Best of Friends (76 page)

“I know I’m in terrible trouble and I’m going to be grounded for ever and have my pocket money taken away and have my kneecaps nailed to the floor,” she joked, “but could you treat me like an adult long enough to tell me something?” She looked meaningfully at her parents’ clasped hands.

Abby’s other hand reached over the table and grabbed her daugh-ter’s.

“We’ve been the stupid ones, Jess,” she said. “Not you. All you did was run away when things got a bit tough. We ran away for a lot longer. You were only gone twenty-four hours. Your dad and I ran away from each other and from reality for months.”

“And it’s thanks to you that we’ve realised it, Jess,” said Dad soberly. “I’ve been thinking so hard about what you told me at Car-oline’s—I haven’t exactly been the perfect husband, have I?”

Abby listened quietly.

“She told me some home truths,” he went on, speaking to Abby now, “about how I’d resented your career, Abby. You told me the same thing and you’re both right. I did and I’m sorry. You were working for all of us to have a better life and I got caught up in my own petty jealousies over that.”

He looked over at her mother and Jess was thrilled to see that it was the loving way he used to. For so long, they’d glared at each other, with Mum giving Dad her laser eyes and Dad staring angrily back, his face taut and cynical. It was different now—he looked the way he used to look years ago. He looked like he loved Mum again.

“So, it’s all down to me?” Jess enquired cheekily.

Her mother laughed loudly. Jess hadn’t heard that sound for a long time either.

“It’s all down to you,” repeated her mum, “but don’t think you’re going to get off the hook, madam,” she added, waggling her index finger at her daughter in a pretend menacing manner. “You’ve no idea how worried we were. Just think: in a few hours, we were going to have an alert on all the news bulletins saying you were missing.”

Jess cringed at the thought. “I didn’t want you to go to all that bother of calling the police or anything.”

“I know you didn’t,” said her mother, “and I know you’re sixteen and capable of looking after yourself but you’ve never been away from home on your own like that without us knowing exactly where you were, so we were worried, really worried. Please don’t ever do it again.”

“I won’t, I promise,” said Jess, “but only if you guys promise not to stress me out, either!”

“Peace, peace,” begged Tom. “Let’s order.”

But Jess wanted to be sure that things were going back to nor-mal. “Are you moving back home, Dad?” she asked bluntly. “You’re not getting a divorce anymore?”

Her parents looked at each other. In the time they’d spent to-gether worrying about Jess, they hadn’t actually talked about Tom moving back in or about calling the lawyers off. During the night, it was enough that they were close again, talking the way they used to. Abby waited to see what Tom would say. She remembered how he’d behaved before when she’d asked him to move back. She’d never forget how painful that had been. He’d thrown her suggestion back in her face and more or less told her that hell would freeze over before he’d do such a thing. Worse, he’d refused to take any re-sponsibility for the problems in their marriage.

Until now. She could barely believe the admission of guilt he’d made but it was still up to him to make the move. She’d let him know that she loved him and that she’d love to have their marriage back. But he still had to realise that it took two people to break up a marriage—and two to fix it.

Abby could see the waitress bearing down on them. In a moment she’d be there, ready to break the spell.

“I’d love to move back in,” Tom said, adding, more hesitantly, “if your mother will have me. Will you, Abby?” he asked quietly.

“Are youse ready to order?” asked the waitress.

Abby looked at her husband and daughter, her exhausted face split with a wonderful smile.

“Yes,” she said, from the heart.

“Well, what do you want?” the waitress went on, pen poised over her pad.

The three members of the Barton family grinned at each other. Jess realised that her parents were too choked to speak, so she did it for them.

“Chips all round,” she said, “and three vegetarian pizzas.”

thirty-four

L
izzie was finding that living with Debra was not getting any easier. Since the disastrous meeting of the two families, there didn’t appear to be any hope of a reconciliation between Debra and Barry, and Lizzie was learning the hard way that even mentioning him caused tears.

“I just think you ought to meet him, that’s all I’m saying,” she would soothe. “Not that he was right and you were wrong.”

“You don’t understand,” sobbed Debra. “He lied to me. He told me he loved me on our wedding day and now it turns out he didn’t even want to be there. I can’t forgive him for that. He betrayed me and he did it publicly. How can we go back now? Tell me that.”

