by Cathy Kelly
As she fumbled to let herself into her car, parked outside the Copper Kettle, she looked through the window and saw relaxed, happy people chatting over coffee, people alone at tables nursing cups and laptops, two girls around Ruby’s age giggling over something on a smartphone.
Ruby. Just the thought of her caused Jennifer to pull up, feeling the pang of intense hurt. She knew Ruby wasn’t happy, but that wasn’t her fault, was it?
Kids were strong, they got over divorces; they were so resilient. Ruby had school to go to where she could forget, while Jennifer had nowhere to go to escape the loneliness.
The kids would get through this, but Jennifer didn’t know if she would.
Vonnie put all the cakes away and tidied up the way she would have done under normal circumstances. Jennifer’s rage had shocked her, so much of it wound up and directed at her.
It had been shocking, there was no other word for it. How could that woman mention Joe in such a way, how?
Vonnie’s hands shook as she worked: stacking the unused crockery, turning on the answering machine, switching off the computer, locking up. She felt herself retreating with every moment. It was how she’d coped with Joe’s death.
In front of Shane, she’d been a lioness: they would get through this, Dad will always be here in our hearts, he loved you so much. On the inside, she’d closed down and thought it lucky Shane was so small and didn’t understand.
The grief counsellor she’d finally gone to had cautioned that bottling up pain was one way of dealing with it, but that it wasn’t a long-term solution.
‘You can numb with drugs or alcohol, or just by retreating inside yourself,’ he’d explained. ‘There are lots of ways to lock down. This is intense pain and it’s understandable that you want to deaden it all. It’s just not helpful in the long term. Not for you and not for your son.’
Vonnie had worked hard to stop retreating inside. She’d done her best to let herself feel the pain. But tonight, after the confrontation with Jennifer, she could feel herself withdrawing to that old place where she could bottle it all up for another day.
She drove home slowly, edged the van on to the drive in Poppy Lane, thinking of how much joy she’d felt as she’d driven home the past two evenings. Tonight, she just felt sad and numb as she looked at the devastation of the overgrown garden. With the inside needing so much work, Ryan reckoned the wasteland outside would just have to manage on its own for a while.
‘Besides,’ he liked to joke, ‘we’re environmentalists, aren’t we? Think of what we’re doing for the butterfly, bee and insect communities with a sanctuary like that.’
Vonnie had laughed along, delighted at a perspective that would never have occurred to her. She’d have worried over the overgrown grass and profusion of strange weeds, worried that the neighbours would be looking askance at the new family.
‘We’ve just moved in,’ said Ryan. ‘Let’s unpack first and then hire a man with a scythe to cut it all down.’
‘Or ask Uncle Tom to do it,’ Vonnie had said, because they hadn’t enough money to hire so much as a rabbit to tackle the garden.
She barely had her key in the door when Shane wrenched it open.
‘Mum! Wait till you see what we cooked!’ He was so delighted with himself he was practically dancing around her with excitement. ‘We made pasta. Pasta!! Not in a machine, but on our own.’
‘You do need a machine, I think, so it might be lumpy in places,’ Ryan added, coming into the hall and kissing her on the lips. ‘Only my parts of it, though. Shane is a pasta master.’
‘It’s the rolling,’ Shane said seriously. ‘You have to roll and roll and not let it get sticky. But some of it did …’
Vonnie didn’t move.
‘We cleaned it up,’ her son assured her.
‘All sparkly,’ Ryan said.
Vonnie knew some response was required. Somewhere, she found the actress in herself, the actress every mother needed.
‘Pasta,’ she said, smiling. ‘Just what I’m in the mood for.’ She hugged Shane, kissed Ryan on the cheek and shrugged out of her coat. ‘What kind of sauce are we having with it?’
Somehow, she fooled them, and the two men in her life looked at each other and grinned.
‘It’s a surprise,’ Shane said. ‘You have to guess.’
‘Dandelion?’ she asked, head to one side.
Shane giggled. ‘No! Yeuch.’
‘Banana?’
