drywall, every scuff left by decades of wakes and meetings, seems to have organized into a jury, her work hung up between them not as offerings but as exhibits.
The wall between rooms might as well be tissue. A scrap of someone’s voice threads through the muffled roar, clear enough to make out the shape if not the face: “…these rich girls doing, like, famine porn now, ” followed by a gust of laughter that could be about anything, anyone, except she has never heard a joke in this zip code that wasn’t about someone specific.
It hits with the neat, inevitable precision of a bill come due. Of course that sentence exists out there; of course it has been waiting, fully formed, for the exact moment she would be alone with her canvases and a plastic knife sinking into hummus that tastes suddenly like chalk. It doesn’t matter whether they mean her. The category is the point. “Rich girls.” “Famine.” “Porn.” The little trinity condenses decades of quiet kitchen conversations and grant-committee praise into one offhand dismissal.
She feels her neck go hot, the way it used to before report cards, before family meetings in the brownstone kitchen, as if the entire neighborhood has merely been politely delaying saying this to her face.
Her phone buzzes on the folding table, screen lighting up beside the sweating hummus, and the subject line glows at her like a dare: “Heritage Series Proposal , Revised Terms.”
Of course they’ve written while she’s literally hiding behind her own work.
The name of the gallery, in its tasteful serif, sits above the phrase “multi-year partnership” in the preview text, and for a second the whole back room tilts, bar lights seeping thinly through the doorframe like stage spill. Here it is: the future her parents’ lawyer keeps gently steering conversations toward, arriving in her cousin’s overworked bar like a courier from a cleaner universe.
Looking at it here, under sagging tinsel and thumbtack scars, she understands with miserable clarity that she’s managed to disappoint both worlds at once.
She scrubs the heel of her paint-streaked hand across her eyes, smearing a faint gray arc on her cheek, and lets herself (just for one treacherous, airless heartbeat) picture walking out, replying “yes” to the email, and never hanging another canvas in this low-ceilinged room again. The bolt of sheer relief that follows is so sharp, so clean, she despises herself for feeling it.
Hand still on the handle, she feels the price of her grandmother’s house, the trust that cushions her, this bar that never quite breaks even. All the mortgages, the hours, the swallowed anger. The knowledge that she has built her art atop a wound she’s never dared to name presses so hard against her ribs it almost turns her back from the door, makes her want to vanish down the stairs and pretend she never heard a thing.
She steps inside anyway.
The door sticks a little on the warped threshold, then gives with a sigh, and the bar’s dim light rolls over her like a confession she didn’t mean to make. The room feels smaller than it did an hour ago, although objectively it can’t have shrunk; it is simply that she is suddenly aware of every inch of it that exists because her grandmother signed something, because a lawyer filed something, because a trust pays what the till can’t.
The low hum of voices doesn’t so much greet her as hit her: an accounting done out loud. The clink of a glass on wood, the scrape of a stool, the muted commentary from the muted match on the TV; all of it tallies up around her. Each scuffed floorboard is a decade of spilled beer and overtime, a line she’s never had to stand in. The varnish worn away in a path from the front door to the bathrooms might as well be an arrow pointing straight at her chest.
Someone laughs near the darts board, sharp and tired. Someone else calls out for another round and adds, “Put it on me tab, Ni,” in a voice that assumes, without question, that the bar will carry him an extra week. The open ledger behind the taps might as well have her surname stamped on every page. Unpaid tabs, favors extended, rent breaks quietly given to the upstairs tenant when they were between jobs. She can feel them all. Not hers, exactly, but adjacent enough that her fingers itch as though she’d signed off on every mercy and every compromise.
She smells fry oil that never quite leaves the air, hears the faint rustle of the Christmas lights she’d insisted on “for atmosphere” years ago. Aesthetic draped over necessity like lace over bruises. This is what she’s been calling community, she realizes, as if the word were not also a column in a spreadsheet somewhere with her family’s name at the top.
She stands just inside the doorway, paint under her nails and gallery email in her pocket, and the distance between her canvases and these walls is suddenly measurable in dollars and decades rather than brushstrokes.
Faces turn, Niamh’s guarded, Sadhbh’s wary, Fiachra’s appraising, and Ríonach feels, for the first time, not like the quiet benefactor or the promising artist, but the landlord’s granddaughter who’s been painting other people’s hurt at a comfortable distance.
It’s in the angle of Niamh’s shoulder, braced as if for an argument about deliveries or taxes; in the way Sadhbh’s eyes flick briefly to the cash register and then away, as though mapping the line between who pours the pints and who owns the walls; in the cool, clinical interest with which Fiachra takes her in, like she’s a case study that just walked into his thesis.
She has stood in this doorway a hundred times, believing herself half-invisible, the good cousin who lends her paintings and doesn’t ask too many questions about money. Tonight the invisibility peels back. She can see, with awful clarity, the invisible captions under her own name: trust fund, property, safe risk, gallery email humming in her pocket.
For years she has framed their stories, stretched them across canvas, mixed their grief with linseed oil and turpentine. Now, caught in their collective glance, she realizes she has never once paid the same price of admission.
“Must be nice, walking in like you own the place,” someone mutters near the end of the bar. Too low to be a call-out, too loud not to land.
It isn’t thrown like an insult, more like a sigh, but it hits her with the blunt, leveling force of fact. For a second she actually checks her pockets, as if she might find a deed there, some crumpled proof of guilt. No one looks directly at her; even the speaker keeps his eyes on his pint, as if the observation were about weather, not power.
It stings precisely because there is no outrage attached, no drama. Only the casual, ordinary acknowledgment of something she has never had named to her face.
The rehearsed defenses (about grants, about heritage, about how she “doesn’t even touch the money,” as if abstaining from the ATM were a moral stance) shrivel on her tongue. What’s left is the bald, nauseating fact that every canvas has been underwritten by tabs she’s never had to settle, a feast of other people’s scarcity she’s been calling inspiration.
Standing there with nowhere to hide, she understands the wound isn’t just guilt over the money but the long, careful cowardice of never inviting anyone close enough to say, plainly, you’re hurting us. She has curated her own feedback like a gallery show. Only praise, no prices listed. If anything she makes is to matter, that quiet, rigged distance has to rupture here, and by her choice.
It’s not her own paint-ruined fingers she sees but Sadhbh’s across the room, braced on the bar. The nails are short and clean in the practical way of someone who can’t afford infection, knuckles reddened from cold and hot water and cheap soap. Those hands have pulled pints when the tap jammed, shouldered crates up the narrow back stairs, steadied blood-slick strangers in the back of an ambulance van on nights when the sirens howled past the windows of this very bar.
They are not metaphorical hands. They are not a symbol for “the working class” or a theme to be developed across a tasteful triptych. They are hands that hurt at the end of a shift.
She thinks of the times she’s seen a faint tremor in them when Sadhbh lights a smoke in the alley, the way she rolls her shoulders after double shifts, making a joke of it. Those risks have always been literal: late trains, drunk men, missed paychecks, the possibility of one wrong move with a stretcher on slick stairs.
And what has Ríonach risked, really? A bad review? An awkward opening? The theoretical possibility that, if she ever truly enraged the family, the trust lawyer might purse his lips and schedule a meeting?
She has called certain paintings “brave” because they hung in a back room where uncles and aunties might mutter. She has flattered herself that turning a landlord cousin’s face into a blurred, accusatory smear of oils was dangerous work. Meanwhile, Sadhbh has been walking home alone at four in the morning along Queens Boulevard, her phone half-charged and her pepper spray expired.
The comparison arrives with the cold neatness of math. Where Sadhbh has put her actual body on the line, her back, her lungs, her future joints, Ríonach has placed only her feelings in jeopardy and then built padded walls around even those, canvas and heritage paperwork and carefully vague anecdotes about “family property” serving as insulation.
She remembers, with a pinch of shame, how she once told Sadhbh she was “taking a big leap” by maybe turning down the Manhattan gallery. Sadhbh had only hummed, polite, noncommittal. Of course she hadn’t laughed in her face; Sadhbh is kinder than that. But viewed from here, with the bar’s low light catching on those working hands, it is laughable. A leap with a safety net is, at worst, a controlled fall.
The room hums faintly around them, TV commentary, glass on wood, someone’s low joke in a booth, but for Ríonach it narrows to the distance between their bodies and the gulf between what each of them stands to lose. Her own “risk” has always come with clauses, fine print written in her grandmother’s lawyerly hand: disbursements, contingencies, market value. Sadhbh’s comes in overtime forms and the quiet, grinding question of what happens if her body gives out before her parents are safe.
