by Cathy Kelly
Ruby had long since learned to tune out whenever her mum went off on one of her rants. That was partly why she was here now instead of sitting in her own home pretending to do her algebra homework. She didn’t want to be there when Dad phoned with the news that he, Vonnie and Shane, Vonnie’s eleven-year-old son, were moving in together. He’d said he was going to do it before the weekend, and Ruby felt sick every time she thought about it.
She hadn’t seen the house in Poppy Lane, just the pictures of it on her father’s phone last weekend. He’d been so excited, telling her she could have her pick of the bedrooms and he’d paint it any colour she wanted.
‘I’ll be close to you and Shelby now,’ Dad had said, with such pure happiness in his face that Ruby knew she couldn’t ruin it all by saying that her mother would go through the roof when she heard.
Ruby spent a lot of time not saying what she thought – it was the divorced kids’ code, sort of like the Mafia one from the old movies her dad liked. Tell nobody anything. Play dumb.
‘It’ll be wonderful to have you nearby, Dad,’ she’d said. Which was entirely the truth.
The rented apartment where he’d been living since the split was an hour’s drive away in the city, so he could never pick her or Shelby up from school or have them to stay during the week. Ruby had grown used to missing him. Every second weekend was really only twice a month when you thought about it. Not enough time with someone you’d loved your whole life. Or too much time when you were interrogated about it for days after.
What did you do? McDonald’s again? Did he cook for dinner or get in takeaway? I hope you didn’t stay up too late. What did you watch on TV? I don’t want Shelby watching unsuitable things and your father never knows …
The questioning had intensified when Dad started going out with Vonnie.
At first Ruby had made the fatal error of being honest, thinking it would put her mum’s mind at rest. ‘She’s really nice, Mum. She’s got a son of her own, so she understands us.’
Her mother’s face had gone white with anger and she’d snapped: ‘What? Your father let a complete stranger spend time with you and he didn’t discuss it with me first?’
‘You muppet,’ said Andi, her best friend, on the phone later. ‘You should have said Vonnie’s a hag, it will never last and you hate her.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ruby glumly. ‘I am a muppet.’
Admitting that she liked Vonnie had caused a nuclear meltdown. Mum had stopped their dad from seeing them. It went on for a month; the only contact they had with him was when he phoned Ruby on her mobile just before bedtime. She’d pass the phone to Shelby, who was only seven at the time, and they’d be in floods of tears by the time they finished talking to him. Even Dad sounded like he was crying.
Eventually Ruby had called in to see Granny Lulu, Mum’s mum, and told her how much she missed her dad. Granny Lulu had gone right off Dad, no doubt about it, but when Ruby had pleaded with her and told her how much it hurt not to see him, Granny had decided to step in.
She’d turned up at the house later that same day, shooing Ruby and Shelby out of the kitchen. There’d been a lot of screaming and yelling; Granny Lulu could scream nearly as loud as Mum, and the pair of them made so much noise that Ruby thought it was a good thing the big five-bedroom house in The Close wasn’t stuck on to another house, else the neighbours might think someone was being murdered and phone the police.
‘Is Mum scared of Granny Lulu?’ Shelby had whispered as they sat on the top step of the stairs, trying to listen.
‘Mum’s not scared of anyone,’ Ruby had whispered back.
‘Why do they have to be so loud?’ Shelby was doing her best not to cry as she leaned her chubby little-girl body against her sister for comfort.
‘Grown-ups do things that way,’ Ruby said without thinking.
‘Dad doesn’t.’
‘No,’ agreed Ruby. ‘Dad doesn’t. We won’t either, will we?’
Shelby shook her head solemnly.
Whatever had been said in the kitchen, afterwards they’d been allowed to visit their dad again. And ever since then, Ruby had followed the code: Say nothing. Questions about Vonnie got a combination of lies and half-lies from her.
But the code wasn’t going to save her this time. Nothing that had happened in the past would be as bad as what was about to happen, Ruby knew. Nothing. When her mother heard the news about Dad, Vonnie and Shane and the house on Poppy Lane, it was going to be World War Three with knobs on.
