Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  Cassie wished she were beside her mother-in-law now because she wanted Antoinette to see how angry she was.

  ‘I’ll be talking to him in a moment, but I can tell you one thing, Antoinette: there will be no shared house, no little granny flat where you can drop in and out any time you want, and keep Shay over there morning, noon and night. If you were ill, if you needed care, it would be a different story. I’ve always been nothing but kind to you. I don’t have a mother of my own so I know how important a mother is, and if you were sick I would have done anything to take care of you. But –’ she wanted to emphasise the words carefully – ‘you’re not sick, Antoinette. You’re in perfect health. You simply want your son back. Well, you can’t have him,’ she hissed, and with that she hung up.

  Before Cassie dialled Shay’s number, she looked through the glass walls of the boardroom at the few people still sitting at their desks in the office, all seemingly happy and content – well, as content as a person could be working for Loren.

  Loren liked to keep her foot jammed to the pedal at all times, which meant that her staff were generally overworked and underpaid. But no matter how stressed they all were, was there anyone else here in the office who was about to phone her husband and tell him what a bastard he was and that she’d had enough? Probably not.

  Cassie mentally rehearsed what she was going to say to Shay. She forced herself to calm down after her conversation with Antoinette and she was ready. Ready to tell him how dare he make such an important decision about their family without her knowledge. She really wanted to scream, but she wouldn’t scream. No screaming. Screaming was a sign of a deranged woman, and she would not be a deranged woman on the phone.

  She would be calm and businesslike, and sound like the one sane person in this hideous triangle of people. No wonder triangles never worked in love affairs. Somebody always wanted more and in this case, that somebody was Antoinette.

  Was it different when you had sons? Did having a boy mean you longed for him and his companionship much more than you longed for the companionship of your daughter? Cassie didn’t know.

  Antoinette had one son and two daughters, yet she wasn’t going to Miriam and Ruth for friendship, consolation and help: she was going to Shay, and Shay alone. It was as if she wanted him to replace his father, and that wasn’t a viable option.

  The more she thought about it, the angrier Cassie got. She was angry with Antoinette for trying to break up the natural order of things, and she was angry at Shay for the same reason.

  ‘Same old, same old,’ she muttered to herself.

  She’d been a small child, just seven, too small to fight and scream and yell when Marguerite had walked out all those years ago. But she’d fight and scream now. She would not let her husband run away on her and their children. Shay would not know what had hit him.

  She was going to keep her voice down, keep calm, and keep the high moral ground, because she was entitled to it after all.

  ‘Hi, Cass,’ he said when he answered, as if all was right with the world.

  At his cheery greeting, all her good intentions fled. She thought of Lily and Beth, and how they deserved a proper family and a father who was there – not a father who was running over to his mother’s because his mother had just clicked her fingers.

  ‘I’ve just had the most unbelievable conversation with Beth,’ said Cassie icily.

  ‘What?’ said Shay, sounding bewildered. ‘Is she OK?’

  ‘No, she’s not OK. She went home and heard a really odd message on our answering machine, a message from your mother where she explains how she’s found a wonderful place that you two will love living in. Apparently she’s selling her house and you’re going to live with her, happily ever after. No mention of us.’

  There was complete silence on the other end of the phone, but Cassie could hear her husband breathing heavily.

  ‘There are so many problems with this ludicrous idea that I almost don’t know where to start, Shay, but I’ll explain the one that’s made me most annoyed—’

  ‘Cass,’ began Shay. ‘You don’t understand …’

  She ignored him. ‘We’re married, have two amazing daughters, own a house and a cat, and suddenly you come up with an incredible, life-changing plan for us all, and you don’t even mention it to me! You’ve told me nothing! Please tell me Antoinette was somehow given hallucinogens instead of her normal vitamins in the pharmacy so that I know she was and still is talking complete and utter rubbish. Otherwise, Shay, it seems you have made a huge decision and kept me out of the loop completely. Oh yes, and before she heard this message, Beth thought we were going to get divorced, which, to be honest, sounds like a damn good idea right now.’

