Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘Bye,’ he said, and he wrenched the door open, letting it slam behind him.

  Both Phoebe and Fiona turned to look at Coco, who was clearly holding back tears.

  Phoebe knew she wouldn’t want Fiona to notice, so she began blandly chatting to Coco about the latest batch of stuff they’d got in from an auction.

  ‘There are these amazing Shanghai-labelled silk blouses with the most beautiful silk painting on them. You are a genius, Coco. I don’t know how you get this stuff.’

  Fiona, in her school uniform, had begun rifling through the jewellery as she always did when she came into the shop, picking up bracelets and sticking them on her arm and rattling them all together, going: ‘Lovely, I’m going to a dinner party,’ in a posh put-on voice, then giggling at herself when she spotted herself in the mirror.

  Coco stood as if rooted to the spot. She was looking at the door, as if she could still see the man.

  Phoebe steered Coco into the office, still chattering about silk blouses so Fiona wouldn’t notice.

  ‘Coco, what’s wrong?’ whispered Phoebe urgently.

  Coco turned to her and, for the first time since Phoebe had known her, which admittedly wasn’t very long, she saw true anguish in her employer’s eyes. Even when Coco spoke about Jo and the stroke, there was courage and determination there. Coco was going to help Jo get over this and do everything she could to make Jo and Fiona’s lives better, despite the stroke. But that fire and determination were missing now. Instead, Coco’s beautiful face looked as if she’d received the worse news ever. Tears brimmed from her dark eyes and Phoebe could tell that she was holding back great sobs because she didn’t want to upset Fiona.

  ‘Just look at the computer for me for a minute,’ Phoebe said loudly, the sort of words that wouldn’t particularly interest Fiona, who was still playing dress-up with bangles and necklaces.

  Phoebe got Coco seated in the office chair and then rushed out, turned the sign on the door to closed and locked it, which she wished she’d done earlier. She ran back into the office, where Coco still sat, gazing into space.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Phoebe. ‘Please tell me. Maybe I can help.’

  Coco looked at her with those anguished eyes and Phoebe wanted to hug her tightly and make her better, the way she tried to make things better for Ethan and Mary-Kate.

  ‘Please tell me, is there anything I can do?’ asked Phoebe.

  ‘No,’ said Coco brokenly. ‘There’s nothing anyone can do.’

  ‘That man, who was he? Is he a stalker or something?’ Phoebe asked.

  If he had been frightening Coco, she’d run out and hunt him down and hit him for upsetting Coco. She had a punishing right hook, developed at school when there’d been a brief period where they’d had a PE teacher who was keen on taekwondo.

  ‘It’s nothing like that,’ whispered Coco. ‘He was someone I was in love with. We … we were engaged.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Phoebe.

  ‘And I haven’t seen him since … it ended. That’s the first time, and I thought I was over him.’ Coco clamped a hand over her mouth. ‘I’m sorry. I’m talking too much. You don’t want to know this.’

  ‘Course I do.’

  ‘Can you … can you mind Fiona for a moment? I just have to talk to Cassie.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Phoebe, straightening. ‘I’ll take Fiona for a hot chocolate, say you’re working on something on the computer, something boring, and perhaps take her to school?’

  Moments later, Coco heard Phoebe telling Fiona that it was so exciting, they were going for a hot chocolate, and because Coco had some boring computer stuff to do, she’d take Fiona on to school. Wouldn’t that be fun!

  Fiona rushed in for a hug but was gone again in a flash.

  Coco followed them to the door and locked it again.

  The pain she’d felt that night in the restaurant was as bad as it had ever been. She wasn’t over Red O’Neill. She probably never would be.

  Cassie was driving to work. She looked at her phone briefly to see who was calling in case it was one of the girls, but it wasn’t – it was Coco.

  Searching for somewhere to pull the car over, she answered.

  ‘Hi honey, I can’t really talk. I’m on the way into work and – oh, there’s a garage I can pull into.’

  Gratefully, she drove on to a corner of the forecourt.

