Excerpt from Trouble the Living by Francesca McDonnell Capossela, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I went to the sink and opened the medicine cabinet. I studied Ma's makeup: old eyeliner pens and half-filled mascara bottles. I thought of the lipstick I'd seen in the magazine. Vendetta. I wanted the lipstick. I wanted to be someone new. I wanted to be like Ina, be with Ina. Somehow, she seemed older than I did, more self-assured. I wondered how she had gotten to be like that, while I still felt like a child sometimes.

"Ach it seems like a lot of worrying—"

Her words were cut off as she dunked her head underwater. She reemerged, hair dripping down her back.

"For no real reason like. All this hating each other because of which Mass we go to and what school and what sports teams we like. At the end of the day, what's the difference? We say the Eucharist is the body; they say it isn't. Who bloody cares?"

I watched her in the mirror as she spoke. She was detangling her hair with her fingers, focusing on a knot she'd found.

"Prods don't go to Mass," I said, my voice harder than I meant it to be. "And sure you know it's not about the bloody Eucharist." I turned back to face her, still shocked by what she'd said. "It's about them coming into our country and taking our language and our land and our houses and our jobs and our food and making us second-class citizens. It's about the fact that we're Irish, not British, and yet they still say we're living in the United fecking Kingdom. United, it's a bloody joke."

"Jaysus," Ina said, raising her hands. Her face looked pale, like I actually had frightened her. "I didn't know I was talking to Ma," she said. "Calm yourself; I was only thinking aloud."

She had sat up straighter in the bath, and I could tell that she suddenly felt strange being there, vulnerable and naked. A flush of guilt passed over me.

"Ach sorry," I said. "You caught me off guard's all." I rubbed a hand over my eyes. Was it giving Conor the bottles that had made me so edgy? That made me feel like it was my movement she was attacking? I turned back to the mirror.

"You're grand," she said, but I didn't believe her.

Behind me, I heard the sound of water splashing gently as Ina stood up in the bathtub. I didn't look at her, but I could see her shape out of the corner of my eye. The severity of her boxy shoulders.

"Your turn," she said. She'd wrapped a towel around herself. Her hair was wet and long down her back. She stood there, dripping onto the bath mat for a moment, looking at me.



Ina hadn't been bluffing. The next day, she sat in front of the mirror doing her makeup, not even wearing a shirt over her light-pink training bra, while I sat on the bed, dressed head to toe in starched church clothes.

"Ina, you're to go," I told her. "Ma said so."

"I'm not going," she protested. "I've other things to be doing."

"Ina, you're to go," I repeated. "Don't make a fuss now."

Ma walked into our room then. She was wearing a red blazer and skirt suit. "Right, is that you set, Bríd?" she asked.

"I'm ready, aye, but Ina won't move." I nodded toward where my sister sat.

"Ach she's all right," Ma said, turning to leave. "Let's go on then; we'll be late."

I opened my mouth in disbelief. "She doesn't have to go?"

"Sure leave your sister alone, Bríd," she chided.

The sun was high in the sky, but the air was still fresh and crisp, not yet softened and lazy with summer. "We'll go to Saint Patrick's in Armagh," Ma told me as we got into the car.

"D'you not want to see Father Jim?"

"We'll go to Armagh."

In the driver's seat, she sat with her back straight. A woman who never slumped. I felt like I could feel the texture of her thoughts, their metallic smoothness. I knew the iron outline of her mind, but I could only guess at its substance. Why hadn't she insisted that Ina go? Ina needed church more than I did; I, at least, believed.

Excerpted from Trouble the Living by Francesca McDonnell Capossela. Copyright © 2023 by Francesca McDonnell Capossela. Excerpted by permission of Lake Union Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.