The Other Mothers' Club

by Samantha Baker

  “And I’m not the one playing up to my ex,” Vince spat. “Did you expect me to sit there like everything was fine after that little performance?”

  “Vince!” she said, taking a step forward, holding out a hand. “Vince! I wasn’t. I didn’t. I was as shocked to see him…them…,” she added pointedly, “as you were.”

  “But Simeon gets to you,” he said. “Still.”

  “He doesn’t,” Melanie protested. “He doesn’t get to me. I don’t love him, I don’t even like him. The guy’s a jerk, the biggest mistake of my life. I love you.”

  Even as she said it, Melanie realized it wasn’t true. She was fond of him. She liked him, really liked him. They were great in bed. But was she in love with him? A heart-pounding, stomach-aching, sick-at-the-thought-of-life-without-him kind of love? No.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d said the words and not meant them, but it was the worst. And she could see from Vince’s expression that, whatever her mouth had said, her face had told him a different story.

  He slumped on the bed and put his head in his hands. “The difference,” he said, the fury draining out of him as quickly as it had blown in, “is that when I say I love you, I really mean it.”

  The springs squeaked as she sat down beside him on the king-sized bed that had squeaked so often in the previous forty-eight hours. Somehow it sounded different this time.

  “I know,” she said.

  It felt like hours before Vince finally looked up, and the pain in his wet eyes was unbearable.

  “Look…,” Melanie started, but she had no idea where the sentence was going. When he put up a hand to interrupt her, she was almost grateful.

  “Don’t,” he said. “There’s nothing else to say, is there? You’re not over Simeon. I knew it after the fashion awards. I should have listened to my head then. But I’m an idiot. I let myself hope.”

  “You’re not an idiot,” she said. “And I am over Simeon, I promise I am.”

  “But?” He eyed her warily, and Melanie was appalled to see a flicker of hope in his eyes. Even now she could see that it would take only one word from her. With just the slightest encouragement he would be prepared to try again. To give her the benefit of the doubt. To give her a second, third, fourth chance.

  It would be so easy, so comfortable, to reach out and take it.

  Then there was Ellie. Who, already, only a few meetings in, Melanie was growing fond of. How would he explain that Daddy’s new friend had vanished from her life as quickly as she’d entered it?

  Ellie almost swayed her.

  And she was over Simeon. Well, she believed she was. In a way, however, that made it worse. To be over Simeon and still not want this man who wanted her so badly. This man she really liked and knew to be good for her.

  “You’re right, Vince,” she said slowly. “I’m not ready for this. I’m so, so sorry.”

  She reached out again to comfort him, but he shook her away. “It’s OK,” he said. “I knew it was too good to be true. But let me be, all right?”

  “I…”

  Melanie didn’t know what to do, what to say. Were they going to sit here like this all night? Would she crack and make up if she did? Cling to him for no other reason than the fact that they were here, in this city, together, and already had some semblance of a shared history?

  Maybe she would. For tonight, for the rest of the weekend, maybe even for the rest of the year. Ellie came back into her head. The Christmas they had been planning—skating and shopping, and maybe even baking blondies (Melanie’s favorite childhood cookies). She felt her eyes prick, but she knew she couldn’t weaken. It wasn’t fair to Vince. And, if they stayed together now, only to split next year…well, that wasn’t fair to Ellie. Because Mel knew in her heart that it would not be enough to keep them together. Not forever. And only forever felt good enough now. She had been to the other place too many times already.

  It was up to her. Vince would make her do what had to be done. And she didn’t blame him. Why should he let her off easy?

  “Shall I…shall I go see reception about another room?”

  Melanie was pathetically grateful he didn’t look up. At least that way she didn’t have to see the hurt in his eyes. The blame.

  “Vince?” she asked quietly. “I think I should…don’t you?”

  A small, sharp nod was his only reply.

  The bed creaked as her weight shifted, a sad, mournful sound, so unlike the joyous cacophony of earlier that day.

  In the doorway, something stopped her and she looked back.