  ‘Listen,’ sighed Shay, ‘I meant to talk to you about it. It’s this plan Mum has and the whole thing got out of hand. If you think about it, Cass, it’s not a bad plan really. Mum’s not getting any younger, she’s lonely, she’s never got over Dad dying and—’

  ‘I never got over my mother leaving but I didn’t run out and steal somebody else’s mother, did I?’ screamed Cassie, and then the gloves were entirely off. She couldn’t have stopped herself screaming if she’d been paid to. ‘She’s sixty-four and is perfectly healthy. Don’t you see what this is? She wants you back. Not us, just you. And you’re letting her. How dare you do this to us? How dare you do this to me, to our children, to our marriage? It’d be easier if you were having an affair because … well, men have affairs. It’s quite normal. Not nice, but normal. But to betray me with your mother like this? How can I ever trust you from now on?’

  ‘Oh honey, don’t be like that, it was just an idea,’ butted in Shay.

  ‘A pretty crap idea at that,’ said Cassie. ‘How about you decide where you want to live, Shay: with us – me, Lily and Beth – or with your mother. Because right now, that’s a choice you’ve got to make.’

  Then she hung up.

  The weird thing was she didn’t feel any better after getting all this off her chest. She didn’t feel the joy of vindication or the power of having stood up to someone who was hurting her.

  Instead she felt like crying. Shay hadn’t shouted back at her or said he’d do what he damn well pleased. That wasn’t Shay’s style. He’d sounded worn out and hemmed in on all sides.

  Cassie stuffed her phone into a pocket and made for the ladies. She found an empty cubicle, pushed the lid down, sat on the toilet and allowed herself to cry. You couldn’t cry in public in Loren’s office. But here, even for a short while, it was safe.

  Loren caught Cassie as she was storming out of the ladies’. ‘Cassie, I need to see you in my office immediately,’ she said in the tone she used to imply that she was the most important person on the planet and everyone else could go hang. Normally, when Loren spoke like that, Cassie and pretty much everyone else in the building kowtowed and said, ‘Yes of course, Loren, how soon do you want me there? How high do you want me to jump?’

  But today Cassie looked at her blankly and said, ‘I don’t have time.’

  ‘What?’

  Under other circumstances, Cassie might have noticed that speaking to Loren like this actually worked. For once Loren took an actual physical step backwards – taken aback in every sense of the word.

  ‘Well, I need you,’ she said, almost stammering.

  ‘I have an emergency at home,’ Cassie said, and it was true.

  What bigger emergency could there be than going home to pack your husband’s suitcases and throw him out? Yup, that all registered pretty high on the emergency-ometer.

  ‘We’ve things to discuss,’ said Loren, flustered.

  Briefly, Cassie actually noticed what was going on around her. It seemed as if Loren, when threatened or confronted in any way, retreated.

  ‘I’ll talk to you in the morning,’ Cassie said abruptly, making it clear that the conversation was now over.

/>   She made her way out of the building, not really caring about Loren or her company. She didn’t care about anything. Most specifically, she didn’t care about her damn mother-in-law and the interfering that had brought Cassie’s marriage to this point.

  Forty minutes later, Cassie parked the car on her drive. She couldn’t have said precisely how she drove home or what route she’d taken. All she knew was that somehow she’d gone through traffic lights and up lanes and down roads, not banging into pedestrians or cyclists, operating on an automatic pilot that had kept her safe.

  She slammed the door of the car and marched into the house. There was very loud music coming from upstairs. That was almost her undoing.

  Beth was home.

  She was the one who’d heard the message on the answering machine, the message that made her think her parents had deliberately kept her out of a vitally important piece of family news. She was the one who was scared her parents were going to split up because of the tension between Cassie and Shay.

  Cassie would never forgive Shay or Antoinette for that. In fact, as far as she was concerned, the blame lay equally between them.