It strikes Ríonach with a kind of horrified awe that, in every argument she has rehearsed about authenticity and sacrifice, she has been counting only the things that fit in a frame.
It lands with a lurch so physical she has to steady her glass: every joke, every deflection about “grants” and “lucky breaks” hasn’t just been self-protection, it’s been a quiet insult. By ducking the words trust and deed and estate, by letting “the family” hover as a vague collective noun, she hasn’t been sparing Sadhbh awkwardness; she’s been denying her the basic courtesy of accurate information.
She has, in effect, asked her to walk into rooms whose mortgages are paid from Ríonach’s lineage and pretend they are neutral ground. To pull pints under a ceiling that forms part of the portfolio without ever being told that the woman flirting with her by the dish pit is one of the signatures that can decide whether the rent triples.
Even tonight, she realizes with a little flare of nausea, she did it again: invited Sadhbh into a show hung in a bar partly leveraged on Ó Dálaigh equity, then let her talk about maybe having to move to Jersey as if the building itself weren’t, in some indirect, morally sticky way, helping carry Ríonach’s studio overhead.
She can hear Fiachra’s earlier barbs about “commodifying the last days” running under Niamh’s raw litany of taxes and late notices like a low, relentless bass line. Until now she could tuck those jabs away under “he doesn’t get it” and “he’s jealous,” the way you file a bad review in the back of a drawer. But standing here, with the ledger literally under Sadhbh’s hands and the tap sputtering because the line hasn’t been serviced this month, the usual armour of artistic defensiveness won’t hold. If the work is fed by these streets and these exhausted bodies, then to siphon that pain off for a slick Midtown nostalgia show, no argument, no naming of names, no risk taken here with them, wouldn’t just be compromise. It would be theft politely rebranded as heritage, a pretty laundering of harm.
The glossy Manhattan offer, once a lifeline for her insecurities, suddenly looks hollow beside the memory of Sadhbh on a milk crate in the back room, telling a story about her father’s first winter in Queens: the radiator broken, breath ghosting in the kitchen while he ironed his only good shirt. Those unvarnished truths, messy, uncurated, unpaid, told over cheap beer and bad lighting, are what she’s been painting toward without admitting it, and she realizes that losing them, or sanding them down into gallery-safe sentiment, would be a more devastating failure than any bad review, because it would mean choosing comfort over the people who gave her anything worth saying.
She stands there with nowhere to hide and understands, with a clarity that feels like a slap, that the wound isn’t only the money but the years of keeping everyone at arm’s length, so no one could ever say, plainly, you’re hurting us. If anything she makes is to mean something, that habit dies now: here, with her, out loud, answered.
Heart pounding, she stares at the unsigned contract on her studio table as if it might suddenly sign itself out of sheer inevitability. The heavy cream pages sit square amid chaos: rags stiff with turpentine, coffee cups wearing rings like bad halos, a smear of viridian across the wood where she’d reached for a brush in the dark. The gallery’s deadline emails glow accusingly from her laptop screen, each subject line a polite escalation: “Gentle Reminder,” “Timeline Clarification,” “Final Confirmation Needed.”
She scrolls through them one more time, as if somewhere in the chain a line might appear that says, Of course, take all the time you need to sort out your soul and your love life. Instead, it’s clauses and deliverables and a quiet, relentless assumption: she will say yes. People like her always do.
Her gaze moves from the signature line bearing her printed name to the stack of reference images the gallery had “helpfully” provided: misty green fields, thatched roofs nobody her age has actually lived under, black-and-white men with flat caps and pipes who look suspiciously like stock photos. “Authentic Irish narrative,” the proposal had said. “A return to roots.” As though the roots were somewhere safely rural and mythical, not in this very borough with its cracked sidewalks and pawn shops and eviction notices.
Beneath the contract is the latest half-finished canvas: Sadhbh at the bar, shoulders squared under her hoodie, jaw set, laughing at something Ríonach had said and not quite meaning it. The paint is still tacky along the line of her cheekbone. Ríonach understands, with the particular nausea reserved for irreversible decisions, that putting her name on the contract now, before she’s told Sadhbh the truth about the trust, the building, all of it, would seal in every lie of omission she’s been living with.
She closes the laptop with more force than necessary. The sudden absence of blue light makes the room feel raw, too honest. Ink pen hovering uselessly in her paint-stained fingers, she hears Niamh’s old accusation in her head, “You always take the deal and apologize later”, and feels, for the first time, that not signing is the only way to prove she’s capable of choosing a person over a promise of prestige.
She doesn’t realize she’s holding her breath until her lungs ache. The pen makes a shallow crescent in the paper where the signature line waits, a dent instead of a name. For once, she lets the silence stretch, doesn’t rush to fill it with rationalizations about “stepping stones” and “visibility” that sound an awful lot like what the family lawyer says when he’s pretending the word inheritance doesn’t mean power.
Niamh’s voice is loud in the quiet: You always take the deal and apologize later. Maybe not in those exact words that night in the kitchen, but the meaning had been clear enough through the whiskey and the slammed cabinet doors. You say you’re different and you do exactly what they’d do.
There’s nothing noble about how her hand is shaking; it’s not a grand artistic crisis, just terror of stepping outside the pattern the contract has drawn for her. Yet beneath the fear is a small, obstinate clarity: if she signs first and confesses later, every I love you, if she ever gets that far with Sadhbh, will sound like a clause tucked into the fine print. Not signing, now, is the only argument she has that she can choose Sadhbh over the soft inevitability of her own good fortune.
Instead of forwarding the contract to the family lawyer like she’s done with every adult decision masquerading as paperwork, she kills the Wi‑Fi on her phone, then the data, until the little bars at the top are as blank as she feels. The emails freeze mid-demand. For once there’s no safety net of “just running it past” someone who writes checks for a living.
Her fingers close around the phone and the pen together, an accidental fistful of habit and refusal, and she jams both into the pocket of her paint-smeared jeans. The work can wait; the gallery will wait, or it won’t. What can’t wait is Sadhbh walking around believing she’s just another Ó Dálaigh trying to buy forgiveness instead of earning it.
She scrubs her fingers on an already-ruined T‑shirt until the paint only smears, then shrugs into her good black coat, the one that makes her look like she knows what she’s doing. She leaves the brownstone with the contract spread open on the kitchen table beneath the skylight, visible, accusing, and very deliberately unsigned, like a trap she’s set for her future cowardice.
The walk down 43rd feels longer than any subway ride to Manhattan. The wind needles the wet at the corners of her eyes until she can blame its sting for everything. She cycles through versions of I’m sorry that keep turning into legal arguments, shareholder reports masquerading as feelings, and each one dies in the air. All she keeps, finally, is the barest shape of a sentence: I didn’t sign. No explanations about leverage or timing, no offer to fix anything with a check. She will stand there with empty hands and let Sadhbh see exactly how much, and how little, that choice is worth.
The door sticks on the swell of damp wood and she has to put her shoulder into it, an undignified grunt that gets swallowed by the sudden wash of sound. Sports commentary from the TV over the bar, a burst of laughter from the back table, ice clattering into a metal shaker. Heat and the smell of old beer, Murphy’s, and fryer oil roll over her like a wave, fogging the cold out of her lungs and instantly fogging her glasses.
She blinks them clear with the back of her wrist, stepping just inside, letting the door thump shut at her back. The room rearranges itself out of the dimness she’s known since she was too young to legally be in here: the glow of the taps, the crooked Guinness mirror, the framed photo of her grandfather in a hardhat on the docks. Two regulars at the far end lift their chins in the barest acknowledgment; someone closer mutters “Ó Dálaigh” like it’s part greeting, part weather report.
Her gaze is already moving, automatic, a painter’s scan for the one face the whole scene is built around. She tracks along the booths, the cluster around the dartboard, the tight knot of younger guys in construction fleeces whose names she never manages to keep straight. No sign of a buzzcut, no familiar slope of shoulders hunched in a corner nursing a seltzer like it’s a secret.
Her heart, which had been holding itself cautiously in her throat all the way down Skillman, thuds harder to the jukebox’s low bass line. Some ’90s track Niamh keeps on the playlist for the sentimental regulars. For a half second she panics stupidly that she’s misjudged, that Sadhbh is somewhere else entirely, that she’s come down here in her good coat and her bad courage for no one.