  ‘Cassie,’ said Coco, ‘you’re not going to believe it, but Red just walked into the shop.’

  ‘Red?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Coco, sounding as if she’d been crying for hours. ‘I don’t know why he came in. He knows it’s my business and he looked around, took one look at me, and then glared at me and left.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Cassie, thinking that this behaviour didn’t sound like Red.

  She’d always been very fond of him, and had been devastated when he and Coco had broken up. To hear that he’d just marched into Twentieth Century, glared at her sister and then marched out again sounded very odd.

  ‘He did, I’m telling you. Just glared at me.’

  ‘OK,’ said Cassie. ‘Do you think he wanted to see you on your own? Was anyone else in the shop?’

  ‘Well, he could have rung the shop,’ said Coco, ‘and there weren’t any customers. There was just Fiona and Phoebe and me. We weren’t even open.’

  Cassie thought about it. ‘Just the three of you,’ she mused. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Coco tearfully. ‘It was horrible, just horrible. I tried so hard to get over him and then he just marches into my life again and then marches out. I just can’t do this anymore, Cass.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure I’m the best person for advice,’ sighed Cassie. ‘I made a bit of a mess of it myself.’

  ‘But what should I do?’ Coco said.

  Cassie tried to think logically. She put her big sister head on.

  ‘If Red came in to see you, then he’s got something to say to you and perhaps he did want to see you on your own. He doesn’t know that Phoebe works there or who Fiona is. She was only small when he left. If I were you, I’d contact him and say you want to see him. Just for a coffee. Just to finish it all because you never did. You simply walked away and you didn’t sort it out. Just like I did,’ added Cassie with an unhappy laugh. ‘I didn’t finish it either. Maybe it’s another genetic thing.’

  Coco grimaced. ‘We’re not doing too well on the romance front, are we?’ she said. ‘We’re good with business, though.’

  ‘You’re brilliant at everything,’ Cassie said loyally. ‘But I think until you – if you’ll pardon the expression – put this to bed, you’re never going to be able to forget about Red. He’s always going to be the one. No one is ever going to match up to him because you’re still thinking about him. So see him, tell him you’re getting on with your life, and you’d love to see him getting on with his life. Then Aunt Edie can stop telling Pearl about things in the paper she’s seen where he’s mentioned.’

  ‘She does that?’ said Coco.

  ‘Oh, all the time,’ said Cassie. ‘Drives Pearl nuts. Edie thinks she’s being helpful and she thinks if Red’s unattached you should run out and grab him right now.’

  ‘As if he wants me,’ said Coco.

  Ruth Reynolds watched her brother bury his face in his hands as she said: ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Shay said in a sigh that was halfway between exhausted and I-might-hit-someone-in-a-moment. ‘You warned me, OK, you warned me.’

  ‘You’d just forgotten what Mum is like,’ Ruth went on.

  ‘I’m remembering now,’ said Shay.

  They were sitting in the serene surroundings of a lovely medieval-themed hotel, close to their mother’s Clontarf home.

  Miriam and their mother had gone to the bathroom, because they li
ked going together.

  ‘Us girls just need to touch up our lipstick,’ Antoinette had said happily. ‘Plus we can have a nosy around.’

  The three grown-up children and their mother were in the hotel to see if everything was up to scratch, as Antoinette put it, to host her sixty-fifth birthday party dinner.

  Shay thought the hotel was perfect and didn’t see the point of this at all, but since he had nowhere to go that evening, he’d got roped into this.

  They’d had a meeting with the banquet person. ‘Although I don’t see why we’re meeting the banquet person,’ Shay had pointed out to Ruth as soon as their mother was out of earshot. ‘It’s only going to be a small group of us. You, me, Miriam, Liam and the kids, Dilys and Josette, Aunt Aggie and Uncle Phil. I mean, how many other people are coming? I thought it was a small dinner.’

  ‘You haven’t been working on the guest list?’ Ruth said, eyebrows raised in mock astonishment.