  Once, she might have said that Antoinette was the one who was creating all the trouble, always wanting Shay, always needing more than he was willing to give. But now it was plain that he was going along with it to the point that they had actually discussed and planned selling Cassie and Shay’s family home – and the last people to know were going to be Cassie and her children.

  Cassie ran upstairs and knocked on Beth’s door. ‘Let me in,’ she said.

  There was no reply. Given the loudness of the music, it was no surprise that Beth couldn’t hear her.

  ‘Please, let me in, Beth,’ she shouted.

  The door opened a grudging inch or two and Beth, red-eyed, peered out. ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Honey, I would never do anything so enormous without telling you. You know that. This is something that …’ Cassie thought about it carefully before she continued. ‘This is something that Gran dreamed up.’

  She had to give Shay the benefit of the doubt in front of their daughters. She would not use them as ammunition.

  ‘It’s your gran. Some silly idea she’s taken all the way without telling anyone – well, without telling me, you and Lily.’

  ‘How could she, Mum?’ said Beth tearfully, and she began to cry loudly.

  ‘Your gran just wasn’t thinking straight. It’s all going to be OK,’ her mother said.

  Somehow she managed to get into the room, turn off the music and sit down on the bed. She held Beth tight to her until the sobbing subsided.

  ‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ she kept saying, the way you’d quiet a crying baby, and all the time, in the back of her mind, she kept thinking: I will kill you both for this.

  When Beth had finally calmed down and Cassie had told her it was all a storm in a teacup, and really Granny sometimes lost the run of herself, Beth agreed to come downstairs and watch some TV in the kitchen while Cassie made dinner. She made Beth hot, sweet tea and gave her a chocolate bar.

  ‘Now,’ said Cassie, taking the TV remote, ‘what delicious telly rubbish can we watch?’

  Soon Beth was engrossed in another episode of a fashion reality show she loved.

  Cassie knew Lily would be home soon, dropped back by her friend Karly’s mum after their karate class. Shay was sure to be home very soon too.

  And Cassie would be ready for him. She would give him the ultimatum that would finish Antoinette’s stupid interfering forever. He simply needed to see what he’d be losing, that was all. And she knew just how to make that fact plain to him.

  Talking hadn’t worked, but this next step would.

  She didn’t have much time. She went to their room, opened his wardrobe and started pulling clothes out. It was amazing how satisfying it was to rip things off hangers, not caring how they fell.

  She ran downstairs, grabbed a few bin bags, ran back upstairs and started stuffing the suits, shirts, underwear and everything she could find into the bin bags. It took four bin bags. Amazing, really. He had a lot of clothes.

  Cassie didn’t think she had that many clothes, which said a lot about her, she thought, wonderingly. Her husband owned more clothes than she did.

  Maybe she needed Coco to take her in hand and dress her.

  She’d tied up all the bin bags, hauled them downstairs and put them carefully on one side of the utility room where the girls wouldn’t see them, when she heard Shay drive up.

  Whether she gave him the bags or not entirely depended on how he behaved, she decided.

  She opened the front door and waited for him. There was no sign of Lily or Karly and her mother yet, but they’d be there in about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes to let her husband know just how angry she was. Fifteen minutes to repair their marriage.

  They could weather this. She’d promised Beth it would be fine but … but Cassie had to be sure, really sure, that Shay loved them.

  Because some primal instinct told her that she could not be rejected again. She would do the rejecting this time.

  Shay had left the office at high speed. He didn’t bother telling anyone where he was going. He thought, ruefully, that they might be used to that: he spent a lot of time going to his mother’s to do things for her lately. Probably too much. Cass was right about that.

  But how could Cassie even begin to think that caring for his mother was abandoning his family? It wasn’t. He loved his mother and he had a duty to her. Duty was important and didn’t just end to your mother on the day you got married.

  This hiccup was just Cassie and her fear of being abandoned.

  He was fed up with that. It had been present all their married life and when he’d talked to Pearl about it, she’d been cagey, as if this was a subject she could barely touch upon.