Her mother couldn’t answer.

The only things that would cheer Debra up were shopping and going out in the evenings. Her mother, though usually tired after work and with the fund-raising she was doing with Erin in memory of Sally, was expected to provide both the entertainment—whether it was going to a pub or a restaurant, or just getting in a takeaway and a video—and the finance. As their hectic social life went on Lizzie found her bank balance suffered correspondingly. The night-time cosmetic party sales looked increasingly like her only option to make ends meet—either that, or sell her body, and she couldn’t imagine that being a particularly lucrative business, given the state of it.

Worse, her fiftieth birthday was looming at the end of Septem-ber and she’d done hardly any of the life-changing “Things to Do …” things she’d planned. So much for chatting men up just for the hell of it or doing something mad. The parachute jump had been her one and only dash for excitement, and she hadn’t been back. Gorgeous Simon would think she’d been teasing him. She knew she ought to ring him, but she just couldn’t pluck up the courage. He’d have been perfectly justified in slamming down the phone, seeing as how she’d ignored him so spectacularly for ages. And what was the point of phoning him to apologise or make up when Debra obviously still needed her? So she tried not to think about him at all, because if she did, if she remembered how they’d got on so brilliantly and how she’d felt so attracted to him, then she felt overwhelmed by a sense of loss.

After years of thinking she’d never meet a man she fancied or who fancied her, she had, and she’d managed to screw it up.

“We could go to the new restaurant on Castle Street tonight,” suggested Debra one Thursday evening when Lizzie had had a par-ticularly long day and wanted nothing more than to collapse in front of the soaps. “I believe the food’s gorgeous.”

“OK,” said her mother, who’d just got home after a speedy after-work trip to the supermarket to stock up. She shoved the chicken pieces she’d bought for that evening’s dinner into the fridge and stowed the rest of the shopping, wondering how she was going to squash her feet back into her shoes to go out. The postman had de-livered two bills that morning: one a jaw-dropping phone bill, and the other an outrageous electricity demand.

The phone rang and Debra leaped at it. As it was so rarely for her nowadays, Lizzie kept unpacking shopping and was almost sur-prised when Debra yelled, “It’s Aunt Gwen for you.”

Gwen didn’t usually phone twice in one day, thought Lizzie, who’d spoken to her sister earlier from work. Gwen was a very com-forting person to talk to these days. There were none of the heavy silences there were with Debra where Lizzie weighed up every word in case she said the wrong thing. With Gwen, if you said something tactless, she’d shout with laughter and never take offence.

“Shay’s gone to his poker night and I thought I might drop in to see you and cheer you up,” said Gwen. “You said you were staying in.”

“Well, we’re going out to dinner in town, now, actually,” Lizzie said, hating herself for being shown to be such a wimp. Earlier, she’d told Gwen how exhausted she was, and about the murderous bills.

There was a silence at the other end of the phone, a Gwen si-lence that Lizzie could translate easily after forty-nine years of prac-tice: You’re tired, you’re broke and now you’re going out because Debra wants to and you won’t say no to her, it went.

“I might come along myself,” Gwen announced.

Piggy in the middle, thought Lizzie with a groan. That was all she needed.

The new restaurant was booked out, so Gwen led the way into the pub next door, the Rock’s Tavern, a spit-and-sawdust venue with an American ranch theme—waitresses dressed in cowgirl out-fits, and plenty of country music playing in the background.

“What a lovely place,” Gwen said, settling herself down happily at a table. She then went on to commit what were in Debra’s eyes two enormous social solecisms: one, by slipping her tired feet out of their flat shoes and putting them up on the bars of a nearby chair, and two, by ordering a glass of stout.

Debra, whose current shoe fetish meant she was sporting yet an-other pair of new sandals in honour of the posh new restaurant, stared at her aunt in horror. Debra would never have dreamed of ordering something like a glass of Murphys, and as for sticking slightly swollen, unmanicured toes out in public, wel … she was horrified.

But Gwen didn’t appear to notice her niece’s discontent—or if she did, she didn’t give a damn.

“Isn’t this the life?” sighed Gwen, sitting back and taking a deep slug of her stout. “I don’t get out on my own often enough, do you know that, girls?” she said. “Maybe I should take a leaf out of your book, Debra, and leave poor old Shay so I could go off on girls’ nights out.”