  Vince was leaning across what had been their bed. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a flash of duck-egg blue as he slid a small square box that had been hidden in his hand into the bedside cabinet and silently pushed its drawer shut.

  Twenty-eight

  Well, Clare thought, at least the worst of it’s over. The lovingly prepared turkey with all the trimmings was cooked and eaten. (Although she couldn’t honestly say she’d tasted the devils on horseback she’d painstakingly made from scratch.) The washing up was done. The row about who got to watch what on TV had been fought and lost.

  EastEnders and Granny had won.

  And why not, it was her house after all.

  All these years of slogging away, and Clare still couldn’t afford an apartment large enough to fit a table that would seat more than two.

  Outside her mom’s kitchen window, a damp, murky dusk was beginning to fall. Mist clung to the edges of the bedraggled garden. At the bottom, as far away as she could get, Lou was huddled, like a secret smoker hiding a sneaky post-Christmas lunch cigarette from prying eyes. But it wasn’t a cigarette Lou was protecting. It was that damn iPhone. Whether Lou was phoning her father—or waiting to receive his call—Clare had no idea.

  Stop it, Clare told herself. Don’t be so paranoid.

  It was far more likely Lou was just texting a friend to bemoan her boring Christmas, or even, shock horror, listening to the music she’d downloaded on Christmas Eve with the iTunes vouchers Will had given her for Christmas. His “official” present to her.

  Either way, it didn’t matter. As far as Clare was concerned, Lou might as well have been shut in her bedroom at the apartment, with a neon sign flashing Keep Out Mom on the door.

  Taking a sip of the dessert wine left over from lunch, Clare winced as the sweet, syrupy liquid hit her tongue. Try as she might, she couldn’t tear her gaze away from Louisa’s back. She hardly recognized her daughter these days. A month—that was all it had taken for Lou to vanish completely and be replaced by a Stepford teenager. Where had she gone? Clare didn’t know, but she fervently wished Lou would come back.

  It had been just the two of them, Clare and Lou against the world for so long, that Clare didn’t even know how to begin to function without her. She had a nasty feeling this was how it was going to be from now on.

  Her mother’s eyes boring holes in her back seemed to alert Lou to Clare’s presence at the window. She looked up from her iPhone long enough to scowl. Then she turned away.

  Dismissed, her body language said.

  Clare sighed. The dessert wine was disgusting. Mom bought muscatel every year, and every year it tasted the same. Vile. Like so many of those Christmas things everyone always bought and nobody ever really wanted to eat.

  Tipping it stealthily down the sink, Clare took a fresh bottle of white wine out of her mother’s fridge, unscrewed the cap and poured herself a glass. What the hell, it was Christmas. And, frankly, after the day she’d had—scrap that, make it the year she’d had—she deserved a bit more than a bottle of wine and thirty quids’ worth of M&S vouchers from her mom. Not that Clare didn’t appreciate the vouchers. It was just, surely this wasn’t it?

  “Mom?” she called, sticking her head around the lounge door and waving the bottle at her. “Want another glass?”

  Her mother shook her head. “No, thanks.” She held up a mug of tea. “You go ahead, though.”

  Too late, Clare though
t.

  Christmas Day had been as difficult as she had feared. The shaky armistice she and Lou had reached had held, just. But with Lily voting to spend Christmas at Liam’s flat, it had been just the three of them for the first time since Lou was born….

  That tricky first Christmas, when a torrent of tears had fallen long before bedtime, and six-month-old Louisa had screamed all day, as if in protest at the woefully insufficient world she’d been born into. Whenever the baby had paused for breath, long enough for Granny to take her, Clare had taken refuge in her bedroom and wept. And when she’d thought her daughters and granddaughter had been asleep, Clare’s mother had shut herself in what had once been her marital bedroom and done the same, unaware that her muffled sobs had echoed through the house.

  Only Lily had remained dry-eyed. Resilient, stoic, don’t-fuck-with-me Lily. She’d opened her presents, turned up the television and ignored the lot of them. And now, with Lily at Liam’s, Clare was painfully aware she had never truly appreciated her sister before. Without Lily, it had been…well, without Lily, dire didn’t even begin to cover it.