  ‘Don’t be a cow, Ruth. She’s driving me nuts,’ groaned Shay. ‘I think I must have fixed everything in the house. And we can’t have dinner at home, no. Every second night we have to go out. It’s like she’s showing me off in the area. I feel like a dog in Crufts. We go down to the pub, we have something there, then we walk home. You know the weather’s starting to get cold and it’s damn freezing, but we do the long loop home as if she wants to show me to all the neighbours. Look at my son: he’s living here with me! No mention of: His wife threw him out.’

  ‘Shay, I told you. Ma wants what she wants and she’s good at getting it. She doesn’t want to be lonely and she wants someone else to fix it. It’s called not taking responsibility for yourself,’ Ruth said. ‘And I’m sorry, but I’m having nothing to do with it. I’m busy. You screwed it up, you sort it out.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks a bunch, sis,’ said Shay.

  ‘Have you spoken to Cassie?’ Ruth asked more kindly.

  ‘She won’t talk to me, although she sends me icy texts telling me what the girls are up to and when I can see them. I’ve seen them twice in the last ten days. Both times they cried for half the visit, and Mum was no help at all because she kept going on about how fabulous it was having me around and what a wonderful arrangement it was, as if I was never going home. The girls were devastated. I don’t know if Mum really doesn’t get how upsetting separation is for children, but the girls want their father back and she’s carrying on as if that’s never going to happen because I’m with her and that makes her really happy. So zip-a-dee-doo-dah, one sixty-four, nearly sixty-five-year-old woman is very happy and two teenagers are crying.’

  He could see his mother and Miriam approaching, looking delighted with themselves. Antoinette was dressed as if going to a garden party in a floral dress quite at odds with the season, along with high, pale pink shoes and a little short-sleeved jacket that showed off her delicate wrists. She was wearing her pearls. She always wore her pearls when she was going somewhere where she wanted to impress people, Shay knew.

  He wished his mother would stop trying to impress everyone. Cassie never did that. Cassie was just … Cassie. She was beautiful, he thought sadly. He remembered what it was like to wake up next to her in the morning and see her staring at him with those sleepy, dark eyes. And her smile: she had such an amazing smile. She’d lie there in bed, her hair all tousled on the pillow. He grinned to himself. She hated that hair, always said she could never do anything with it, but he loved it. Cassie’s hair was curly and a little bit wild, like her. For sure, sometimes he wished she’d dress in sexier clothes, more fitted things, and show off those gorgeous legs of hers, but that wasn’t what she liked. She wasn’t like Coco.

  She’d had to be the tough one, the grown-up one, from a very early age. He understood that. That’s why she wore those clothes. She’d told him that once, years ago, when she was still Library Girl and he was Jock Boy. When they’d talked. All the talking had gone out of their marriage what with the conversations about groceries, taking out the bins, and paying the bills.

  He wished she were here now. She’d know the right thing to say to his mother to make her feel that her day was special, instead of his desire to tell his mother that it was only a damn birthday and what was the big deal?

  That was the craziest part of all this – Cassie had always got on wonderfully with his mother. It was like she was surprised he had a mother at all, as if mothers weren’t on her radar.

  On their wedding day, Cassie had made such an effort to involve Antoinette.

  ‘I think the groom’s mother gets totally left out of things,’ she’d said before the actual wedding. ‘It’s like she’s an also-ran. And you know Pearl obviously is like my mum, but Pearl isn’t slightly precious about her side of things, so I want your mum to be involved, it’s important to her.’

  She’d consulted his mother about all manner of things and his mother had been thrilled.

  He thought of that now as he watched his mother happily working on the long list of people for her allegedly small birthday dinner, and she didn’t seem in the slightest bit put out that Cassie was not on the list.

  He hadn’t said: ‘Don’t put Cassie on the list because it would be awkward’, but she simply hadn’t.

  He’d seen the list, had watched her working on it, had endured many an evening while she discussed it as if it were some matter of vast national importance. And nowhere was there a mention of his wife or daughters.

