Between Sisters (21 page)

‘She
can’t
go out like that!’ Shay said, glaring at Cassie as if their elder daughter’s growth spurt was entirely her fault.

‘I know it’s short but I haven’t had a chance to get back to the uniform shop yet to get the next size up,’ Cassie said tiredly. She’d done all the back-to-school uniform shopping, not Shay. She wanted to add that they were lucky there was food in the fridge, that anyone had homework done any night, or that without her, nobody would have had cooked dinner for the whole week. She wanted to add that Shay still hadn’t managed to speak to Coco
once
about the whole Jo tragedy and ask how she was coping, but she held her breath.

Don’t sweat the small stuff. Keep the big stuff firmly at the back of your mind.

‘It’s not acceptable, Cassie,’ said Shay fiercely, unable to move off what he clearly viewed as a scandalous outfit for their daughter to be wearing to a sporting event. ‘People will be able to see … well, her underwear! It’s indecent! You can’t let her out like that, Cassie.’ It was the ‘you’ that did it, as if only Cassie had any responsibility for things in their house, while Shay was only responsible for things relating to his beloved mother’s home.

Cassie lost her battle with not sweating the small stuff.

‘
You
go to the uniform shop then,’ she said, surprising them all with her roar. ‘
You
can do the grocery shopping and make the dinner. And every Saturday we have hot chocolate in the Coffee Bean, which you wouldn’t know as you almost never take the girls to sports, but this week you can take them in there!’

With that, she turned on her heel, marched back into their bedroom and slammed the door.

Outside, there was silence.

Beth went into her room, bent over beside the mirror and twisted around to see if she could catch a glimpse of her knickers. Not a sign of them and she was wearing the pink cotton ones with the lace at the top, the ones she liked best because she thought they were really pretty and not at all kid-like, because Mum was obsessed with them wearing age-appropriate clothes.

‘You can’t see my knickers, Dad!’ she roared triumphantly.

On Saturday morning, Antoinette thought she might phone Shay and get him to come round for a few hours in the afternoon. It was a sunny day, still warm for September. The branches of most of the shrubs in the garden needed to be cut back for winter and he was great with the secateurs. Her old hands weren’t up to it anymore.

‘I cut all my garden stuff up,’ her friend Dilys liked to say. ‘This gizmo I got in the garden shop can cut anything, whether you’re strong or not. The fella that sold it to me said it was the perfect thing for the more mature lady. I think he was flirting with me …’

Josette rolled her eyes. ‘You think everyone is flirting with you, hussy,’ she said.

‘Keeps me happy!’ said Dilys, winking bawdily. ‘There’s many a fine tune played on an old fiddle.’

‘My hands aren’t up to it,’ Antoinette pointed out, with a look at the fingers she manicured herself every week. ‘The last time I did it, I had pains for ages.’

‘I have pains for an hour after I get out of bed,’ said Dilys, ‘but I still do it. Lord, Antoinette, don’t get old before your time.’

‘It’s nothing to do with age,’ Antoinette said, wondering why she’d bothered even mentioning the pains in her hands.

Dilys was very annoying these days, pushing Antoinette all the time and implying that she was relying on Shay too much. Dilys was really taking the whole ‘anything a man can do, I can do better’ thing too far. Dilys would hurt herself one day with her determination to do it all herself, despite the two new hips. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have adult children to help. But then not everyone had a son like Shay.

The row over short uniforms and teeth-brushing meant Cassie had as much chance of launching herself up to the International Space Station as she had of going back to sleep, so she made herself some tea and toast, then went back to bed and flicked through a magazine. Her concentration wasn’t even up to a book, which was a good indicator of her tiredness. Work was exhausting. Loren, her boss, had taken on four huge jobs and hadn’t added any temporary staff to help them all out.

‘Conference tourism is good for all of us!’ Loren had said in a rallying speech the day before as she’d hurried out the door in head-to-toe designer gear to go to a posh lunch in the Merrion Hotel – an activity she described as ‘networking’ and on which she claimed oodles of tax back as a business expense.

‘Better for some of us than for others,’ sighed Belinda, clutching her office laptop she was taking home to work on all weekend.

Cassie had decided to ask Coco and Fiona if they wanted to come to an early Saturday dinner.

