Read Online The Pub Across the Pond by Mary Carter - Free Book Online

square in the chest.
    â€œI’m going to win,” he said. “A fecking Yank running the pub. Over my dead body.”
    â€œThat can be arranged,” Siobhan said. Suddenly, a familiar blast of dread-cold air ran through Ronan. He looked behind him. Anchor was still there, but the rest of the men had vanished.
    â€œWhere are the lads?” Ronan said.
    â€œThey took off,” Clare said.
    â€œThe minute you said Howards End,” Anchor said.

C HAPTER 5
    The Good Woman
    If there was anything Dublin, Ohio, knew how to do well, it was throw its annual Irish festival. Like Ireland, except smaller, their website bragged. Carlene Rivers thought the festival was just an excuse to eat, and drink, and drink, and eat some more, but to disguise that fact, the hundred thousand or so visitors who came through each year were also treated to Irish music, Irish dancing, Irish dogs (canines with credentials), sand castle–building contests, dart-throwing contests, whiskey-tasting contests, jigs, sheep herding (spelled h-e-a-r-d-i-n-g), and more green crap for sale than Carlene had ever seen in her life.
    To be fair, the festival was always a fun day out. The food was delicious, the music was both live and lively, the people watching couldn’t be beat, and the dogs could do some pretty awesome tricks. Parents were placated by plastic mugs of green beer, and children were bombarded with activities just for them. On Wendy’s Wee Folk Stage, Skelly the Leprechaun emceed contests for children with the reddest hair, greenest eyes, and most freckles. If Carlene wasn’t blond with blue eyes, and her best friend, Becca, wasn’t a brunette, Becca would have been screaming ageism and dragging them up onstage.
    The festival was held in the summer because Ohio in March was too unpredictable, and nobody wanted his or her shamrockriddled tents flapping in the wind. Carlene and Becca, friends since they were in kindergarten, had been coming to Dublin’s Irish festival since the summer they turned thirteen. Rebecca Weinstein was the only Jewish person Carlene had ever met who regularly wore Kiss Me I’m Irish T-shirts. She was wearing it today, of course, along with her plaid skirt, which was actually more Scottish than Irish, Carlene thought, but she kept this to herself. Carlene wasn’t a physician, but she believed in their creed. First, do no harm.
    Becca was pregnant and due to pop in less than a month. She was here to have a good time and “distract herself from her alien stomach.” Carlene thought if she wanted to distract herself, wearing what amounted to a kilt and a tight T-shirt over her bulbous stomach wasn’t the way to go, but once again, she kept this to herself. No good would come of belittling either her outfit or the Irish festival to Becca—she would defend every bit of it, down to the grown men who wore giant leprechaun ears and painted Irish flags or four-leaf clovers on their hairy beer bellies. Becca was thirty going on thirteen. She was also deliriously happy, so in turn, Carlene pretended to be deliriously happy, although she drew the line at wearing anything with a leprechaun, pot of gold, or shamrock. Most of these festivalgoers, Carlene thought, put the sham in shamrock.
    They ate their way down the street. Bangers and mash, shepherd’s pie, curry chips, and salt-and-vinegar chips, and chips with mayonnaise, and chips with cheese, or just plain old chips with tons of salt. Chips, of course, weren’t American potato chips, which the Irish called “crisps,” they were big, fat French fries. Becca was yammering on about getting Irish soda bread when a man at a nearby tent called out to them.
    â€œCmereIwancha,” he said. Carlene stopped. In the entire festival, it was the first real Irish accent she’d heard. Becca kept walking. Carlene, drawn in by the man’s lyrical voice and generous smile, walked into his tent. It was empty except