  Suddenly, Shay had the strangest feeling that Cassie had been right all along: that his mother wanted him and nobody else from his nuclear family.

  She had focused on what she wanted and that meant her beloved son, nobody else. It was, he realised, monstrously selfish, and he’d stupidly gone along with it because he felt being a good son was his duty. As if duty was a black and white thing, instead of being many shades of grey.

  Shay got to his feet. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I’m getting a killer of a headache, so I’ll go home. Girls, you’ll drop Mum back?’

  Ruth looked up at him with a faint, knowing grin, while Marguerite and Miriam stared at him in astonishment.

  ‘Don’t you want to help us sort everything out?’ said his mother.

  ‘I’ve got some paracetamol in my handbag,’ offered Miriam, who was always prepared.

  ‘No, really, thanks, I’d just be in the way. This is more your sort of thing.’

  And his mother smiled at the notion that there were things women were innately better at than men, lovely things like arranging parties – not dull things like changing light bulbs, the sort of things that Cassie did without blinking.

  Cassie had never asked him to fix the washing machine; she’d have a go at it herself and if she couldn’t fix it, she’d just call the plumber.

  His funny, strong, lovely wife, who had done her best to make their family perfect, even if perfection was entirely impossible. But she’d tried her best.

  He missed her so much, but how could he tell her that now?

  Shay stood outside the hotel and breathed in heavily.

  ‘What’s wrong, sweetie?’ said a voice, and he turned to see his mother coming up to him, tottering slightly on the high heels she’d insisted on wearing.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said flatly. ‘Nothing’s wrong, just thought I’d get some air, and you are better at that sort of thing than I am.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to come back, Shay? We’re trying to decide the menus. It may only be a small, select gathering but I want the food to be perfect.’

  At that moment, Shay looked at his mother through different eyes. She wasn’t thinking about Cassie, Beth and Lily at all. She was thinking about her own party, her own friends and nothing else.

  She wasn’t thinking about him either, he realised with a start. He was just another part of her life, like a chess piece to be moved around.

  Not that she didn’t love him; of course she loved
him.

  But she loved herself more. She was the centre of her universe and he was a mere satellite.

  If he didn’t get out now, he’d be with her forever, getting older and more bitter, with her giving him new jobs to do every day, because the jobs would be never-ending.

  He could imagine it: Shay, pet, can you go to the post office for me? Shay, I don’t feel like driving today. Will you bring me to meet the girls?

  Things that his mother was well able to do would suddenly become things that he would have to do.

  Pearl came into his mind at that moment. Strong, courageous, and still going strong at seventy-nine. Pearl had had to bring up two girls as her own daughters and she’d made a damn good job of it. He thought he’d ring Pearl or maybe Coco again, if Coco was still talking to him, to see how Cassie was.

  ‘Are you sure you won’t come in, sweetie?’

  ‘No,’ said Shay, and he stalked off away from her, taking out his mobile phone.

  Coco sounded wary and strangely tired when she answered the phone.

  ‘Hello Shay,’ she said.

  ‘I know you think I’m a complete bastard, but I’m not, Coco,’ he said. ‘Please help me out here.’

  ‘Help you out, Shay?’ said Coco, sounding not at all like the sweet Coco he adored, but like a tougher woman altogether. ‘What were you doing making some plan with your mother to move everyone into a different house so your mother could move in? I’ve nothing against your mother, I think she’s lovely, but you’re not married to her: you’re married to Cassie.’

  ‘I know,’ muttered Shay.

  ‘I don’t think you do, you moron,’ snapped Coco, astonishing him. ‘Do you have any idea how abandoned Cassie felt when she was growing up? How abandoned I felt? And then you went and did it again, you just walked off, chose your mother over Cassie. No wonder she did what she did. Yes, I think she should have talked it over with you, but still Shay, come on, you were asking for it.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he agreed miserably. ‘It was the stupidest thing ever, but Mum had this idea and I thought it was going to suit everyone and—’