‘Stay over, perhaps?’

‘I’d love to but Attracta’s flying in from Sydney on Saturday and she’s staying with us. Xavier’s coming on Sunday. He’s very laid-back about the whole thing, saying it’s just a quick trip. They’re a weird family …’

Cassie thought about it. ‘They had a weird upbringing, Coco,’ she said.

‘Ours wasn’t cookie cutter either, Cass,’ said Coco lightly. ‘No mother, Dad permanently sad about her leaving … Only Pearl was normal. Well, and us …’

‘You’ve never been normal!’ teased Cassie, not wanting to talk about their own lives. The conversation during the week had been hard enough. That was the trick: if she didn’t think about the past, it didn’t exist. ‘And we had love, don’t forget that.’

‘Yeah, love,’ said Coco gratefully.

‘That’s what you’ve got for Fiona, and don’t forget it. You’re not her mum but you love her. That can work, even if it’s just till Jo gets better.’

‘I guess. I’m just so terrified of doing it all wrong,’ said Coco.

Her sister laughed loudly. ‘That’s the main theme of motherhood,’ she said. ‘Welcome to the club!’

‘We had the big talk,’ Coco went on. ‘I told her I would never let her down and she hugged me all evening, sitting on me like a baby monkey. She’s never done that before.’

‘She was scared,’ Cassie said, ‘and you helped her with that. You’re doing amazingly, darling.’

Cassie had finally dragged herself out of bed and was about to start on vacuuming the house when the phone rang. It was just about the time the netball matches should be over, so Cassie thought it might be one of the girls with news of netball matches lost dismally or won triumphantly. Or even an update on the current row with their father.

Instead, it was her mother-in-law.

‘Oh Cassie, how are you, pet?’ said Antoinette. Then, without waiting for an answer, she sailed on. ‘I was looking for Shay. Is he around? I need him to do something for me.’

Shay had been at his mother’s twice this week and the previous week. He’d been there the night Jo had been rushed to hospital – the night when she’d needed him.

Cassie felt a surge of anger rise from somewhere inside her. That night she’d really needed her husband and he hadn’t been there – it still rankled.

The words
abandonment
and
choice
rippled through her head. Antoinette was making Shay choose.

‘He’s taking the girls to netball, Antoinette,’ she said coolly.

‘Oh, right. I thought that was your thing, the netball and all that,’ said her mother-in-law.

Cassie realised that her plan for not sweating the small stuff wasn’t going too well that morning.

‘He loves to do things with the family,’ she said, knowing there was a hint of bitchiness in her voice but unable to contain it. ‘The girls love having hot chocolate with him after a game,’ she added, thinking that a great divine foot might come out of the sky and stomp on her for such a barefaced lie.

‘Isn’t that lovely?’ said Antoinette in such nice tones that Cassie felt guilty immediately.

Poor Antoinette lived on her own and she was just phoning up for a chat, that was all …

‘Can you get Shay to phone me, then, pet?’

‘Of course.’

‘You see, I need my garden sorted out. I know he’s a dab hand with the old shrubs, even if he doesn’t have a clue what’s a shrub and what’s a weed, but if he comes soon, he could tidy it all up for me today,’ Antoinette went on.

Cassie thought of the wilderness of their own back garden, which was an unattractive combination of semi-wild and semi-barren due to places where plants had either gone feral or died altogether. Only the patio, with pots delivered from Pearl, was decent. Shay hadn’t been near it all summer, too busy at his mother’s beck and call, and Cassie hadn’t inherited her grandmother’s gardening gene.

‘I don’t know if you know how lucky you are with Shay, you know.’ Antoinette was still talking. ‘Not many husbands are so good around the place, but Shay, Lord, that man can fix anything. He takes after his father, of course. Our garden was the pride of the road once. Not anymore, sadly, but Shay will fix it all up—’

‘Have you thought of getting a gardener in to do some work in it?’ Cassie interrupted suddenly, unable to take any more.

Her mother-in-law wasn’t poor and despite the state of their own finances, Cassie would have contributed something to the gardener from her own pay packet if she thought it would get Shay away from Antoinette’s clutches. Better still, Miriam and Ruth could cough up to help their mother.

