No Way to Say Goodbye by Anna McPartlin

his life. He remembered that, following their mother and her lover in the car ahead, they had cried all the way. Neither had wanted to move away from their dad and their friends but he had told them to be brave and to enjoy the adventure and that their home would always be waiting. Everything inside him had threatened to snap but he held on tight to reason and reminded his children that he loved them. He told them to think of England as boarding-school because they would spend all their holidays with him at home. When they walked through the departure gates he had struggled so hard not to cry because a father’s tears could scar a child. Instead he wept all the way home, having to stop the car a number of times because he couldn’t see the road.
    For two weeks he hibernated in his soulless home, dressed in an ill-fitting tracksuit, holed up watching daytime TV with the phone in his hand. Then Mary had sorted him out. She had let herself in with his spare key and, ignoring his protests, she had cleaned the pigsty his home had become, then cooked a spicy lamb stew, his favourite of her dishes. He showered and shaved, but only after she’d threatened him with a kitchen knife. He joined her at the freshly laid table, silent and distant, and attempted to eat while she talked to him about all the things he could do with his kids when he saw them.
    “Remember when Chris was a baby?” she asked.
    “It seems like a lifetime ago.”
    “Nah, not so long. You were abroad working for a lot of that.”
    “Don’t remind me,” he said, his hands over his ears.
    “Did he forget you then?”
    “No.”
    “No,” she agreed. “He used to sit on the doorstep waiting for you to come home.” She smiled at the memory. “You’re their dad. You’re the one they love. So miss them while they’re out of sight but remember it’s not for ever. You’ll see them again.”
    Suddenly he was embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I know it’s not the same as losing Ben.”
    “This isn’t about me,” she said. “Not everything that happens has to be measured against losing Ben. You have a right to your pain. I just want to make sure it doesn’t swallow you up.”
    He reached across the table and took her hand in his. “What would I do without you, cousin?” he asked.
    “What would I do without you , cousin?” she responded.
    “Life goes on.”
    “And the only choice we have is how we want to live it,” she replied.
    At first Ivan’s kids had groused and griped about their new life. They bashed their friends, school, teachers and their mother. They turned grumbling into an art form. Ivan would spend hours on the phone attending to their complaints. Their problems were not so different from the ones they’d left behind, and with time they made new friends and became accustomed to their environment. Intermittently he’d receive some positive information about an outing or something that had happened at school. They had settled in, and Kent was not as far away as he’d first thought. Kerry airport was only half an hour down the road and there were cheap flights to three London airports every day of the week. The journey took less than an hour. When he worked out that it would actually take them longer to travel home to Kerry from Dublin than it would from Kent, he felt a lot better.
    And just when he’d relaxed his kids stopped talking to him. No more whingeing and whining, no more bitching and moaning. No more stories of friends or outings or anything. Their conversations became stilted, and again he worried that he was losing them, but something in the back of his mind told him it might be worse than that…
    After his few pints with the American he didn’t feel like going home so he returned to his boat. The evening sky contained a hint of purple and the weather was mild so he located a beer in the fridge and sat on deck sipping it and watching the dark waters as the Waterboys sang “Fisherman’s Blues” from an old CD player