  ‘Cassie was so young when her mother left, Shay,’ was all she’d say. ‘That has a long-term effect on a person, particularly when the person who leaves is their mother.’

  ‘Yeah, but she had you,’ said Shay, exasperated.

  Pearl had looked at him sadly. ‘It’s not the same.’

  The traffic was hell. Rush hour no matter what time you left at, he thought with irritation. Cassie would have gone into boil mode by now.

  Sure, he had been stupid to even think of listening to his mother’s plan about them all moving in together, but hell, it hadn’t been the worst plan in the world. Who knew what sort of help Pearl would need in the future, and no matter what plan Cassie came up with, he’d go along with it. He wasn’t threatened by his wife’s relations, so why was she so threatened by his?

  Shay walked in and slammed the front door behind him.

  Slam the door, did you? thought Cassie, alert to the slightest thing.

  They met in the hall. Conscious of the fact that their voices might carry into the living room where Beth was watching TV, Cassie said: ‘Let’s have this out in the kitchen. Beth’s home, as you know, and she’s already devastated enough. I don’t want her to hear this.’

  ‘I want to go see her,’ Shay said, ‘and tell her it’s not what she thinks.’

  Cassie glared at him. ‘You sorting out your messes will have to wait, because you and I need to talk’ she said. ‘You betrayed me.’

  Shay had been expecting a row but not this.

  ‘Betrayed?’ he said. ‘C’mon, Cassie, don’t be overdramatic. It’s hardly betrayal when you talk about something with your mother,’ Shay shot back.

  Cassie stared at him as if all her suspicions had been correct. ‘You’re defending this,’ she said in astonishment, ‘this cack-handed idea to sell our home and move somewhere with your bloody mother.’

  It was hearing Cassie say ‘your bloody mother’ that finally sent Shay over the edge.

  ‘Do you know what,’ said Shay, his blood be
ginning to boil, ‘it was a stupid idea, a very stupid idea, and certainly very stupid to consider any of it without talking to you, but do you know what, Cassie, for most people this would not be that big a deal. It’s only a big deal because of you. Because of your issues.’ He pointed his finger at her. ‘You’re so afraid that everyone’s going to leave you, that all it takes is one notion that somebody could be planning something behind your back and you’re convinced that’s it, they’re going, they’re off. You’re crazy, just like your crazy mother, and I’m sick of it.’ He enunciated each word slowly. ‘I love you. I made a commitment to you when we got married, and has that changed? No, that hasn’t changed at all. You just keep thinking it’s changed, you keep being determined to think it’s always going to change, that I’m going to leave, that I’m going to dump you like your mother did.’

  ‘How dare you?’ whispered Cassie.

  ‘I dare because it’s the truth. You’ve been acting weird ever since Jo went into hospital. I don’t know what that meant to you, whether it brought up all the stuff about your mother leaving when you were a child or not. Maybe you identify with Fiona, poor kid.’

  Cassie could say nothing, only stare at him. Everything he was saying was true but it was all being said so coldly, without comfort. How could he speak to her like that?

  ‘But you’re not a kid anymore, Cassie; you’re a grown-up. A grown-up with a grown-up husband who did a really dumb thing, yes, and my mother didn’t help with her stupid phone message, and I should have told you. I am sorry for not discussing it with you, Cass, so let’s have an adult conversation about this and you can tell me, “This is a dumb idea and I don’t want to live with your mother, end of story”. But let’s discuss it like grown-ups and not kids.’ Shay paused. ‘I suppose you rang my mother?’

  ‘Yes, because I knew this was all her idea—’

  ‘She’s lonely, Cass, that’s all.’

  ‘And I don’t get lonely without you?’

  It sounded so stupid once the words were out of her mouth, but she did feel lonely. The girls were growing up so quickly, they needed her in different ways, and she needed the stability of her relationship with Shay. Except that felt as if it was gone too. She came last with him and she couldn’t bear that.