‘Pay good money for a gardener when I have Shay?’ said Antoinette, shocked. ‘You must think we all have money to throw away, Cassie.’

No,
Cassie reflected sourly,
only marriages.

‘I’ll get him to phone you,’ she said shortly. ‘I think the girls are back. Bye.’ And she hung up.

If Shay so much as set foot in his mother’s house this weekend, Cassie would find her own long-lost, rarely-used garden implements and stab him with them. And then she’d pack his bags for him, she thought grimly.

The sports’ club party arrived home at one, hungry and grumpy.

‘We didn’t go to the Coffee Bean,’ grumbled Lily.

‘There was no parking,’ said Shay defensively.

There never was parking, Cassie knew. It was the best coffee shop for miles, so you had to park a long way around the corner and schlep. But nobody minded. The Coffee Bean had cranberry and orange muffins and hot chocolate to die for …

‘We went to Freddie’s crappy coffee shop,’ said Beth scathingly.

Freddie’s made the hot chocolate with water instead of milk and had rock-hard scones that people joked were sponsored by the local dentist, so good were they at dislodging fillings.

‘Dad met some of his friends and they talked for ages about
football
…’

The litany went on. He’d missed Lily scoring a goal because he’d been talking to another father and hadn’t run between the two girls’ matches the way Cassie did, determined to give of her time fairly to both daughters.

Under normal circumstances, Cassie would have told the girls not to be so hard on their poor dad, to apologise and remember who’d taken them to netball. Diffusing family rows was her speciality. She’d have privately told Shay that hormones were ruling the house and not to mind, that the girls did exactly the same thing to her all the time.

But not today. Today she felt unhinged, attacked by memories and problems from every side.

‘Freddie’s is a dreadful coffee shop, Shay, and you know it,’ she snapped. The words were out of her mouth before her brain had fully kicked in. ‘Oh yes, and your mother rang. Her garden needs doing. I should point out that
our
garden needs doing too but I feel we’re rather low on the list.
Again
.’

And with that, she swept into the kitchen, slammed the door and headed for the coffee maker. The calming herbal tea thing could go hang; she needed proper caffeine.

Shay looked at the kitchen door and idly wondered if the wood was still vibrating from the slamming. Cassie had been saying the girls’ hormones had been a problem lately, not that he’d really noticed, but he wondered if his wife’s hormones were really the worrying ones. What was wrong with her? So they hadn’t gone to the coffee shop the kids wanted. What the hell? Nobody had taken him to coffee shops when he was a kid.

And since when did Cassie worry about the garden? She was as hopeless at it as he was. They had grass, a deck and few scrubby shrubs along the garden walls. It wasn’t a bower like Pearl’s, but then Pearl lived with her secateurs in hand for deadheading and a bit of twine in her pocket to tie up trailing things. You were either born like that or you weren’t.

Flowers and wine, Shay decided. That would sort things out. He’d phone his mother, get out of the house for the day, sort out Ma’s garden, let Cassie’s mood improve, and bring home gifts. That always worked. She had a bee in her bonnet about him going round to his mother’s but what else was he to do? He had a duty to his mother; surely Cassie understood? But then, he supposed, she hadn’t had a mother and Pearl was the most competent person on the planet, so beside her, his poor mother came up badly in the taking-care-of-herself stakes. Still, Cassie would get it. She never lost her temper for very long. It was one of the things he loved about her.

Except she might lose her temper over the house-selling thing. Shay felt a twinge of discomfort. He still hadn’t broached that with her.

He’d seen a place in the property pages that looked good – far too expensive, but the sort of thing they were theoretically looking for. If they couldn’t find a house that suited with the sort of flat in the garden, this property in the paper made him think they could sell his mother’s house, she could move into theirs, and they could buy somewhere and build on it with a bridging loan … It was a good plan.

‘Hope you approve, Dad,’ Shay said to his father, who he hoped was up above playing cards with his pals and watching the footie on some celestial big-screen telly.

Thinking of his dad made him think of his sisters. He’d need to talk to them about the whole moving thing with their mother and how it would all work out. He’d talk to Cassie when she calmed down. Next week, for definite. When she wasn’t so hormonal.

Ruth answered the phone on the second ring.

‘Waiting for someone?’ Shay teased his sister.