Then the crowd at the bar shifts, a man in a Mets cap leaning away to sign a receipt, and the opening gives her a clear line of sight down the length of polished wood.
At first she almost misses her entirely; the Flannagáin’s baseball cap throws her: navy brim shadowing the familiar face, the logo pulled low like it’s meant to be a disguise, not a uniform. Then the rest of her resolves: the dark smear of a union hoodie with the local’s faded emblem at the chest, sleeves shoved to the elbows, forearms working. She’s moving in a tight, economical circuit behind the bar with the kind of unshowy rhythm you only earn on the thousandth repetition. Wrist tilted just-so on the Guinness, a half-turn to snag shots off the service rail, a nod that sends a regular fishing out his wallet without a word.
Of course she’s behind the bar. Of course she belongs here more than Rí ever did hovering on a stool, pretending to help Niamh count the tills. The sight lands with a dull, unsurprised ache: this is Sadhbh in her element and on someone else’s clock, shoulders squared under fluorescent light, not looking toward the door because she doesn’t have the luxury of arrival as an event.
The moment their gazes finally catch, it’s like a flashbulb going off in a crowded room, sharp, overexposed, gone. Sadhbh’s face rearranges itself with microscopic precision: whatever naked thing was there a second ago drops behind the neat, frosted pane she keeps for difficult customers and too-familiar managers. Her jaw sets, not quite a clench, just a small correction; the corners of her mouth pull into something that would look like a smile from across the room if you weren’t paying attention. She finishes topping off a pint, gives the glass a practiced quarter-turn so the logo faces out, slides it down to a waiting hand. “What can I get you, Rí?” she says, light enough that only the distance lands heavy.
She edges in between two barstools, palm flattening on damp wood, and manages, “Hey. Did you get your results? The exam. Sadhbh is already sliding past, head bent as if she hasn’t heard, calling, “Who’s next, lads?” Her smile goes service-industry neutral, shoulders tightening into a posture that says: busy, fine, untouchable.
Every time she opens her mouth, “How did it, ” “D’you want to (” ) Sadhbh is already moving, slipping the question into the same bin as coaster requests and bathroom directions. “You good there?” “Need a tab started?” “You’re grand, yeah?” Each pass is brisk, neutral, professionally kind, and each one skates her just out of reach of anything that might turn into apology or offer.
The crush at the bar loosens for a blessed thirty seconds: a lull between a game ending on mute and the next wave of latecomers realizing they’re not getting a seat anywhere else on the block. Somebody’s card misdeclines at the far end; there’s a short burst of groaning, good-natured abuse. Niamh’s hand hovers over the till, ready to referee.
Ríonach feels the opening the way she feels a blank stretch of canvas, sudden, terrifying, exactly what she’s been waiting for. Before she can talk herself out of it, she slides into the space where Sadhbh has just vacated, palm finding a sticky ring on the wood.
“Niamh.” Her voice comes out steadier than she feels. “Can I have ten minutes with the back room? Just. Ten.” She flashes a quick, apologetic half-smile. “I swear I won’t burn the place down.”
Niamh doesn’t look up right away. She finishes counting a handful of crumpled singles into the register, rings up a pint for some lad who thinks “take your time, love” is flirting, hands over his change without breaking eye contact with the drawer.
“Ten minutes for what,” she says finally, which is not a no but isn’t a yes either.
Ríonach sets her phone down between them like she’s laying a card in a game they both know the rules to. The subject line of the email is still open on the screen: HERITAGE DREAMING: FORMAL OFFER. The gallery’s name glares in tasteful serif.
Niamh’s eyes flick to it, then to Ríonach’s face. There’s a tight, counting look there now, the same one she uses when a supplier raises prices or the ConEd bill comes in wrong. She wipes her hands on a bar towel, slow.
“You’re sure you want to have that conversation in my bar?” she asks, voice low. “In front of half the parish?”
“I don’t want to have it at all,” Ríonach says. “But I can’t keep pretending it’s not. “This is where the work started. It should be where I say what I’m doing with it.”
For a second, Niamh’s mouth softens, some old version of her (the cousin who used to sneak Ríonach sips of cider at family weddings) surfacing. Then the shutters come back down.
“You’d better not be about to clear the place out,” she mutters. “I need asses on stools, not everyone trooping in there to cry over their childhood.”
“I’m not asking you to close up.” Ríonach hears the pleading edge and swallows it. “Just… let me hang what I should’ve hung in the first place. Say something. Ten minutes. If they don’t care, I look like an eejit and you get to tell me you told me so.”
“Already got that privilege, thanks,” Niamh says dryly. Another glance at the phone, another at the room. At the far end, someone shouts for two more Murphys; a credit card slaps the wood.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she sighs, then jerks her chin toward the back. “Go on. Curtain’s yours. You’ve got till the next commercial break, and if anyone starts a fight back there, you’re cleaning it up with your fancy gallery rag.”
Relief hits so hard Ríonach has to grip the bar to steady herself. “I’ll be quick,” she says.
“You’ll be honest,” Niamh corrects, already reaching for the pint glasses again.
Ríonach nods, pushes off the bar, and slips toward the tinsel curtain before her courage can evaporate with the foam. Behind her, the hum of Flannagáin’s swells back up, ordinary and relentless, as if it doesn’t know the room at its heart is about to change.
The tinsel curtain sighs shut behind her, thinning the bar’s roar to a muffled thump of bass and sports commentary. The back room smells of stale beer, dust, and the faint metallic tang of wire hangers. Her own work stares back at her from the walls: the safe stuff, all soft rain over cottage roofs and that one big canvas of the Cliffs done from a phone photo, the one an Upper East Side couple had called “so evocative” before asking if she did smaller sizes to match their sofa.
“Right,” she mutters, heart hammering. “Off with you.”
She moves on instinct, the way she does in the studio at three a.m.. No second-guessing, just motion. One, two, three canvases down, cloth groaning on hooks. She leans them against the upright piano, ignoring the clatter of a loose key. From behind the stack in the corner, she drags out the ones she swore she’d only ever show to herself: the landlord’s fat key ring looming over a street map of Sunnyside like a noose; her grandmother’s rosary threads snarled through photocopied eviction notices; Flannagáin’s, its familiar barfront dissolving mid-frame into scaffolding and a glossy condo render.
Her fingers shake as she rehangs them, but the motions stay sure, practiced from a lifetime of pop-up shows and community fundraisers. Nails slip into old holes; frames bump into place. In the overhead fairy lights, the rawer canvases look louder, almost indecent, as if they’ve been undressing in the dark all this time and have just been caught.
When Niamh kills the sound on the match and calls, “Two minutes, folks, Rí’s got something to say if you’ve the patience,” it ripples through the bar with the same authority as last orders. Heads lift from pints and phones; necks crane toward the tinsel curtain. The regulars, the lads in transit jackets, the nurses with their scrubs half-zipped, the old men at the horseshoe end, shift on stools and in booths. The newer faces, all good boots and better health insurance, glance around to see how seriously they’re meant to take this.
Ríonach steps into the doorway, haloed by the fairy lights, paint on her forearms and a smear of ultramarine along her jaw. She wipes her hands on her ancient band T‑shirt, suddenly aware of every threadbare hole. The room’s gaze presses on her skin, heavy as wet canvas. She feels Sadhbh’s profile at the far edge of the crowd: jaw tight, arms folded around a tray, pretending to polish a stack of glasses she’s already clean. Not looking at her, exactly, but not quite able to look away either.
“Right,” Ríonach says, voice catching and then finding itself. “I’ll be quick. I just. This is about the paintings, and about who they’re for.”
She clears her throat, fingers worrying a fleck of dry paint on her wrist, and tells them about the Manhattan offer without dressing it up: the “heritage” show, the curated shamrocks, the tasteful famine mist they’d asked her to lay over everything. She says she emailed back that afternoon and refused, because selling them a sepia postcard while the block’s being gutted “would be blood money on linen.”
She jerks her chin toward the raw canvases, voice rough but steady, says they’re staying here (for now at least) not for collectors’ foyers but “for the ones who took doubles and triples and still paid the bar tab, who stayed when they could’ve legged it to Long Island, Jersey, or back across the water.” She thanks Niamh for the walls, flicks a helpless half‑smile toward Sadhbh without quite holding her gaze, and then lets the words run out. The silence that follows isn’t polite; it’s thick, unsettled, people shifting on stools, glasses set down too carefully, the room rearranging itself around what she’s just said.