She finished her chocolate, scrunched up the wrapper and wished she’d bought another one. One chocolate bar was never enough.
Her phone pinged with a text from Andi.
Wot happened? Ur mum gone mental?
Hvnt been home yet. Going now. Cross ur fngers 4 me.
Ruby got off her seat, hoisted her rucksack and headed down the stairs. She wondered whether her mother might be diverted from her rage if she took the bus into Waterford city, didn’t answer her phone and appeared to have gone missing. Probably not. Eventually she would have to go home, and her mother would fly into a mega-rant – as if it wasn’t bad enough that her former husband had betrayed her by moving into a house with another woman, now her selfish daughter was letting her down by running away. Nobody ever thinks about me, she’d yell.
Ruby looked at her watch. Half six. Time to face the music.
Leila phoned Susie with some trepidation.
‘Is there any way you can come and visit Mum on Friday?’ she asked. ‘You could stay in Poppy Lane and I’d be back on Saturday morning to take over visiting.’
‘I thought you said the house was a pit?’ Susie snapped. ‘I can’t bring Jack there.’
‘Susie,’ said Leila, and she didn’t bother to keep the temper out of her voice, ‘we’re talking about our mother. And I’m cleaning the house. It’ll be so clean and tidy, it will squeak by the time you get here on Friday. I have to work Thursday and Friday and one of us needs to be there. I still haven’t managed to talk to a doctor. The nurses say she’s doing fine; a physio has been to see her and they’ve told her a nursing home would be a good plan for when she’s out of hospital, so I am assuming all is going well. But she’s …’
Leila paused. There was something wrong and she simply couldn’t put her finger on it. The whole issue of the house was worrying her. Could her mother have developed early-onset dementia? Could that be it? How else to explain a wildly house-proud woman allowing her home to fall into such a state?
The thought of dementia made her feel as if she was falling headlong into a wormhole, so she closed the idea up in her head.
‘She doesn’t seem totally herself,’ she said, ‘but everyone says it’s the medication.’
‘Fine,’ Susie broke in, her voice heavy with resignation. ‘I’ll come and stay overnight. But I am bringing that dog and I will be leaving her with you. You can figure out what to do with her.’
‘I can’t keep a dog in an apartment,’ Leila said, thinking of her carpets.
‘Well I’m not looking after her,’ snapped Susie. ‘I have enough on my plate as it is. It’s your turn now.’
She hung up, leaving Leila staring at the phone sadly. Right now she could only cope with one major worry at a time. Susie would have to wait.
Vonnie didn’t know which would be worse – being with Ryan when he phoned Jennifer and told her the news, or not being with him and having to wait to hear how it had gone.
In the end, Ryan decided it for her.
‘I’ll phone Jennifer after work,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll drive over to you and stay the night. OK?’
‘Fine,’ said Vonnie tightly.
After work, when she picked Shane up from the childminder’s, he wanted to chat about his day and ask her about hers, the way he usually did. Vonnie knew that hormones would soon start to rage through her darling boy, and if everything her friends said was true, he’d start grunting and never want to chat with his mom again, which horrified her. They couldn’
t be right, surely? But for now, he loved being with her, loved hearing about her day and who’d wanted what cakes. In return, he told her everything that had happened at school. She knew this closeness came from what they’d been through together, because friends said that trying to get a word out of their eleven-year-olds after school was impossible.
‘I got all my math homework done,’ Shane said with pride. ‘It was really hard, too – can I play Mario on Wii for half an hour before dinner?’
Vonnie was torn. She tried to limit Shane’s computer game time, but tonight she didn’t think she would be able to hold an intelligent conversation with her son, and he was bound to ask what was wrong. He was acutely sensitive and could pick up on anxiety easily. It was best that he didn’t know how on edge his mother was because of Jennifer. Vonnie found it hard enough to think that there was a person out there who loathed her; she needed to protect Shane from that knowledge.
