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She’s got a wheeze in her chest from too many Chicago winters. Still, she laughs as she lengthens her stride to keep up with Ellie’s tugging. Her pretty little perfect granddaughter is almost four and she’s more beautiful than anything Lucile has ever seen.
Her curls almost make her think of that friend Lucile used to have, so long ago. Beautiful blonde waves tumbling down her back. There’s no chaos to Ellie though. Only simple, unashamed happiness.
Lucile has never been proud of anything quite like she’s proud of Ellie. Her girl could conquer to the world and she intends to be around to watch her do it. It’s the drive to stop smoking and eat better and maybe do a little bit of exercise sometimes that she didn’t think she would ever feel before.
Everything’s good, better than it has been in a long time.
She’s seeing a man from Church. A man her parents probably would have been happy to see her with, if they were still talking to her.
Last Lucile had heard, her mother was still hanging in there. She keeps meaning to put in a call, take Ellie up to see the old bat. Maybe Mandy. Try and show her that she didn’t go so wrong after all. (Even though she really did.)
It’s warm and Ellie’s in sandals and shorts, a t-shirt with a turtle on it that she’s been insisting on wearing for about a week straight.
“Mickey bought it for her, that’s why,” Mandy had said.
Lucile doesn’t completely get it, but sometimes (often) Mickey and the ginger boy, Ian are all Ellie wants to talk about.
They took me to see the fishes, Nana.
We made a cake, Nana.
Uncle Ian is real strong, Nana. He lifts me like a rocket ship.
Did you know Uncle Mick’s a real good drawer, Nana?
The answer to that last question had been a resounding no. But then… it makes her remember her sweet baby boy again. Crayons clutched in his hand and careful strokes fitting the colour inside the lines. The way Ellie pokes her tongue out of the corner of her mouth when she concentrates is reminiscent of how Mickey had been in those moments.
It almost hurts, almost.
It’s not such a far-fetched thought then that Mickey would be good at drawing. He’s a tattoo artist now, Mandy had told her. It seems sort of fitting, even if she’d always thought he was stupid for getting those cruel letters inked onto his fingers way back when.
Lucile can’t pinpoint the exact moment it went wrong with Mickey. Or the moment it apparently seemed to go right. It’s an anomaly she doesn’t know how to understand, so she doesn’t try. They say don’t fix what isn’t broken, but she also doesn’t see the point in trying to fix what’s smashed to smithereens.
She lost all the pieces to her and Mickey’s relationship a long, long time ago.
Ellie squeals suddenly, pulling her hand out of Lucile’s and it’s all she can do to watch as the little girl goes tearing off across the grass of the park.
The redhead looks taller than the last time Lucile saw him, filled out more. Or maybe that’s just the way his tank top leaves little to the imagination, the fabric scarce in the right places and tight in all the better ones. It stretches across his wide chest, but Lucile can see the dip of his collarbones clearly, the hint of chest hair and the splattering of freckles across his shoulders.
He really is beautiful, she thinks. Her son did well.
The muscles in his arms shift and bulge as he picks Ellie up, throwing her into the air with a laugh that lights up his entire face.
“How are you, monstermunch?” he asks, propping Ellie on his hip like she weighs nothing.
Lucile hasn’t been able to pick her up like that for over a year now.
“You’ve grown again!” he accuses.
“Have I, Uncle Ee?” Ellie asks, her palm braced over his heart.
“Definitely,” Ian says seriously. “You’ll be taller than your Uncle Mick soon.”
Ellie giggles, curls bouncing and the sound like music as it drifts across the short space between them. “’s not hard, Uncle Ee,” she says, the tone of her voice making it obvious she knows she’s being a cheeky little minx.
Ian laughs happily though and swings her around to make her squeal. “When did you get so cheeky, huh?” he asks.
Ellie reaches up a hand and carelessly ruins Ian’s no doubt carefully styled hair. He doesn’t even blink though, like it doesn’t matter to him. It probably doesn’t.
Ian’s eyes meet Lucile’s over Ellie’s head and he freezes slightly like maybe he wasn’t expecting it to be her. He relaxes soon enough, even taking the few steps closer so that he can say, “Lucile,” politely.
“Gallagher,” she replies, with the same polite nod of her head.
It makes him laugh. “You can call me Ian, you know,” he says.
“I know,” she says.