They made it into the kitchen and Vonnie allowed herself to be propelled towards the saucepan where a carbonara sauce sat waiting to be heated up.
‘My favourite!’ she said.
‘I know.’ Shane beamed.
The pasta, fat lines of it like overweight tagliatelle, lay ready for cooking, hung over carefully balanced wooden spoons: ‘In case it sticks,’ Shane told her seriously.
The Jamie Oliver cookbook was on the counter and nicely floured. The table was neatly laid for three with napkins, place settings and even a flower, which must have been the only non-weed to have survived in the back garden.
‘I’ll just run up to the loo, then I’ll be ready,’ Vonnie said with a great beaming smile.
She took the stairs two at a time and fled to the bathroom, where she shut and locked the door. She couldn’t cry, because with her colouring it was so noticeable afterwards. Instead she tried to compose herself by taking deep breaths, the way the counsellor had showed her. Breathe in to a count of six, hold, breathe slowly out again. Keep going. Trying all the while not to think that Jennifer’s words had followed her home and were now swirling round the house in Poppy Lane, contaminating it with their anger: you might do well to remember that men who walk out on one woman will walk out on another … They run when it all gets too tough …
Jennifer was wrong, totally wrong. It wasn’t the thought of Ryan walking out that scared her. He’d explained why, and meeting Jennifer in a rage, she could understand it. But this was all so hard. Could they make this blended family work? Vonnie couldn’t bear to be hurt again. Losing Joe had almost destroyed her. She didn’t have anything left inside to survive another cataclysmic ending.
At midnight, she lay in bed and listened to Ryan’s breathing. Contented breathing. He could sleep anywhere and under any circumstances, and she envied him that.
She should be used to her sleeplessness by now, but she wasn’t. She’d flirted with insomnia ever since Joe had died.
At their home in Brookline, she’d spent many nights lying with her eyes open, still on her side of the bed, still not able to reach over to his side. As if imagining him there would somehow make him be there, and reaching over and not finding him would make him utterly gone. Never seeing him again was too huge for her to think about.
Even now, when the miracle of her falling in love with Ryan had happened, she couldn’t escape the insomnia trap. This time it wasn’t sudden tragic widowhood and its violent stages of grief and fury. No, this time it was caused by Ryan’s past and the fact that it could easily destroy the precious thing they shared.
Jennifer didn’t seem to realise that life was so fragile, love and happiness so fragile, that you could never take any of it for granted. You had to grab it with both hands. If only she understood and could move forward and be thankful for her two healthy daughters.
Vonnie hadn’t told Ryan about Jennifer’s visit yet. She had to, she knew. But not in their first week in Poppy Lane. She wanted there to be nothing to take the shine off their happiness.
Jennifer’s words still echoed in her head, though. Ruby hates you. Could that be true?
Vonnie slipped from the bed, found her slippers in the dark and put on the pink fluffy dressing gown that Shane said made her look like a pink bear.
‘A nice bear,’ he’d added quickly, a worried look streaking through silvery-grey eyes like hers. ‘Not one of the dangerous grizzlies.’
Shane wasn’t like any of the other eleven-year-olds in his class. He worried about his mother’s feelings, always
careful not to cause her pain: the behaviour of a child whose father had died suddenly in a car crash and whose mother was his whole world. Last night she should have been so happy because he and Ryan had been cooking companionably together, having fun, behaving like a father and son.
The experts in the step-family books had warned that Shane might resent it when Ryan came into her life, mistrustful and jealous of this new male presence who wasn’t his dad and was somehow usurping Shane’s position.
But they’d been wrong about that.
Maybe, Vonnie thought hopefully, they’d be wrong about Jennifer too.
The kitchen was covered in splashes of sunflower-yellow paint, because Shelby loved sunflowers.
‘It’s so bright and shiny and lovely – could we draw sunflowers on the walls?’ she’d asked Vonnie, and Vonnie had hugged her and said they would definitely see what they could do. Lorraine, with her amazing gift for sugarcraft flowers, was also a wonderful artist, and Vonnie was toying with the idea of asking her to come and paint some beautiful sunflowers on Shelby’s wall.