The hush in the back room stretches until the hum of the fridge and the commentary from the muted match out front feel grotesquely loud, like someone’s left life on in another apartment. Glasses clink once and then don’t. The fairy lights buzz. Somewhere in the main bar a man coughs, a smoker’s rattle that usually disappears into the roar but now lands clean in the silence.
Ríonach’s fingers worry at a smear of umber on her cuff like she could rub herself down to primer and start over. The adrenaline of the speech is already leaching out of her; what’s left is a dry-mouthed awareness that this, this next bit, is the thing she’s been ducking for years with one more painting, one more show, one more “we’ll talk properly when it’s quieter.”
It is quiet. There’s nowhere left to dodge.
She swallows, throat working around something heavier than an artist’s statement, and finally turns toward Sadhbh. The room tilts so the other faces blur, become background texture; her eye hooks on the familiar mess of Sadhbh’s growing-out buzzcut, the stubborn line of her jaw, the tray held against her stomach like a shield. Sadhbh has gone very still in the way she does when there’s a bar fight brewing (weight balanced, ready to move) but her eyes are fixed on a spot just above Ríonach’s shoulder, as if looking directly would be indecent.
Ríonach takes a step closer, boots sticking a little against the beer-tacked floor. The crowd’s attention follows in a soft, collective lean. Niamh, behind the bar, has one hand flat on the wood as if holding the whole structure steady.
“Sabh,” Ríonach says, and the nickname she’s barely dared use in months comes out hoarse, scrubbed clean of charm. “There’s. There’s more I should’ve said. About…everything.”
She can feel her pulse in her paint-slick fingers, in the hollow at the base of her throat. For once, there’s no clever deflection, no joke about starving artists or “family complications.” Just the strip-lit, back-room fact that if she doesn’t open her mouth now, she never will.
Her voice, when it finally comes, has none of the gallery-opening varnish left on it. No talk of “lineage” or “heritage” or “lucky breaks.” She says “will” and “trust fund” and “my rent is paid whether I sell a single canvas” in the flat, fluorescent tone of someone reading out a charge sheet. She explains, not defensively for once, how her grandmother signed papers none of them fully understood, how a lawyer with a Celtic knot tie sends emails twice a year and money simply appears. How the brownstone isn’t just “the house” but a shell company that owns the building next door and a slice of the one after that: how her name sits on paperwork like a quiet landlord over people who used to drink here with her grandfather.
She doesn’t look at Niamh. She doesn’t look at anybody. Her gaze fixes somewhere near the scuffed floor as she adds, with a raw little hitch, that she’s been hiding behind feeling bad about it all: using guilt like a clever, pious shield so she never had to choose anything cleanly. Not the money. Not the work. Not Sadhbh.
Sadhbh doesn’t move at first. Her jaw works once, twice, like she’s biting down on something she can’t quite swallow, and then this short, cracked laugh slips out of her: nothing pretty in it, just air pushed past grit.
“Rí, I’m not thick,” she says, finally looking at her, eyes sharp. “I knew from the first night, remember? That cab to yours when you didn’t even glance at the meter, the way the driver knew the block. The coats, the paintings on the walls, the fridge that was always full. I clocked it.”
Her fingers tap a restless rhythm on the tray edge. “I wanted you anyway. Christ, did I. But I couldn’t hack being some…project. A good deed. Or the girl you bought with extra square footage and guilt.”
She says, more quietly now, that every time she pictured climbing those brownstone steps, she also saw her ma and da back on 41st, folding their lives into Lidl bags and cardboard boxes. That the thought of kissing Rí in a house that owned half their street turned her stomach. It felt like choosing the landlord’s side, and she couldn’t make herself do it.
The silence after that isn’t clean; it’s frayed at the edges, humming with all the years they’ve spent decorating the truth with jokes and theory and “heritage.” What’s left now is graceless and exposed: Rí’s cowardice named, Sadhbh’s pride and dread on the table, and between them a single, brutal question. Are they actually willing to choose each other, costs itemized, no allegories left?
Ríonach turns away before she can say something defensive and unforgivable. Her hands, grateful for an order that isn’t emotional, go to the stack of canvases leaning against the far wall. They rasp softly as she flips through them (finished pieces, saleable grief in tasteful colors) until she hits the one she’s been avoiding.
It’s just underpainting and charcoal: the long smudge of the bar counter, the suggestion of bodies hunched on stools, Niamh’s outline caught mid-pour. No faces yet, only the hollow ovals where they ought to be. She hauls it out, nearly clips the fairy lights, and wrestles it onto the crate between them so it stands like a badly chosen icon.
“There,” she says, more to the painting than to Sadhbh. “That’s the honest version.”
Under the harsh back-room bulb, every scraping brushstroke looks like a confession she ran out of nerve on. None of the familiar tricks are there. The amber glow that flatters wrinkles into wisdom, the deep greens that say heritage instead of hangover. Just bare canvas showing through, streaked gesso like old plaster, rough ghosts of figures who might be her uncles, or the lads from the day shift, or Sadhbh’s da at the end of a week.
Sadhbh steps closer despite herself, tray forgotten on a chair. “This is new,” she says carefully. Not a compliment. An observation.
“It’s old,” Rí answers. “Older than the last show. I started it the night your ma came in asking Niamh about the rent strike.” She swallows. “And then I…stopped.”
“Why?”
Because she’d realized half the building they were talking about sat neatly in the trust paperwork upstairs. Because finishing it would mean choosing who got to be visible and who stayed a smudge in the background, and she’d panicked at the idea of getting it wrong and still cashing the check.
She drags a paint-slick thumb over one of the blank ovals, leaving a dirty comet of color there. “I keep doing this,” she says. “Circling. Collecting stories, sketching people, turning it all into…texture. Atmosphere. Something that will sell to the nice couples from the Upper West Side who think this place is romantic poverty with good beer.”
Her laugh is short and joyless. “Every time it gets close to being about anything real, I tell myself I don’t have the right. That if I really looked straight at it, at the trust, at who’s paying what rent, at you working doubles while I’m upstairs painting, I’d have to pick a side. And I might lose the house, or the shows, or you.”
She feels Sadhbh looking at her, but she keeps her eyes on the canvas, on her own wavering hand. “So I hide behind the idea that my guilt is very noble. That not inviting you in, not…asking for more, is somehow protecting you from being bought. That if I keep everything half-finished, half-said, then nobody can accuse me of using you, or the bar, or the neighborhood.”
The charcoal figures blur a little as her vision stings. She blinks it away, furious with herself for the drama of it. “But that’s shite, isn’t it?” she says, voice going hoarse. “It’s not protection. It’s me being a coward. If I don’t paint the faces, if I don’t say the words, then I never have to risk you looking back at me and saying no. Or worse, yes, and meaning it. Without the house. Without the bloody trust. Just…me.”
Her thumb is still pressed to the canvas, smearing. For once she doesn’t clean it, doesn’t reach for a rag. She lets the mistake sit there between them, ugly and undeniable.
“So I built this whole…ethical fortress out of it,” she goes on, the words dry in her mouth. “The trust, the brownstone, the bar shares: it’s convenient, you know? I get to say, ‘I can’t ask you for anything, I can’t offer you anything, not really, because look at all this history, look at the paperwork with my name on it.’”
She taps the stretcher bar with a paint-chipped nail. “I turned my family’s mess into a moral alibi. Any time I could’ve just said, ‘I want you,’ I told myself it would only ever land like a handout. That if I invited you up those steps, it would be me playing Lady Bountiful with the view of the skyline thrown in.”
Her mouth twists. “But that’s not why I didn’t ask. Not really. I didn’t ask because without the house, without the sad little mythology of me As Complicated Heiress, I’m just…a tired girl who paints too big and talks too sideways.” She finally looks at Sadhbh. “And I had no idea if that would ever be enough.”
Sadhbh’s jaw works once, twice, like she’s chewing glass. Her hands disappear deeper into her hoodie pocket, shoulders hiked. “When I came in here tonight,” she says finally, “I had the whole thing written already. You’d do the grand tragic-artist bit, I’d make some crack about your mortgage paying for my pint, we’d both know our lines.”