She watches as he lowers Ellie to the ground and motions towards the playground beside them. “Why don’t you go play, monstermunch?” he says.
“Will you come push me soon?” she asks, looking up at him with wide, imploring eyes. She points to the swings.
Ian nods like it is the most serious thing, “Of course.”
He looks at Lucile then and there’s none of the hatred there that she would have expected from someone so close to her son. It makes her wonder what Mickey might have said, or if maybe it’s just the case that she isn’t worth the words at all.
“Can I buy you a drink?” he asks. “I’m on a break between clients and this place does the best smoothies.”
He motions to the cart nearby and Lucile thinks, why not then.
“Sure,” she says and sits on a bench to watch him go.
He talks to the girl making the drinks like they’re best friends, making her laugh and blush and no doubt tipping her when the drinks are finally handed over. His drink is yellow and the one he hands over is a dark red. It tastes like strawberries, the thick juice sliding down her throat and cooling her just the right amount under the glare of the sun.
It was a good idea, smoothies. She doesn’t tell him this though, just mutters a simple thank you.
“So you knew Monica,” is what he leads with, eyes on Ellie where she’s on the jungle gym.
He’d make a good parent, she can already tell. Careful and watchful and just easy-going enough. She’s not sure how her son would be though. She’s not sure watching Ian Gallagher now how he and her son even work together at all. They seem like opposites.
But then, it’s not really her place to be trying to work it out.
“I did,” she replies, corrects herself. “I do.”
Ian’s eyebrow creeps up in surprise and he takes a long drink from his smoothie, apparently mulling the next words over. “Why?” is what he asks.
“We grew up together,” Lucile says.
For once, she’s quite glad to get to share the story. There was never anyone before who would be able to think to ask, who would care to listen. It feels uplifting to be able to share the madness of Monica with someone who could appreciate the tale.
“She introduced me to all the mistakes in my life,” she says. The words are coming freer than she thought they would do; but maybe it’s just something about this boy. Maybe Lucile is just as easily softened to him as the girl who made their smoothies. “Drugs, drink, Terry…”
Ian shakes his head. “Terry wasn’t a mistake,” he says, adamant. “I don’t care what he did to you, how shitty it all felt. It got you Mickey, Mandy.” He motions to where Ellie is talking to another small girl. The ease with which children can make friends has always been beautiful. “It got you Ellie.”
“Did it get me Mickey though?” Lucile asks him.
He shrugs. “Poor choice of words maybe,” he says. “But you’re the one who let him go.”
And there it is.
It’s not so much an accusation as a statement of fact, but it still hurts.
“So he has talked about me.”
Ian scoffs and his long fingers stroke through the condensation on the outside of his plastic cup. He wipes it off on his skin and Lucile watches the smears dry against the orange hairs of his arm.
“Of course he has,” he says. “You’re his mother.” He rolls his shoulders and leans back a little, his eyes still on Ellie. “Not a good one, admittedly, but good mothers are hard to come by in the Southside.”
She wasn’t Southside though, not really. She wasn’t born into it and she wasn’t supposed to turn herself into it though. That life, even with so many children had just felt like one large pretence.
“It was never my choice to make,” she protests, because it wasn’t really.
Monica stole her choice with the drugs.
Terry stole her choice with the pregnancies.
Life just kicked her in the balls and left her to struggle back up onto her knees. She’s not ashamed of doing so, but maybe she is of how she managed to get this far.
“Maybe not,” Ian concedes. “But making the choice of which children… child to love was all on you.”
He’s right, nobody forced her to love all of them. Any of them. But she does, in her own way.
“He thinks I don’t love him.”
She doesn’t know why she’s surprised and the look on Ian’s face clearly says she shouldn’t be.
“You took Mandy and left him there to rot,” he says, words not unkind, but so blunt that it hurts all the same. “What is he supposed to think? Did you even want him or Iggy? Or were the boys just a means to an end to get Mandy?”
She knows how it’s looked like that sometimes. She’s considered it a possibility herself.
But she remembers the feeling of holding Nicky in her arms. Of teaching Iggy to walk. Of watching Mickey in the quiet of the night. The feeling in those memories has never gone away. She’s never forgotten it and she knows she never will.
She loves her children. Always has done. And Lucile has failed in a lot of ways, but that will never not be true.
“I wanted all of them,” she says. “But I couldn’t afford to save more than one.”