For the kitchen, Vonnie and Ryan were leaning towards a lovely buttercup yellow that lit the room up, while another corner had a big splash of dark blue paint at Shane’s request.
‘I like dark blue,’ he said gravely. Everyone still smiled a bit when they walked into the room and saw the big patch of the colour in one corner. It was very un-kitcheny, particularly with the pine cabinets that were never going to be rescued from their pine-ness unless she and Ryan painted them.
There was great mirth surrounding the kitchen redecoration and the painting of the whole house in general, with everyone joining in the fun. Except Ruby.
Vonnie and Ryan talked about it late at night in bed.
‘Do you think she resents me?’ Vonnie asked Ryan anxiously, Jennifer’s hateful words making her question herself. ‘I’d understand if she did. It’s just that I thought we were getting on so well up to now. But perhaps us all moving in together has been a step too far. There’s a whole psychological thing about girls and their fathers, and maybe she thinks I’ve stolen you away from her … I don’t know, Ryan,’ she said in frustration. ‘I wish I did. I feel as if Ruby’s gone into some untouchable place and I can’t reach her any more.’
Ryan merely looked haunted. ‘I don’t know either,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s something not quite right, but I don’t know what it is. I thought she was just being a teenager, but she’s so quiet all the time. It could be just teenagerdom but I think … maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think it’s something to do with home and Jennifer and the pressure she’s been under since we moved in together. How do we fix that?’
There was silence.
From Shelby’s artless conversation, they had a pretty clear picture of the way Jennifer was forever giving out about the house on Poppy Lane.
‘I don’t think Mum would like to come in,’ Shelby said to Vonnie. ‘She says it’s a bit of a tip from the outside and she thinks the inside must be much worse. I told her it was lovely and I’m going to have a pink bedroom with sunflowers and she says I can have a sunflowers in my bedroom at home too, so I’m going to have two places with sunflowers!’
Shelby had laughed with delight at the thought, but Vonnie hadn’t joined in. Didn’t Jennifer understand that you couldn’t play with kids that way? That when parents split up there was bound to be hurt and pain, but that hurt and pain became so much worse if children were used in the battlefield.
Jennifer’s most recent trick was to insist that Shelby and Ruby come home first thing on Sunday morning because there was a family event involving Jennifer’s family and they had to be there.
‘What is it exactly?’ Ryan had asked his daughters, having received nothing but a text message from Jennifer on the subject.
‘Granny Lulu is having a lunch party,’ said Shelby.
‘Is that all?’ Ryan directed the question to his older daughter.
‘Yeah.’ These days Ruby tended to answer in monosyllables, if at all.
‘Well that’s hardly any reason for you guys to go home early. I bring you to school on a Monday morning on your weekends with me, that’s the deal.’
It wasn’t a deal as far as Jennifer was concerned, though. Ryan was furious and wanted to phone the lawyers to intervene, but Vonnie calmed him down.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘let’s work on the theory that she’s very angry and stressed at the moment. Things are bound to calm down, given time. We’ve just moved in together. It’s all so different for her.’
Ryan had still looked mutinous, but Vonnie had continued to pour balm on the troubled waters. ‘There’s no point making an issue out of it,’ she said. ‘The last thing we want is to upset Ruby by entering into a big argument with her mother, OK?’
‘OK,’ he’d agreed.
Vonnie still hadn’t told him about Jennifer’s visit but she was sure Jennifer’s latest plan was due to their encounter. Couldn’t Jennifer see that Ruby was suffering in all of this?
Vonnie’s gentle attempts to find out how the girl was doing had got nowhere. Whenever she showed an interest, asking ‘How’s the homework going?’ or ‘How’s school?’ Ruby would avoid meeting her eyes and respond with a muttered ‘Fine, busy, y’know.’
Just enough of a conversation not to be rude, but not enough to put Vonnie’s mind at ease.
