# Read the first page of The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín Read the opening of The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín free, no signup. Stories of exile and return, Ireland to Spain. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/the-empty-family-colm-toibin - Genre: Short stories - Year: 2011 - ISBN: 9781439195963 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9780771084348&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781439195963 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781439195963 ## The opening The moon hangs low over Texas. The moon is my mother. She is full tonight, and brighter than the brightest neon; there are folds of red in her vast amber. Maybe she is a harvest moon, a Comanche moon. I have never seen a moon so low and so full of her own deep brightness. My mother is six years dead tonight, and Ireland is six hours away and you are asleep. I am walking. No one else is walking. It is hard to cross Guadalupe; the cars come fast. In the Community Whole Food Store, where all are welcome, the girl at the checkout asks me if I would like to join the store's club. If I pay seventy dollars, my membership, she says, will never expire, and I will get a seven per cent discount on my purchases. Six years. Six hours. Seventy dollars. Seven per cent. I tell her I am here for a few months only, and she smiles and says that I am welcome. I smile back. The atmosphere is easy, casual, gracious. If I called you now, it would be half two in the morning; I could wake you up. If I called, I could go over everything that happened six years ago. Because that is what is on my mind tonight, as though no time had elapsed, as though the strength of the moonlight had by some fierce magic chosen tonight to carry me back to the last real thing that happened to me. On the phone to you across the Atlantic, I could go over the days surrounding my mother's funeral. I could go over the details as though I were in danger of forgetting them. I could remind you, for example, that you wore a suit and a tie at the funeral. I remember that I could see you when I spoke about her from the altar, that you were over in the side aisle, on the right. I remember that you, or someone, said that you had to get a taxi from Dublin because you missed the train or the bus. I know that I looked for you among the crowd and could not see you as the hearse came after Mass to take my mother's coffin to the graveyard, as all of us began to walk behind it. You came to the hotel once she was in the ground, and you stayed for a meal with me and Sinead, my sister. Jim, her husband, must have been near, and Cathal, my brother, but I don't remember what they did when the meal had finished and the crowd had dispersed. I know that as the meal came to an end a friend of my mother's, who noticed everything, came over and looked at you and whispered to me that it was nice that my friend had come. She used the word 'friend' with a sweet, insinuating emphasis. I did not tell her that what she had noticed was no longer there, was part of the past. I just said yes, it was nice that you had come. You know that you are the only person who shakes his head in exasperation when I insist on making jokes and small talk, when I refuse to be direct. No one else has ever minded this as you do. You are alone in wanting me always to say something that is true. I know now, as I walk towards the house I have rented here, that if I called and told you that the bitter past has come back to me tonight in these alien streets with a force that feels like violence, you would say that you are not surprised. You would wonder only why it has taken six years. I was living in New York then, the city about to enter its last year of innocence. ## Books with a similar feel - [So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan](https://uncovered.ink/read/so-late-in-the-day-claire-keegan.md) - [The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-shell-collector-anthony-doerr.md) - [Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro](https://uncovered.ink/read/nocturnes-kazuo-ishiguro.md) - [The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits by Emma Donoghue](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-woman-who-gave-birth-to-rabbits-emma-donoghue.md) - [Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway](https://uncovered.ink/read/men-without-women-ernest-hemingway.md) - [Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales by Robert Louis Stevenson](https://uncovered.ink/read/strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-and-other-tales-robert-louis-stevenson.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. Rights holders can request removal at https://uncovered.ink/takedown.