And Mandy had been so innocent, so breakable. She’d only just bore Joey out into the world when she’d finally made the decision to leave for good. She’d taken Mandy because the boys she bore were always more resilient and Helen had always been a sucker for Joey’s wide eyes.
“You didn’t save her,” Ian says. “Mickey did.”
He doesn’t elaborate when Lucile looks up at him sharply.
He doesn’t look like he’s going to say anything else at all, but she can’t help but ask, “So how did you and my son start out?”
She’s curious, so sue her. She’s as invested in this love story as she has any right to be. She doesn’t understand it, so maybe that’s what is so appealing. She’s intrigued.
“Foster care,” Ian admits. He’s got a half smile that just screams nostalgia. He looks fond. “He fascinated me. It just snowballed from there.”
There’s obviously so much more to the story, but Lucile doesn’t ask. She doesn’t have the words to. And she’s too scared of him not answering, of him walking away to even try.
“You said you’re in between clients at the moment,” she says and it’s not a question, not quite, but he nods anyway.
“I’m a fitness instructor,” he says, shrugs. “I basically yell at people to run faster, but it’s whatever. More pay, better hours. Can’t complain.”
“You got my son on a treadmill yet?” she asks.
She knows she’s bringing it back to Mickey again, but she can’t help it. She’s curious.
The look on Ian’s face says he isn’t judging her as he replies, “I couldn’t pay Mickey to get on a treadmill.” He looks amused. “Says he only runs if something’s chasing him.”
Lucile laughs lowly. She can imagine Mickey has probably gotten chased a couple of times in his laugh, no doubt by the police. Ian’s expression sours when their eyes meet and he looks back at Ellie sharply, like he knows that’s where the neutral ground lies.
“Don’t do that,” he warns. “Don’t think the worst of him all the time.” She opens his mouth, but he cuts her off before she can get a word out. “He’s better than anything you could have had a hand in influencing. He’s not in jail. He’s stable, which is more than you can probably say.”
It is, but Lucile isn’t admitting that.
“I don’t know him,” she says, drinks more of her warming smoothie. It suddenly feels thicker in her throat, like it may choke her at any minute. “Can’t help but just assume he’d turn out to be his father’s son.”
Ian scoffs, looks rightly disgusted. “So if he isn’t, does that make him yours?” he asks.
Lucile doesn’t really know what that means. She doesn’t even know what ‘her son’ could look like. It must show on her face, because Ian just rolls his eyes.
“Do you even know you have another grandchild?” he asks suddenly. She wants to cower under the force of his tone. And maybe she can see how he fits with her son. Mickey’s the wolf in sheep’s clothing, pretending to be something he isn’t; but Ian is the sheep that doesn’t even know it’s a wolf itself until something causes it to snap. She knows which is more dangerous.
“His name’s Toby,” Ian tells her, voice brimming with a sort of violence that Lucile prays doesn’t bubble over. Still, she’s floored by his words. Because no, she didn’t know. “He’s three, loves dinosaurs and basketball. He’s fucking perfect and he’s all of that without needing to be near you. Because your children, your grandchildren, they don’t need you. You’re just a sad old woman who broke her own family and doesn’t have the balls to make the effort to put it back together.”
He’s right, which is why it stings.
They don’t need her. Ellie, Mandy, neither of them would fall apart if she were to die tomorrow. But she doesn’t know where she would be without them to focus on.
It’s the cold hard truth of her life.
She’s got a large family behind the scenes, but the only part to give a damn is so small it’s almost suffocating in a backwards way. Lucile doesn’t know how to fix it though.
“How would I even start?” she asks, thinking aloud more than anything.
Ian stands, drops his drained cup into the bin beside them and stares down at her with eyes so impossibly bright that Lucile has to look away.
“Monica’s like you,” he says. “She cares, in her own way, but makes shitty decisions. She can’t even help it. She fucks up our lives when she’s there and leaves us do deal with the fallout when she’s bored. But she gets let back in every time, like nothing happened.” He levels her with a look she can feel shaking right through to her very soul. “And do you know why? Because sometimes children just need mothers and there’s nothing more complicated about it than that.”
He shrugs, already walking backwards to where Ellie is standing waiting by the swings. “But you know…” he says, the sun behind him making it look like his hair’s on fire. “A sorry and some chocolate cake works wonders sometimes too.”