Still, Vonnie thought, at least the house was improving. She and Ryan were working on it as often as they could, with Tom’s assistance. He was a great man to have about the place, full of advice about paint and carpenters and how best to sand ancient floorboards. Whenever he came, he always brought beautiful home-made cakes from Maura, who’d hurt her wrist using the steam cleaner and had been ordered not to get involved in any of the cleaning, painting, sanding or other house renovations. Maura was a fabulous cook, and when break time came, everyone leapt on to the container of cakes and buns. All except Ruby.
‘I’m not hungry,’ she’d say, or, ‘I’ve just had an apple, and sugar’s so bad for your teeth and your skin.’
She always had an excuse. Vonnie couldn’t be sure, because with all the weird layers Ruby and her friend Andi wore, it was difficult to tell if Ruby was losing weight, but her face seemed thinner. Since she wasn’t in a position to ascertain how thin Ruby was underneath her clothes, all Vonnie could do was watch her at mealtimes and offer her food she knew she liked. Growing teenagers went through a lot of changes, so perhaps it was entirely normal that Ruby’s face was losing its hint of juvenile plumpness. But the nagging doubts inside Vonnie wouldn’t go away. She decided to get a second opinion: when Maura dropped in on their next weekend with the girls, she’d ask her. When you saw a lot of a person, it was hard to spot any changes because they happened so gradually, but Maura might notice.
Vonnie hoped with all her heart that she was imagining it, but she just wasn’t sure.
All at once, the happiness Poppy Lane was supposed to bring seemed very fragile.
On Sunday morning, Jennifer surprised herself by going for a walk. It was a gloriously sunny morning and, astonished that she’d noticed such a thing, she searched high and low until she found her old trainers and dragged them on.
It had been months – no, make that years – since she’d been to an exercise class. She’d liked aqua aerobics. Nobody could see you sweat.
Her mother had introduced her to the idea. As a child growing up, Lulu had tried out every exercise craze for a while, and had a library of fitness videos from Jane Fonda and Callanetics onwards. When the fad was over, she would embark on a cooking frenzy. Jennifer had learned her love of cookery from her mother, but she wasn’t as keen on the fitness.
Yet today, something – OK, she admitted to herself, not something: Vonnie, with her annoying slenderness – had made her think about getting fit. Or thinner.
She drove down to the pier and walked along it, finding herself saying hello to people as they passed with dogs and children. There was no need to wa
lk quickly, which was what put her off normally: the thought of people seeing how unfit she was. Here, people meandered happily or strode at pace, whatever they felt like.
She met one mother from school, and for once, she didn’t feel at a disadvantage. Caroline, the other woman, was no sylph either and was checking her pace on a pedometer.
‘Dratted thing. It’s harder than you’d think getting up to ten thousand steps a day.’
‘Is that what you’re supposed to do?’ asked Jennifer, interested.
‘Yes,’ panted Caroline. ‘This is my second week of it. I thought I walked about twenty thousand steps round the house every day picking up laundry off the floor, but it turns out I don’t. Still,’ she grinned, ‘I have lost three pounds, my jeans don’t threaten to rip my waist in two any more and I feel better.’
‘You sound like an advert for a gym,’ said Jennifer, unable to keep the cynicism out of her voice.
‘It’s more for my head, actually,’ Caroline replied candidly. ‘Since Dan was diagnosed, life’s been all about cancer.’
Shocked and embarrassed by her cynical tone, Jennifer reached out. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know …’
‘He’s doing well,’ Caroline said, chin firm. ‘I thought chemo was bad, but six weeks of radiotherapy has taken it out of him. He has a scan in two weeks and I have to be strong for all of us: him, me and the kids. Walking helps.’
‘I didn’t mean to sound bitchy,’ Jennifer heard herself saying. ‘I’m the expert at opening my mouth and putting my foot in it. If you want a walking partner, I’m around …?’
‘That would be nice,’ said Caroline, and for a moment, she let the energetic facade fall. ‘It’s hard motivating yourself when you’re so tired.’
‘We could walk the whole pier again, at speed,’ Jennifer said, ‘and then go for a low-fat coffee?’
Caroline smiled. ‘We could do that,’ she said. ‘What speed exactly?’