‘Half an hour on the Wii,’ she agreed. ‘But only when you’ve finished all your homework.’
‘Yay,’ he said, delighted.
The town house she had bought a lifetime ago looked the best it ever had. Selling a house meant cleaning at a whole different level: making beds look perfect, putting toys away, dusting endlessly, making sure every kitchen worktop was shining before they left the house in the morning in case a viewing came up. Vonnie had thought she was verging on obsessive compulsive disorder the way she was continually sticking the vacuum cleaner nozzle into every corner to keep dust at bay.
Thank goodness the place had sold quickly.
Final contracts for both houses were being signed on the same day in three weeks’ time, which gave Vonnie three weeks to pack up her life.
As soon as she came downstairs from changing into her comfortable grey sweat pants and a fleece, she checked on the slow cooker and laid the table for three, then decided she might as well do a bit of sorting out. She pulled out the junk drawer. Bits of string, old batteries, a slightly melted spatula, several screwdrivers, old fuses and clothes pegs stared up at her. It was the sort of job she usually put off, but this evening it was perfect.
Ryan Morrison was a big man, and when he sat in cars, he had to push the seat back the whole way.
‘Daddy-long-legs,’ Ruby liked to tease him.
He loved the teasing: it made him feel that his daughter still loved him in spite of his leaving home.
‘Shorty,’ he’d tease her back, then hug her to show it was a joke.
Now he sat in his car outside work and it felt like a prison around him. He had a phone call to make and there was nowhere private to make it.
In the shop, his office was like a train station, with people coming in and out looking for advice, files, that paper on the new lap pool and how it compared to the old one.
The car would have to do.
He’d spent the day psyching himself up to phone Jennifer. He’d trained for an Ironman race once, and all those months cycling, running and swimming felt like a walk in the park compared to phoning his former wife and telling her his news.
He’d tried to play down how worried he was for Vonnie’s sake, but the truth was that unless Jennifer had undergone a personality transplant – a bit unlikely – she was going to explode with rage when he told her about Poppy Lane.
Was that a normal reaction, or was it merely a Jennifer reaction?
He’d known she was fiery from the start. Had known and hadn’t liked it, but she’d made him laugh and somehow a short-term thing had turned into a long-term relationship.
Whereas Ryan was the gentle giant he resembled, Jennifer liked to argue and insisted that healthy relationships needed anger and passion to survive.
‘Rowing is good for couples,’ she’d say, face flushed after a yelling match. ‘Better to get all the anger out rather than repressing it.’
He knew where she’d got that idea: he’d witnessed enough pyrotechnic rows between Jennifer and her parents to understand that she’d grown up with it and was entirely comfortable with arguments as a part of family life. Once the row was over, Jennifer would expect things to return to normal.
But Ryan couldn’t cope with the endless ups and downs, the cruel things she came out with while in a rage.
‘You know I didn’t mean that, don’t you?’ she would say afterwards, wanting make-up sex once the row was over. ‘I was just cross. You know what I’m like, darling.’
Ryan did know what she was like, but it seemed to him that if you said something, even in the heat of a row, it must have some basis in truth.
They were too different ever to have been married, he thought now – now that it was too late and they had two beautiful daughters caught in the crossfire.
Jennifer was a good, if volatile, mother: the girls were beautifully looked after and the house – the big house in The Close that Ryan was paying for – was always immaculate. But she wasn’t averse to using them as pawns in any battle she might have with Ryan, and it was that thought that made him dread the conversation he needed to have with her tonight.
‘Hi, Jennifer, it’s Ryan. Can you talk? I’ve something to tell you,’ he said in an ultra-calm voice.
‘What? The shop’s gone bust, nobody wants to do stupid triathlons any more, and the plans for another shop in your great empire have gone down the drain?’ she snapped.
‘Since that would wreck not just my plans but all our financial security, happily, no. The shop’s doing fine,’ he said, anger shifting him out of his enforced calm. How did she do that to him after all these years?
