Early one Sunday, after the first service in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives through Wexford towards the coast where my mother's family is from. It is a warm, bright day, with scattered shadows and sudden greenish flashes along the road. We pass through the village of Sileili, where my father once lost our red cow in a card game, and we go past the market at Carn, where the man who won the animal sold it a little later. My father throws his hat onto the passenger seat, rolls down the window, and lights a cigarette.

I undo my braids with a toss of my head and lie on my back on the rear seat, looking up through the back window. Sometimes the sky is clear, blue. Other times, clouds as white as chalk cover the blue, but the image that remains is an intoxicating chaos of sky and trees, cut here and there by wires over which, every so often, small brown flocks of fleeting birds fly with force. I wonder what it’s like there, that place that belongs to the Kinsellas. I imagine a tall woman standing over me, making me drink milk, still warm from the cow. I imagine another, less likely version of her, wearing an apron, pouring pancake batter into a pan, asking me if I’d like some more, as my mother sometimes does when she’s in a good mood.