Lizzie stifled a giggle at the thought of Shay abandoned while Gwen embraced the single life. Debra, on the other hand, looked disgusted at the thought of her aunt considering acting like a twenty-something.

Gwen and Lizzie both ordered chips and sausages in a basket, but Debra found there was nothing on the menu that she wanted to eat. Perfectly happy to eat big fried breakfasts at home, she liked healthier, trendier food when she was out.

“There’s nothing here I like,” she said, a tad petulantly, as she scanned through a menu made up of steak sandwiches and deep-fried everything with chips. “This is all swimming in cholesterol,” she complained. “I don’t know why we had to come here instead of a proper restaurant.”

Gwen took another meditative sip of her drink. “It’s far from fancy restaurants you were reared, my girl. Are you the same one who expects her mother to make her big cooked breakfasts every weekend?”

Lizzie gulped. She hadn’t meant to bitch to Gwen about Debra’s childish insistence on a weekend fry-up routine but she must have done. Now Debra would sulk and the evening would be ruined.

But Debra was smart enough to take more criticism from her aunt than she would have from her mother. “Once a week it’s all right to eat that sort of junk,” she said loftily.

“So you’ll wolf down fried food if your poor mother buys it
and
cooks it, but you’re too posh to eat it on a night out, is that it?” de-manded Gwen.

“No,” began Debra.

“And while we’re on the subject of buying food,” said Gwen, get-ting into her stride, “when are you going to start paying your mother for staying with her? She’s feeding you, and you eat like a prize pig for all your moaning about cholesterol.”

Lizzie winced, but there was no stopping her sister when she’d started.

“She’s paying the electricity bill, the heating bill, the mortgage, you name it, and you still expect her to get up out of her bed on a Sunday morning and cook you your breakfast. When is that going to change, Debra?”

“Oh … I …” stammered Debra.

“Well, you might say ‘Oh, I,’ ” retorted Gwen. “It’s about time somebody had this out with you, my girl. I’d be ashamed if you were my child. You have your poor mother run into the ground looking after you, and she’s broke. Do you know she’s been think-ing of taking a second job just to make ends meet? And why is that?” Gwen paused for dramatic effect. “Because she spent every penny she owned on your bloody wedding and now she’s letting you leech off her when you earn a good wage.”

Lizzie couldn’t bear to do more than glance at Debra. Her daughter looked the same way she had at the disastrous Cronin÷Shanahan reconciliation dinner.

“Ah, Gwen, don’t say anything more,” Lizzie begged her sister.

“You’re too soft on her, Lizzie,” Gwen said sharply. “I’m saying all this for your own good too. I’ve held my tongue for months now but something has to be done. Look at her here tonight, sitting like Lady Muck, not even able to put her hand in her pocket and buy us

a drink, and then turning her nose up at the food here.”

“I didn’t,” protested Debra.

“You did,” said Gwen. “You’re spoilt, Debra, that’s your trouble. You’re upset over Barry and you want to make sure everyone else is upset too. Isn’t that why you threw a tantrum when your poor mother brought her new man back to the house?”

Lizzie held her breath, waiting for Debra to attack her and de-mand to know why Gwen had heard about this. But Debra was silent.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” she admitted slowly.

“No, you bloody well shouldn’t,” snapped Gwen. “How dare you interfere in your mother’s life? Doesn’t she deserve some happiness of her own?”

“I was upset and worried—”

“ … About yourself. If your mother had a man, you wouldn’t be numero uno in her life anymore, that’s more like it,” Gwen said. “It’s about time you grew up, Debra. Your mother never says a word against you and you’re using her. It’s got to stop. What if you got back with Barry? I bet you’d rush off and not bother to think that you were leaving your mother alone, having scuppered her chance to have a life with this man.”

“I didn’t—” began Debra.

“Why is it that all your sentences begin with ‘I’?” said Gwen with chilling accuracy. “I, I, I. You never think of anyone else.”

“I’m sorry, Mum,” said Debra, beginning to cry.

“Cut the tears out,” warned Gwen. “Stop treating your mother like a doormat or you’ll have me to answer to.”