She huffs, not quite a laugh. “Every Ó Dálaigh gesture, I filed under ‘performance.’ Patronage, pity, a project for the nice girl who wants to feel useful. It was easier that way. Cleaner.” Her gaze hooks on the half-formed barstools on the canvas. “If I decided ahead of time you were talking down to me, then I didn’t have to risk thinking you meant it. That you actually…wanted something with me. Because if I let myself see your…clumsy reaching as anything else, and I was wrong. “I don’t bounce back from that kind of wrong, Rí. Not quick. So I made you the villain in my head instead of…” Her mouth twists. “Instead of leaving room for you to be just as scared as me.”
They stay there, worrying the same threads from opposite ends. Fear of needing anyone, the grim pride of getting by alone, the sour knowledge of whose rent pays whose quiet. As they speak, the blank ovals stop looking like failures and start feeling like a kind of permission: space for a story where survival isn’t the finish line, and neither of them has to pretend they’re not starving for something that lasts.
Niamh’s shout from the front and the rattle of the till snap the bar back into its ordinary racket. Still, the two of them stand shoulder to shoulder before the unfinished piece, close enough to feel each other breathe. Not quite touching, no longer flinching, they both understand that choosing differently now will cost more than a bad review or a missed shift; it will mean staking pride, habit, and the thin armor of their old stories on something neither of them can afford to treat as an experiment.
Ríonach swallows, the taste of turpentine and old nerves catching at the back of her throat. Her fingers are still tacky with paint, faint smears of umber and nicotine-yellow making a mess of the clean lines of her cuffs. She drags her gaze from the half-born barstools on the canvas to the very real one Sadhbh is occupying beside her.
For a beat she just stands there, listening to the bar’s clatter swell and recede around them: the clink of glass, the muted roar of a match on the television, Niamh’s laugh slicing through it all like a bell. It would be so easy to let the noise carry them off, to joke, to offer to buy another round and file the night under “dramatic but inconclusive.”
Instead, she makes herself step into the tight little gap between Sadhbh and the wall, close enough that she can see the faint paint-moon on the back of Sadhbh’s hand where she’d brushed the wet canvas. When she speaks, her voice comes out lower than she expects but, to her own faint surprise, steady.
“I don’t. “I’m not looking for a do-over. Not of the show, not of tonight. I don’t want to…reset to some version where I pretend I never said the wrong thing and you pretend you’re not watching the exits.”
Sadhbh’s brows tick up, wary, but she doesn’t bolt.
“What I want,” Ríonach says, feeling the words land in her chest as she shapes them, “is to start again with you. Properly. Not as the mad artist and the practical girl from down the block. Not as the one with the safety net and the one pretending she doesn’t notice it.” She exhales, a thin white flag of breath in the stale air between them. “I want to know if you’d be willing to try that. With me. Without the…unspoken debts. Without the half-truths we wrap around the bits that hurt most. Just, ” Her mouth quirks, self-mocking and hopeful all at once. “Just us. As we actually are, not as the stories we’ve both been using to keep from getting properly wrecked.”
Sadhbh studies her for a long moment, like she’s testing the weight of each word for hidden hooks. The bar noise recedes to a muffled hum, just the bass of someone’s laugh and the scrape of a chair coming through. Finally, she nods once: small but decisive, as if anything bigger might spook them both.
“‘Properly’ can’t mean you swooping in when I’m short on rent,” she says, voice low enough that it barely crosses the space between them. “No saving, no rescuing, no little secret subsidies. If I say I’m grand, you don’t go around the back to fix it anyway. And you don’t get to turn my life into material and then tell yourself you’re doing me a favor.”
The heat rises up Ríonach’s throat, settling in her cheeks. She’s suddenly aware of every place money hides in her life: the coat on her shoulders, the keys in her pocket, the trust paperwork sitting in the house like a polite bomb.
“Okay,” she says, and the word feels heavier than it sounds. “No more pretending the fund is some abstract weather system I can’t control. I’ll talk about it like it’s real, like it touches you, because it does. And I’ll stop…framing you. You’re not a project, or an origin story for the next series. If we do this, it’s not me fixing anything. It’s just, ” she huffs out a breath, wry, “me being an eejit beside you, in full view, without an artist’s statement to tidy it up after.”
From behind the bar, Niamh clocks the angle of their shoulders, the way the air’s gone taut around them, and something in her expression eases. She wipes the same clean patch of counter twice, then snaps the rag down and lifts her brows in their direction.
“Right, that’s enough tortured eye contact for one night,” she calls, voice rough but not unkind. She jerks her chin toward the front door. “Go on with ye. I’ll cash out and lock up. If you’re going to rewrite the bloody script, you’re not doing it under these fluorescents and the smell of last week’s Guinness.”
A few of the regulars glance over; Niamh’s stare sends them back to their pints as she adds, quieter, “Off with you, before I change my mind.”
They shoulder open the bar’s heavy door together and the warmth drops off at once, traded for a slap of river-cold air that smells faintly of exhaust and fryer grease. Coats tugged tight, they fall into step, breath fogging as the rumble of the 7 rolls overhead. For a few blocks their hands only ghost against each other, brushing, retreating, neither brave enough to close the gap. Then, at a crosswalk where the wind cuts sideways off Queens Boulevard, Sadhbh hooks her fingers, tentative, through Ríonach’s. It feels like a question spoken in the space of a heartbeat. Ríonach answers by lacing their hands together, careful, no grand squeeze, just a steady, ordinary hold that promises nothing except that, for this stretch of pavement at least, she isn’t letting go.
By the time they reach the quieter side street, the brownstone’s dark outline is waiting ahead like a ledger of everything Ríonach hasn’t said, every silence accrued with interest. At the iron gate Sadhbh stops, thumb brushing the cold metal; Ríonach stops too, loosening her hand, offering no tug. The invitation sits plainly between them. When Sadhbh finally nods and pushes the gate herself, Ríonach falls into step beside her. They climb the stoop shoulder to shoulder, not patron and subject entering a studio, but two women, equally exposed, walking into whatever argument, comfort, or future the house will hold.
In the narrow entryway, where family portraits watch from gilt frames, Ríonach hangs up her paint-stained coat beside Sadhbh’s scuffed thrift-store one, the two garments brushing like a quiet declaration that their lives are meant to share the same hooks.
The gesture feels startlingly ceremonial, like some small domestic sacrament. Her grandmother’s wedding photo, yellowed but imperious above the radiator, seems to glare down at the juxtaposition of fabrics and fortunes. Ríonach ignores the impulse to apologize to the dead.
“Which one’s more valuable, d’you think?” Sadhbh asks, toeing off her boots, eyes on the coats. “The expensive one you wrecked with paint, or the cheap one that still does its job?”
“Capitalism would say neither,” Ríonach replies, dropping her keys into the family’s crystal bowl with a clink that sounds oddly final. “They’re both depreciating assets.”
“Romantic,” Sadhbh says, but her mouth tilts, fond.
They move further into the hallway, past polished side tables and framed degrees, the air warmer now, more theirs. The house has always felt like a museum of other people’s decisions; tonight, it feels, precariously, like it might be rearranged.
“Is it weird for you?” Ríonach asks, nodding back toward the coats. “Sharing space. With me. Here.”
Sadhbh considers, one hand trailing along the banister as if checking that it’s solid. “Yeah. But not in a bad way. More like…learning the steps in a dance you were never invited to before.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m stepping on your toes,” Sadhbh says. “But you keep not letting go.”
“That’s because you’re very stubborn,” Ríonach says. “And I’m…very bad at giving up.”
Sadhbh squeezes her paint-smeared fingers. “Good. Then we’ll be awful at giving up together.”
Ahead, the house waits. Behind them, the two coats hang shoulder to shoulder: not equal, not pretending to be, but choosing, for once, to lean against the same wall.
They end up in the kitchen because there is nowhere else to put such ugly truths. The kettle hisses, the old radiator knocks, and the overhead light is too bright for comfort, which might be why neither of them looks away.
“So,” Sadhbh says, fingers wrapped around a chipped mug that once belonged to some great-aunt with better manners, “how rich are you, actually? On a scale from ‘can afford takeout’ to ‘owns half the parish’?”
Ríonach laughs, then doesn’t. “Closer to the second. Not me personally. The trust. The houses. This place.” She taps the table, the same wood where her grandmother balanced ledgers and grudges. “I could lose money and still be…fine. You can’t.”
Sadhbh studies her. “And you hate that, or you like it?”