‘What is it, then? I’m cooking dinner.’
Ryan took a deep breath. There was no easy way to do this – he had to leap in and get it over with.
‘This is big news, Jen, and I don’t want to hurt you, but Vonnie and I are moving in together in three weeks. We’ve bought a house on Poppy Lane, the one by the old train tracks into—’
‘I know where it is,’ Jennifer hissed. ‘How. Could. You? This is my town, my place – how dare you move in with that bloody woman here! She’s not even from around here.’
The ridiculousness of this instantly annoyed him. It was as if Vonnie’s nationality was what mattered most to Jennifer: not the fact that he was starting over, moving in with her, but the fact that she was from abroad.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ he demanded. ‘I grew up here. Bridgeport isn’t your personal domain. I’m a local too. I know it’s going to be hard for you, but I want to be closer to Ruby and Shelby. I want somewhere they can have their own rooms instead of bunking in with each other, and’ – he knew he shouldn’t say this, that it would only stoke the fire of her rage, but he said it anyway – ‘Vonnie’s business is here and I want to be with Vonnie.’
‘Rub it in, why don’t you? She’s a businesswoman and I’m nothing but a housewife who bored you. Say it, go on, say it!’
Ryan leaned over and put his head in his big hands. He was losing already.
‘That’s not why we broke up and you know it.’
‘Oh yes, I know why we broke up – because you ran away. And now you want to act all happy families again,’ sneered Jennifer, seething rage in every syllable. ‘Someone should tell the businesswoman of the year that a man who runs away from a woman will go on doing it.’
The counsellor he’d seen a couple of times immediately after he left Jennifer had attempted to give Ryan what he termed emotional tools to help deal with his wife’s anger. But advice given in a calm office years ago seemed futile in the face of her rage. Still, Ryan tried to remember the counsellor’s words: A lot of anger comes out of fear. Concentrate on that.
‘Jennifer, I know this is scary, but we all deserve a second start. You and I need to be adult about this. We have two beautiful girls—’
‘Who are going to be supplanted by Vonnie’s son! Is that it – I couldn’t give you a boy?’
Ryan was glad he’d told Vonnie he’d make the phone call somewhere else. Jennifer’s changes of direction ha
d always been dizzying.
‘Shane is a lovely boy, but you know well that I never wanted a son for the sake of it. I wanted healthy children, which is what we’ve got.’
‘And a wife,’ Jennifer shrieked. ‘You have a wife too.’
They still weren’t divorced. Not a day went by that Ryan didn’t curse the archaic Irish law that forced him to wait another year before the marriage could officially be terminated. He ought to get a calendar and mark off the days.
Jennifer changed tack again. ‘Do Ruby and Shelby know about this?’
Ryan was torn between lying and having Jennifer interrogate their daughters anyway, which he knew she did regularly.
‘Ruby does, but don’t drag her into our fight,’ he said tightly. ‘This is about us, not them.’
‘That’s what all you bastards say, isn’t it?’ she hissed down the phone at him. ‘ “It’s not about the children.” Well it IS. Don’t tell me it isn’t. I’m the one who comforts Shelby when she cries for her daddy at night, not you.’
Ryan had no answer for that. He never did. It was Jennifer’s final and most powerful trump card. Ruby insisted that Shelby didn’t cry in the night but he could never be sure about this. His heart bled at the thought of his smaller daughter in pain. He could imagine tears on her sweetly plump little-girl cheeks and he wondered, as he always did, if he should have stuck it out with Jennifer for his daughters’ sake. He was in love with Vonnie, but perhaps he didn’t deserve the joy of that because his leaving had hurt the girls so much.
He blinked back tears. Was he the worst father in the world for putting Ruby and Shelby through this? Was it too much to expect that one day Jennifer would be able to put the past behind them and let go of the bitterness?
This was no good. He’d have to hang up. Yet again Jennifer had pierced his armour and made a series of direct hits.
‘I’ll talk to you again,’ he said, reverting with huge difficulty to ultra-calm.