What’s Irish for ‘I Love You’?

What says all the things you cannot say?

Author’s photo of author’s battered copy of The Country Girls.

‘You’re a right looking eejit,’ I said to my mother.

She was in London. In hospital. She was dying.

Her face was pale and still. I was reading The Country Girls to her. I put on the Irish accent I learned from summers spent in my mother’s hometown of Belfast. Now and then, O’Brien’s words…