“I hate that I like it,” Ríonach says. “And I hate that it makes us uneven. That you could fall and I’d…bounce.”
Sadhbh nods slowly. “So we say it out loud. You have a safety net. I don’t. You don’t get to fix me with it. I don’t get to punish you for having it.”
“That’s…our deal?” Ríonach asks.
“Our starting point,” Sadhbh says. “No pretending it’s fair. Just choosing it anyway.”
Upstairs, the studio smells of turpentine and rain-wet wool. Ríonach flips on the harsh skylight and drags a new canvas onto the easel, the white so clean it feels almost accusatory. For a moment she only stands there, thumb worrying a smear of ultramarine on her palm.
“If this was your room,” she says at last, voice catching on the word your, “what would you put on that?”
Sadhbh snorts. “Rent receipts and unpaid bills.”
“Sincerely,” Ríonach says.
Sadhbh leans against the table, considers. “A fire escape. Middle of summer. Everyone’s laundry out. Plants in old paint cans. Not pretty: just…stubborn. Still here.”
Ríonach nods, reaches for charcoal, then hesitates. “Show me?”
She takes Sadhbh’s hand, sets it over her own on the stick. Together they drag the first dark, decisive line across the white, wobbly, unsure, and absolutely theirs, a rough blueprint of a life neither could sketch alone.
The next week, Ríonach turns down the gallery’s nostalgic contract in a terse phone call made with Sadhbh and Niamh leaning in the kitchen doorway, arms folded, saying nothing but refusing to leave. She doesn’t dress it up as martyrdom (just a clear no, then another, calmer no when the curator presses) offered as a shared decision about what kind of future they’re willing to fight for and which stories they refuse, together, to sell back to strangers.
That Sunday at Flannagáin’s, with regulars crowding the bar and Fiachra quietly watching from his usual corner, Ríonach and Sadhbh stand shoulder to shoulder beneath a small new piece that bears both their initials, paint still faintly tacky. The room’s teasing toasts and wary blessings swell around them, rough-edged but sincere: the first public recognition of a commitment they’ve already made in private and on canvas.
The old family fights don’t magically vanish. They don’t even soften at first; they just change rooms.
They relocate from the brownstone’s polished dining table to Niamh’s sticky bar top, from whispered recriminations at christenings to the clatter of closing time, when the last regular has been bullied out with a free cab number and a paper cup of water. It’s in those hours (chairs flipped, tills counted, mop sloshing) that the three of them begin picking at the old knots.
It starts small. Niamh, wiping down the same patch of wood she’s already cleaned twice, mutters, “Your ma didn’t pay for that extension alone, you know. Da took out a second mortgage he never mentioned.” The sentence hangs there like cigarette smoke. Ríonach’s first instinct is to apologize for something she didn’t actually do; instead, she makes herself ask, “So who did pay for what?” Sadhbh, pretending fierce concentration over stacking pint glasses, listens without chiming in until silence threatens to close over again. Then she offers a deflating joke, or a plain question, “And who decided you had to be the responsible one?”, that lands sharper than either cousin expects.
Over months, a ledger of sorts emerges, not in the lawyer’s neat hand but in their own: who paid what, who signed which paper, who walked away, who stayed and worked double shifts, who got to “follow their passion” because someone else quietly didn’t. Dates get attached to old slights; numbers replace vague accusations. Sometimes voices rise and one of them storms off, only to reappear ten minutes later with tea or fresh pints and a grudging, “Right, where were we?”
Nothing is forgiven in a single scene. But as they keep at it, naming the deals struck in back rooms, the wills rewritten, the holidays skipped for overtime, blame loses its satisfying sharpness. What’s left underneath is messier: grief for grandparents who did their fearful best, for chances taken and chances never offered. They start saying “we” more than “you.”
No one drafts a treaty; there’s no solemn toast. Yet by the time spring light starts lingering in the bar windows, their arguments have a different weight. Not verdicts handed down, but old wounds held up to the light, examined together until they hurt a little less.
As Sadhbh’s EMT schedule steadies and Ríonach keeps declining the most flattering, most exploitative offers, they start a small, irregular “clinic and canvas” night in the bar’s back room. There’s no flyer campaign, just Niamh’s scrawled chalkboard propped by the toilets and word passed along barstools and WhatsApp threads.
Half the room is folding chairs and a donated blood-pressure cuff, a stack of city pamphlets fanned out like bad tarot. The other half is drop cloths, a battered easel, and cheap canvases leaning against the wall. Neighbors drift in on pretexts (“just to see,” “only here for the match”) and stay to let Sadhbh wrap the cuff around their arm, to have Ríonach press a brush into their hand.
Old men who won’t go near a doctor sit for Sadhbh “just this once,” grumbling while she writes down clinics that take their insurance, or lack of it. Teenagers paint over each other’s half-finished skies. Between readings and brushstrokes, stories spill out: the kind of small shames and stubborn hopes neither church nor hospital seems built to hear.
Fiachra, broke and nearly out of time on his visa, brings in his rough cut one Tuesday when the bar’s half-empty and the mop bucket still out. Niamh kills the sound on the match and lets him rig a bedsheet to the back-room wall. The first screening is tight-shouldered and silent until it isn’t: until someone recognizes a dead brother on-screen, or hears their own throwaway complaint about rent coming back at them with subtitles. A couple of lads walk out hard; one old regular cries without wiping his face. Fiachra flinches, notebook open, but he keeps coming back. By the second and third showings, people are shouting at the film, correcting dates, names, motives, and he’s revising in real time with their anger and pride as co-authors.
What began as Ríonach’s “heritage” paintings evolves into collaborative installations that braid her canvases with Sadhbh’s scribbled field notes from ambulance calls, Niamh’s ledger pages and beer‑ringed bar ephemera, and Fiachra’s grainy images and furious transcripts. Hung crooked in the back room, they turn evictions, layoffs, drownings, addictions into a shared, obstinate record of survival that refuses both tourist nostalgia and polite erasure, insisting, simply, that they were here.
When word finally comes that rezonings will reshape half the block, the bar doesn’t dissolve into wake talk but into a packed, makeshift assembly. Parish elders, undocumented tenants, young professionals, queer kids, and old union hands argue, translate, and plan. Over cheap pints and lukewarm tea. Ríonach steps to the mic, voice shaking as she names the trust and her cut of it out loud. Sadhbh follows, breaking down tenants’ unions, legal clinics, rent strikes in plain language. Niamh chairs with iron patience, tapping her pen when tempers flare. Fiachra drifts along the walls, lens lowered, recording minutes instead of stealing images. Less vulture than reluctant clerk to a community deciding, stubbornly, to author whatever comes next together.
Ríonach and Sadhbh don’t vanish into coupledom but fold their lives into the enclave’s new rhythm, the way you might fold a fresh flyer into an already overstuffed noticeboard. They move through it separately and together: tagging out behind the bar at closing, crossing paths on the stairs when EMT gear and paint-splattered coveralls brush past each other, sharing a thermos of too-strong coffee in the alley during five stolen minutes between crises.
On weeknights, when the back room fills with people learning how to read a lease or challenge a fine-print clause, Ríonach sets up a side table with torn-up ledgers and cheap canvases, asking kids and old-timers to sketch the buildings they’re afraid of losing. Sadhbh, off a ten-hour shift, leans in the doorway in her uniform, translating medical bureaucratese into “this is what happens if you don’t have insurance, and here’s what we can do anyway.” When someone mutters that art won’t stop a marshal at the door, Ríonach doesn’t argue; she hands them a pencil and asks them to write the marshal’s name down.
Weekends, the brownstone kitchen becomes neutral ground, if you can call a room with a marble countertop and inherited china “neutral.” They crowd the table with dollar‑store notebooks, grant printouts, a laptop that keeps threatening to die, and a box of bakery scones Sadhbh swears she got “wholesale.” Friends drift in and out: a paramedic with a side interest in photography, a tenant who knows everyone’s rent history by heart, a teenager who designs protest flyers on cracked software. Ríonach unlocks the office safe for the first time without a parent present, laying the trust statements out like evidence. Sadhbh taps each line, asking, flatly, “Okay, so what can this pay for that doesn’t just polish the Ó Dálaigh name?”
They argue, sometimes viciously. About money, optics, whether a sliding-scale print sale is solidarity or charity. They test ideas: an emergency medical fund administered from the bar, a residency for undocumented artists housed in the upstairs spare room, legal workshops paid for by selling small works instead of courting donors. When Ríonach suggests anonymizing her contribution, Sadhbh snorts.