  As she’d sat by the tree handing out presents, Clare had tried not to notice Lou eyeing her scant pile—useful things (for useful, read boring) from Clare; Topshop vouchers from Granny, (bought by Clare); and cool things from Lily and Eve—while she’d listened to Granny’s ancient Now That’s What I Call Christmas CD and made polite “How’s school?” conversation.

  It had been obvious Lou had found them all wanting.

  And who, thought Clare, can blame her? Clare found herself wanting, too.

  As if drawn by a magnet, Clare drifted to the window, unable to look and unable to look away. Lou hadn’t moved. Her thin shoulders, clad in a new army surplus jacket (courtesy of Lily and Liam), were still hunched over her most treasured possession, but her body language had changed. Suddenly an arm flew up, gesturing wildly.

  Clare’s heart lurched.

  Something was wrong! Then the arm lurched again, this time downwards. And Clare realized that nothing was wrong. Quite the reverse. It was animation, not anguish or fury. Louisa was animated because she was talking to her father.

  Planning their Boxing Day celebrations, no doubt.

  Boxing Day.

  First, Christmas Day without Lily. Now, Boxing Day without Lou. Just her and Mom and whatever bloody awful Christmas film the BBC was repeating this year. For the first time in years, Clare squeezed her eyes shut and counted silently down from a hundred in her head until the tears that threatened were beaten back.

  Get a life, Clare, she thought. It’s time to get yourself a life.

  Liam had been gone for hours. He’d left at ten to collect Rosie from her mother’s house, which was a fifteen-minute drive, thirty at most in heavy traffic. Anyway, it was Boxing Day. Traffic wasn’t heavy on Boxing Day. Liam should have been there and back in half an hour; three-quarters max. But he wasn’t.

  Eleven came and went. Eleven thirty. And then twelve. There was still no sign of them. Where the hell was he? Surely he wouldn’t have picked today of all days to play happy families with his ex-wife? Not after all the effort he knew Lily had put into making their first Christmas, just the three of them, go well. She’d had to sell her soul to Brendan to get the day off and had promised to work the box office on New Year’s Eve instead. Even Liam, as distracted as he’d been lately, wouldn’t do that. Would he?

  No, it had to be Siobhan. She was bound to have cooked up something to screw up Liam and Lily’s day.

  Bloody Siobhan, Lily thought, slamming around his apartment, redoing chores that had already been done, piling and unpiling Rosie’s numerous presents under the tree. That bloody, bloody woman.

  But there was no getting away from it. That bloody woman was Rosie’s mother and, as such, a nonnegotiable part of the package.

  Christmas Day had been idyllic. Like a movie, she thought. A dirty one, admittedly. Not one she’d have wanted to watch with her mother, that’s for sure. Just Lily, Liam, new sex toys and champagne, interspersed with the occasional parcel. Unwrapping the gifts and each other. The Agent Provocateur underwear had stayed on all of five minutes, before Liam had worked through his entire repertoire of things to do with a mouthful of bubbles.

  The day had grown light and then dark again before either of them had realized they’d been famished. So they’d demolished a loaf of crusty French bread and a packet of smoked salmon and a second—or maybe third—bottle of champagne in bed. It had only been then, when Liam had come up for air, that it had occurred to Lily that, in her twenty-four years, this was the first Christmas she hadn’t spent watching the EastEnders Christmas special at her mother’s. Thinking of Clare, Lou and her mother, Lily had experienced a brief pang of guilt.

  Caught up in her own private festivities, she hadn’t even thought to phone home, but she’d pushed aside her mental image of them sitting on her mom’s settee, nursing the last of that awful dessert wine Mom always bought and nobody ever wanted to drink. She’d always been able to do that, push aside things she didn’t want to think about. There were too many things it was easier not to think about. Far too many of them. All that Catholic guilt, for a start. This was, Lily decided, her best Christmas ever.

  Well, it had been.

  The indecently large pile of pastel-wrapped presents under the tree had been rearranged a dozen times when Lily finally heard footsteps on the stairs.

