Page 54 of Trying Sophie

“Do you think she’s ready to hear it, Colm?”

“Could be, could be not.”

“Oh for chrissakes, would one of you just tell me what you’re on about!”

My grandma sighed. “You may as well tell her the whole thing, Colm.”

“So the thing is Sophie, Declan’s had a thing for you for … well, pretty much all of his life.”

“That’s absurd,” I objected. “I’m willing to buy the stuff about when we were kids, but I left almost a decade ago.”

“You told her about that silly chit … what was her name, Killeen? And the others?”

“I told her about Killeen.”

He hadn’t said her name, but I figured that was the girl who’d tried to trap Declan into marriage.

“Okay, no more pussyfooting Sophie my girl,” my grandma said, turning to me. “It goes like this. When Declan went up to Dublin, he was better than anyone thought. He could play multiple positions and he took the team by storm. Soon enough he’d broken into the starting 15 which made the fans sit up and take notice. Female fans in particular.”

That last part was said with extra emphasis so I wouldn’t miss her point. Not that it was hard to. Having spent some time around professional athletes, I’d seen women throw themselves without shame at them, so I knew better than most where this story was heading.

“I’m familiar with that phenomena,” I answered, rubbing at a tight spot in my chest.

“Yes, dear, I’m sure you are,” she replied kindly.

My dad wasn’t an athlete himself, but with his tie to the team, he got to enjoy the same spoils.

“Well, since Colm had been so good at setting him straight with that she-devil Killeen, Colleen asked him to intervene again.”

I got the impression she wasn’t entirely on board with Declan’s mom always running to my grandpa, but knowing my grandma, she’d probably never said a word about it. Whereas the ability to bite one’s tongue had skipped my mom, my grandma and I were both experts at it.

“It’s not an easy thing, you know, telling a young man who’s flush with cash and the toast of the town that he’s walking a bad path,” my grandpa said, taking over the story. “He wasn’t too keen on me warning him off those girls.”

Of course he hadn’t been. Good looking, famous, and with more women than he’d know what to do with? I’d seen enough of Declan’s temper tantrums when we’d been kids to imagine exactly how he would have responded to my grandfather’s interference. It wouldn’t have been a pretty sight.

“He wouldn’t have any of it,” he continued, shaking his head. “Maybe it was a bad idea, but I decided that if I talked about you during our visits, maybe he’d see there were other types of women out there. Women he could be proud to be with instead of all those tarts.”

“To hear Cian tell it, Declan didn’t give up the tarts though.”

He winced and looked around the small room. “Hand me that crate, would you?”

When I passed it his way, he plopped down and my grandmother rested her hand on his shoulder. “You shouldn’t tire yourself out Colm. You know what the doctor said.”

“I’m fine Maureen. Just need to sit down a bit.”

The small, dark room descended into quiet for a few moments.

“Now, where was I?” he asked and cast his eyes to the ceiling. “Oh yes. So any time Declan came home to help his mam or visit his sister, he’d stop here too. I started to notice that after a while, he’d ask me questions about you: what you were up to, where you were, had I heard from you lately. That sort of thing. He hadn’t … ehm … curbed his activities, if you catch my meaning, but he was definitely showing a lot of interest in your activities too.”

And that’s when I realized what my grandpa had been plotting and for how just long.

“Oh my god,” I drawled. “You do realize how ridiculous this plan of yours was, don’t you?”

“I told you Sophie, I didn’t think anything would happen. I just hoped he’d realize the women he spent time with weren’t the right type of woman. I thought maybe he’d meet someone good and smart—like you—and he’d settle down with her.”

“Settle down at 27?” I scoffed and looked to my grandma.

“When he had his heart attack, did the doctors run a scan of his head too just to be sure?”

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