“People already know whose house this is,” she says. “The point isn’t to pretend the line between us isn’t there. It’s to walk it where everyone can see.”
So they do. Ríonach starts listing herself, publicly, as both beneficiary and backer on flyers, taking the microphone when someone needs to say, in clear terms, whose money is on the table. Sadhbh stands beside her and lays out bus routes to housing court, what to do if immigration shows up at your door, how to get CPR certified for free. Their affection threads through it all in glances across crowded rooms, in the way Sadhbh rests a hand on Ríonach’s paint-streaked wrist when she starts to spiral, in the way Ríonach remembers to pack an extra sandwich in Sadhbh’s bag before a double shift.
They never quite manage the quiet, private life older relatives hint they ought to want. Instead, their intimacy is lived in public fragments: a shared joke over the mic when the projector fails, a dance around mop buckets after last call, a kiss stolen in the brownstone hallway with posters for the next tenants’ assembly curling on the wall beside them. The enclave’s pulse runs through their days, and they let it, choosing not to step outside of it but to stay tangled in the mess: two people trying, imperfectly and visibly, to make their love one more piece of the collective record.
Niamh stabilizes the bar by formalizing the favor network into a co‑op style membership scheme, pulling in younger tenants, undocumented workers, and older regulars as small stakeholders, trading volunteer hours, skills, and event nights for real say in how Flannagáin’s on the River evolves. It starts as a joke, “loyalty cards, but make it socialist”, and hardens into laminated membership forms slid across the bar with pint glasses.
She caps individual shares low enough that no landlord’s kid or nostalgic tech bro can buy control, and insists that “sweat counts the same as cash.” Cleaning after closing, running food during fundraisers, teaching an ESL class in the back room. These tally on the same ledger as twenty‑dollar buy‑ins. Once a month, she shuts the place for an hour and runs meetings where ballots are scribbled on coaster backs: Which liquor reps are out? How many nights go to shows, to union meetings, to tenant assemblies?
The old guard grumbles, the new crowd overexplains bylaws, but the bar’s future stops belonging solely to a balance sheet and starts belonging, noisily, to the people inside it.
Fiachra, backed into a corner by his own conscience and several pointed bar conversations, quietly flips his project from indictment to something closer to convening. He starts hosting open “editing nights” in the back room, spreading cheap printouts of his chapters alongside bowls of pretzels. Regulars circle damning paragraphs with biro, scrawl “that’s shite” or “you left out the cleaners on 47th,” and dictate corrections into his recorder. Teenagers borrow his mic to interview grandparents; undocumented workers insist on voice distortion and pseudonyms or nothing goes in. He builds a digital archive where every clip and caption carries the speaker’s name, when they want it, or their chosen alias, listing the parish, the tenants’ committee, the bar, and himself together as authors of record.
The parish, tenants’ groups, and new arts-and-education outfits begin to interlock: grant money, legal clinics, childcare swaps, pop‑up shows, and job boards circulating through back rooms and basements. Survival stops being a lone hustle and becomes an overlapping web of text chains and whispered introductions, where someone nearly always knows a shop steward, a sympathetic lawyer, or a spare couch for the week.
As rezonings creep outward, the Sunnyside Irish Quarter stops being only an inherited enclave and becomes a conscious experiment in shared stewardship. Rents are argued over in three languages at tenant meetings; leases get renegotiated with collective riders attached. Holidays stretch to include Filipino karaoke beside céilís, altar servers doubled as interpreters, and the stories that once orbited a few old families are held, messily, imperfectly, by many hands, and recorded as such.
Former bar regulars and parish stalwarts (nurses, transit retirees, undocumented kitchen staff) begin to step sideways out of the roles anyone expected of them. The ones who used to slip folded twenties into parish envelopes now slip them into seed funds for worker co‑ops, signing their names on incorporation papers with a mixture of awe and annoyance. A retired bus operator and a former line cook open a collectively‑owned café in what used to be an insurance office, the espresso machine paid for with pooled severance and GoFundMe dollars from nieces who live in Astoria now and call once a month.
Other storefronts, the new mixed‑use ones with suspiciously clean glass, fill up with odd hybrids: a laundromat where the night shift is also a tenants’ counseling clinic; a daycare whose board meetings happen in three languages and over reheated lasagna. Old union men, who swore they were finished with committees, find themselves chairing preliminary assemblies about printer leases and bylaws, arguing not about who gets overtime but who gets to use the front window for outreach flyers.
A different subset gravitate toward memory as their trade. They become the unofficial historians, half tour guide and half witness, leading small groups past bars, parish buildings, and former walk‑up tenements. They refuse the easy nostalgia the visitors seem to want. No, Mrs. O’Rourke snaps gently at a grad student with a Moleskine, it wasn’t all fiddles and soda bread, it was mold and three jobs and uncles who drank their pay. They point out which building housed undocumented roommates in the nineties, which corner saw immigration raids in the 2010s, which landlord “lost” repairs for six winters.
On some Saturdays Ríonach spots them from the train, umbrellas bobbing, a cluster paused in front of Flannagáin’s or the old union hall, listening as someone who once sat silently at the far end of the bar rewrites the neighborhood aloud, insisting on the sharp edges as well as the soft focus.
Niamh stabilizes Flannagáin’s on the River by bringing in a rotating slate of younger co‑owners from different backgrounds, trading small equity shares for sweat and vision until the bar is less a single‑family burden and more a stubborn, communal anchor. The first to sign papers at the sticky back table is a Dominican line cook from three doors down who has opinions about fryers and fire codes; the second is a Filipino nurse who wants quieter afternoon hours for union meetings and grief circles. Later, a Colombian DJ takes a sliver in exchange for re‑wiring the sound and negotiating with the crankiest neighbors about noise.
Niamh resists the word rebrand with an almost theological fervor, but the bar shifts anyway. The Guinness stays, the piano stays, the ledger of who owes what absolutely stays. What changes are the calendars (now a collage of handwritten notes in three languages) and the sense that if one person goes under, the place does not. Ríonach watches her cousin learn to say “our bar” and mean something larger, and harder to evict.
Sadhbh’s parents sign a long-term, below-market lease through the new neighborhood land trust, the kind of document her father reads three times and still mistrusts until a parish lawyer cousin and a tenants’ organizer both nod. The relief in the apartment is almost embarrassing in its plainness: her mother buys new curtains instead of another space heater; the good china comes down for tea on a Tuesday. Sadhbh keeps her contribution quiet. An automatic transfer from her now‑steady emergency‑services paycheck to the land trust fund, logged under a generic donor ID. She jokes that she’s just “paying rent on the past,” and spends her off‑shift hours running ride‑alongs and exam‑prep nights for local teenagers who eye her EMT jacket with wary, practical hunger.
Fiachra’s project, once jagged with accusation, limps and then strides into the world as a hybrid of documentary, testimony, and ruthless self‑critique. It does not blow up the enclave so much as unmask it. Undergraduates argue with its footnotes; parish book clubs mutter at its harsher portraits, and yet younger kids quietly pass around dog‑eared copies, underlining the bits that feel like home.
Old rifts soften not in speeches but in logistics: who brings the soda bread, who wrangles the toddlers, who knows the hymn in Irish. Weddings, naming days, milestone wakes weave together once‑splintered threads, so that the people once glimpsed only at the bar, the parish steps, or late‑night fundraisers now greet one another as provisional kin, making elastic space for whatever stories Ríonach and Sadhbh will write next.
Years later, their names are said together without thought, on fundraiser flyers, in parish bulletins, over pints at Flannagáin’s, as if the pairing had always been there, a quiet fact like the River or the 7 train.
“Ríonach and Sadhbh’ll sort it,” an aunt will say, waving off some logistical nightmare involving a double-booked parish hall and a broken sound system. No one bothers to specify which of them is calling the electrician and which is sweet‑talking the sacristan; the division of labor has settled into something wordless and exact.
At Flannagáin’s, the chalkboard for the next benefit night carries their surnames in the same cramped, careful hand Niamh once used for drink specials. “Art & Ambulances,” one regular christens the evening, raising his pint. The phrase sticks. A few years on, no one remembers who coined it.