  “Merry Christmas, sweetie!” she cried, flinging open the front door just as Liam reached forward to put his key in the lock. Lily wasn’t feeling all that merry, but putting a brave face on it was always the best policy where Rosie was concerned.

  Except Rosie wasn’t there.

  “Where is—,” Lily started, but the look on his face as he pushed past stopped her.

  “Liam?” She followed him into the living room, where he’d already slumped on his sofa, his eyes red and sore. It could have been the aftereffects of yesterday—frankly, they’d drunk enough—but she didn’t remember him looking this rough when he’d left three hours earlier. “Where’s Rosie? Has something happened? Is Rosie all right?”

  “She’s fine,” he said finally. “Rosie’s not coming.”

  “What d’you mean, she’s not coming? Where have you been? What’s going on?”

  Liam sighed, rubbing his hands over that day’s stubble, then glanced at his watch and shrugged. “Get me a drink, will you?” It wasn’t a question. “Brandy, if there’s any left.”

  Lily opened her mouth to object, then thought better of it. Shouting and screaming, her preferred default position, didn’t work where Liam was concerned. Like her, he’d long since perfected the art of zoning out. Maybe his reasons were as good as she believed her own to be.

  “Here you go,” she said, handing him a tumbler. “Now, tell me what’s going on. Where have you been for the last three hours?”

  “Sitting at a rest area on the South Circular.”

  Lily waited for him to elaborate. When he didn’t, she tried again. “Sitting at a rest area? Liam…why were you sitting at a rest area?”

  When Liam looked up his eyes were wet.

  Seeing him cry made Lily feel uncomfortable; she couldn’t help it. Growing up in an all-female household, she’d never seen a man cry before, except in a play, on screen, or on TV, and those didn’t count.

  “Liam? Baby? What’s wrong?”

  “She’s going.” He paused, took a large gulp of his brandy, then swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand.

  “Rosie? Going where?”

  “Siobhan. She’s moving. And she’s taking Rosie with her.”

  “Moving?” A thousand possibilities spun through Lily’s head. Back to Dublin? To relatives in America? Emigrating? “Where’s she going?”

  “Manchester.”

  Lily stifled a sigh. It could be worse. Manchester was only three hours in the car, less by train. OK, so it wasn’t exactly around the corner, but it was doable, especially only once every three
weeks, which was how often Liam had access to Rosie.

  “She’s getting married,” he continued, “to this guy, Robert, you know the one. She’s been seeing him for months now. Rosie talks about him all the time.” Liam’s words were full of bitterness. “What she failed to mention is that Robert lives in Manchester. She’s moving in with him, and she’s taking Rosie.”

  “Just like that? Can she do that?”

  “She can and she is,” Liam said, downing his brandy. “I don’t have a leg to stand on…or so I’ve just been told. I don’t have joint custody, I have access, and I’m so crap I’m lucky to have that, apparently….”

  He paused, staring into the bottom of his glass as if expecting it to refill itself. Taking pity on him, Lily fetched the bottle.

  “They’re going at the end of January. She just dropped it on me when I went to collect Rosie, but she’s been planning it for weeks. I didn’t even know our old house was on the market, but there’s already an offer on it. Rosie’s got a place at nursery, you name it…”

  “What did you do?”

  Liam grinned sheepishly. “I went fecking mad. What d’you think I did? Like the idiot I am.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” Lily said, ruffling his hair. “You’ve got a right to be pissed off with her. Of course you said some rash things. It still doesn’t explain where Rosie is now…”

  “I said bad stuff, Lil. A lot of bad stuff. Siobhan hit me with moving the moment she opened the door. And I wasn’t ready. I just lost it, told her she couldn’t take Rosie away, I wouldn’t let her, I’d get the law on her. Then she said if that was how I felt she didn’t feel safe letting me take Rosie away today. She didn’t trust me to bring her back, and from now on we’d be talking through lawyers. Then she slammed the door in my face. Left me on my old doorstep yelling through the letterbox. She set me up, Lil. And I fell for it.”

  His tears were back now. “Like I’d hurt my baby girl.”