Lillian’s Reviews > Brooklyn > Status Update

Eilis saw names on headstones that she recognized, the parents or grandparents of her friends from school, men and women whom she remembered well, all gone now, held here on the edge of the town. For the moment, most of them were remembered by the living, but it was a memory slowly fading as each season passed.

‘I think about it,’ Eilis said, ‘and I can’t bear it and then I forgot about it for a minute and then when it comes back it’s as though I just heard the news. I can’t get over it.’

‘The funeral will be the day after tomorrow,’ he said.
It was the softness in his voice, the guarded way he avoided her eyes, that made her start to cry.

She watched him carefully because she knew that this was his way not only of asking her to marry him but of suggesting that marriage had been already tacitly agreed between them. It was the details of how they would live, the life he could offer her, that he was presenting now.

They moved around the city centre, slowly becoming more relaxed, beginning even to laugh sometimes as they talked. At times, it struck her, they spoke like responsible adults - he told her stories about work and about weekends - and then they were suddenly back as children or teenagers, jeering at one another or telling jokes.