In parish write‑ups, they appear as “local artist R. Ó Dálaigh and EMT S. Sheehan,” the initials a futile attempt at formality that fools no one. Old men at the bar, who once muttered about “those Ó Dálaigh types,” now grumble more democratically about the mayor, rent, or whatever new zoning acronym threatens their block. When they say “the girls,” it is not diminishment so much as a rough, instinctive inclusion, the way they used to speak of cousins who’d always be called lads no matter their age.
Newcomers to the neighborhood learn the pairing as part of the unofficial orientation: where to catch the bus after midnight, which bodega sells the decent rashers, and that if you’re in the kind of trouble that needs both a stretcher and someone to yell at Housing, there are two women whose door you can knock on, upstairs in the brownstone.
People argue, sometimes, about who is responsible for what: who pushed the land trust through, who fought the rezoning, who started the wake‑fund that quietly erases funeral debt. The arguments never stick. By then, the story has set hard: you say one name, and the other follows, as naturally as the next stop on the line.
The upstairs room that once belonged only to Ríonach’s canvases turns into a shared command center: EMT manuals dog‑eared beside sketchbooks, grant applications open next to union newsletters, dinner dishes shoved to the edge of the table to make room for whatever tonight’s crisis requires. The skylight that used to catch only the sheen of oil paint now falls on high‑vis jackets slung over the back of heirloom chairs, a stethoscope coiled beside a palette knife as if both were simply different tools for triage.
On some nights it’s all CPR protocols and complaint letters to the ambulance service drafted in Ríonach’s neat, looping hand while Sadhbh dictates from the couch, one sock off, ankle taped from a bad step off a curb. On others, Sadhbh scrolls through benefits‑office fine print, squinting, while Ríonach staples flyers for a tenants’ meeting that will double as an exhibition, gaffer tape and Blu‑Tack sharing a bowl originally meant for fruit.
If the room looks cluttered to visitors, it feels, to them, correctly full: a map spread open, mid‑journey.
When one of them falters: a bad review that makes Ríonach’s stomach drop, a brutal double shift that leaves Sadhbh’s hands shaking, an unexpected bill sliding under the door like a threat: the response is already in motion before either admits defeat. The kettle’s hissing, or the good glasses are on the table with the bottle uncorked; takeaway menus are fanned out over an unpaid notice, triage by curry and lo mein. The old, sharp arguments about money, risk, or who’s allowed to be tired stand politely in the hall and wait their turn. By unspoken agreement, first comes sugar or salt or whiskey, whatever’s required; only when color has returned to a face do they pick up the quarrel again, carefully, like a brush or a stethoscope.
Holidays become a rotating chaos of accents and casseroles, paper crowns askew over buzzcuts and careful blowouts, old grievances distilled into half‑joking toasts that still draw a warning look from Niamh. Nieces and godchildren are drilled, good‑humoredly, in both their names as Gaeilge and in English, small tongues mapping a history of distance, then collision, then deliberate, stubborn closeness.
On an ordinary evening, walking home under the train’s rattle with takeout balanced between them, their fingers find each other without ceremony; they step off the curb in unison, already arguing about paint colors and pension plans and whose turn it is to call the insurance company. The future doesn’t arrive with trumpets so much as receipts and paint chips. Less a leap than a steady, shared stride.
Years later, the room they finally do it in is not a chapel or a gallery but a beige city office whose chief decorating principle is Fire Exit signage. The fluorescents hum like an anxious relative. A plastic plant droops in the corner. Someone has taped a cartoon kidney to the filing cabinet with the caption KNOW YOUR DONOR OPTIONS, the ink half‑faded.
They stand at a scratched laminate counter, shoulders almost but not quite touching. The clerk, who has the air of a woman who has seen every possible permutation of human entanglement and remains unimpressed by all of them, slides a stack of forms across: power of attorney, health care proxy, HIPAA releases, beneficiary designations. Everything in triplicate, everything in twelve‑point font that makes Sadhbh squint.
“Romantic,” Sadhbh mutters, turning a page. “Be still my beating heart.”
“Shut up and initial next to paragraph six,” Ríonach says, though her own hand isn’t entirely steady. The pen they’ve been given has CITY OF NEW YORK printed on the barrel and a chewed cap that she tries not to think about too hard.
They read more carefully than the clerk expects; of course they do. Sadhbh traces a line with her finger, lips moving silently over phrases like in the event of incapacitation. Ríonach wants to make a joke about how she’s been incapacitated by deadlines for years, but the words won’t quite form around the stone in her throat.
“Are you sure?” Sadhbh asks once, low enough that it doesn’t have to leave the two of them.
“About you deciding whether to pull the plug?” Ríonach answers, managing a crooked smile. “I trust your judgment. You send back undercooked fries.”
“That’s a heavy responsibility, Ó Dálaigh.”
“So is my IRA,” she says, and that gets a snort, which is what she was aiming for.
One by one, they sign where they’re told, black ink tying their names together in ways no priest or art critic ever could. Emergency contact. Primary agent. Sole beneficiary. None of it is framed, or Instagrammed, or announced with canapés. The clerk stamps, dates, and slides copies into manila envelopes with the same bored efficiency she’d devote to a dog‑license renewal.
But when they step back into the grimy corridor, fluorescent hum replaced by the echo of other people’s errands, there’s a new, unshowy gravity to the way they reach for each other’s hands. No audience, no applause: just the quiet, bureaucratic fact of it: if anything happens, it’s their phones that will ring first, and they have, in terrible, precise legal language, agreed to pick up.
On the first night in the rent‑controlled apartment they’ve somehow pried from the jaws of the market, through a latticework of union hookups, expired listings, and one very pointed conversation with a landlord who turned out to owe Niamh a favor, they sit cross‑legged on the paint‑spattered floor, backs to a wall still half‑primed.
The only working light is a naked bulb swinging faintly in the draft from the rattling radiator. They eat supermarket sheet cake straight from the aluminum tray, carving crooked rectangles with a plastic knife, the frosting leaving blue smears on paper plates and on Ríonach’s knuckles.
“Where’d you pack the good mugs?” Sadhbh asks, eyeing the chipped promotional pint glasses currently serving as tea cups.
“In the box marked ‘kitchen, obviously,’” Ríonach says. They both look at a leaning city of boxes, all marked KITCHEN in increasingly frantic Sharpie.
On the wide, painted‑shut windowsill, a manila folder sags open: EMT rotation printouts slipping against scholarship forms, grant guidelines, a half‑finished artist statement. Their lives, alphabetized and paper‑clipped, already shuffled together. Outside, the 7 train thrums past; inside, their arguments about mugs blur, gently, into arguments about shelves, schedules, how to make it all fit.
At a raucous fundraiser in the bar’s back room, the air thick with spilled beer and raffle‑ticket hope, Ríonach’s canvases crowd the walls between curling union flyers and parish notices for bereavement groups. Christmas lights blink over saints’ faces and storm‑grey skylines. Sadhbh shoulders through the crush with a plastic pitcher, refilling flimsy cups with the efficiency of long practice, dodging elbows and affectionate slaps on the back.
When an older regular, flushed and tipsy, jerks a thumb toward the paintings and says, “Look at you, pouring pints under your wife’s fancy art,” she snorts, rolls her eyes for form’s sake, and doesn’t bother to correct the tense. The word lands light and certain, like something already decided, just waiting on paperwork to catch up.
One late visit to the brownstone, after another round of polite, sharpened talk about trusts and titles in the kitchen downstairs, they escape to the studio, where heat pipes clang and turpentine bites the air. Surrounded by unfinished work and old family portraits stacked face‑in against the wall, Sadhbh taps a blank stretch of primed canvas with a paint‑stained fingernail.
“This one’s ours, yeah? Not theirs?”
She’s half‑joking, half‑daring. Ríonach, hair escaping its pins, a smear of ultramarine on her cheekbone like war paint, feels the familiar pressure of names and deeds and signatures pressing up from the floorboards. For once, she doesn’t equivocate. She nods, drags a chair closer, and starts sketching them both into the lower corner of the new piece: two small, stubborn figures at the edge of a larger, shifting city, refusing to be painted out.
Many ordinary evenings from that first one, they fall asleep on a sagging couch with the train’s distant roar filtering through the window, laundry half‑folded on the coffee table, tomorrow’s shifts and deadlines already stacked against them. Yet their ankles are knotted together under the blanket, an unconscious, unshowy knot that holds fast, a small domestic treaty signed nightly in cotton and skin.