Three Wishes (34 page)

Neither Cat nor her mother had the right personalities for this sort of work.

“We need Gemma,” said Cat. “She could sit and talk to Nana while we just throw the lot out.”

“She’s doing something with Charlie’s family,” said Maxine and then compressing her lips at her mistake, quickly changed the subject, producing some creased and faded sheets of paper. “Look what I found!”

Cat smiled as she recognized her own childish handwriting. “Another blast from my past.”

It was the
Kettle Scoop,
a weekly family newspaper that Cat had produced when she was around ten. There had been four issues before she got bored.

“I’m really pleased,” said Maxine. “This is the missing issue! I was convinced Gwen had it!”

“You would come in and present it to me with this stern little frown on your face,” said Maxine. “And I had to sit there and read it without laughing. It nearly killed me. Then you’d leave the room and I’d laugh myself silly. You were such a funny, passionate kid.”

“I thought I was producing a serious publication!”

Cat read the front page:

INTERVIEW WITH POP KETTLE!

Next to the article was glued a blurry photo of Pop Kettle that Cat remembered taking herself. At the bottom of the page was a star:
Look out for next week’s issue of the
Kettle Scoop
when we reveal who are Gemma’s
real
parents! As everyone knows, Gemma Kettle is adopted.

Maxine wiped tears of laughter from her eyes.

“Give it to me,” she demanded. “I’m not letting it out of my sight again.”

Cat handed it over. She liked hearing herself described as a “funny, passionate kid.”

“So,” Maxine folded the page neatly in two and tapped it against her hand, “just what are you going to do with your life?”

“Sorry?”

Typical. The very moment she became the slightest bit likable, she had to repair the damage by reverting to bitch mode.

“Well? Not many people get a chance like you’ve got. I hope you’re not going to mope around forever, throwing cutlery at people whenever you don’t get your own way.”

Cat stared at her. She couldn’t believe it. And here she was helping move out Nana’s stuff while Lyn and Gemma spent the day with their happy little families. Cat had been feeling like the old maid daughter, the saintly one, Beth in
Little Women
—except she wasn’t dying, unfortunately.

“What do you mean?” Heavy, resentful bitterness filled her voice. “Not many people get the chance to enjoy a miscarriage and a divorce? How unfortunate for them.”

“Not many people get the chance to choose a new life,” said Maxine. “You’re young, smart, talented, you’ve got no ties, you can do whatever you want.”

“I’m
not
young! And I want ties! I might never get the chance to have children!”

“You might not,” agreed Maxine. “Would that really be the end of the world?”

“Yes!”
It came out like a self-pitying sob of fear.

Maxine sighed. “Look. When I was your age I had three teenage daughters who were all convinced I was trying to ruin their lives. I had a dead-end job and an ex-husband with a bizarre habit of introducing me to all to his new girlfriends. I felt trapped, depressed—and now I think about it, a little bit insane. I would have given anything to be you with all those choices.”

“But I don’t have any choices. Not any that I want.”

I want to be sitting on a plane next to Dan. I want my baby. I want Sal. I want to be somebody else.

“But you
do, you infuriating child.”

Nana’s voice trilled imperiously down the hallway. “Maxine! Cat! Where are you both?”

“Look at your grandmother,” said Maxine.

“What about her?”

“Oh, well, now you’re just being obtuse.”

Nana called again, “Maxine!”

“Just a minute, Gwen!”

At that moment a plane flew overhead, and Cat put her hands on the balcony fence and watched it turn into a speck on the horizon.

Maxine opened the screen door to go back inside.

“France was Dan’s dream,” she said, her hand on the door. “Why don’t you come up with some of your own?”

“That’s not true,” said Cat furiously, but her mother was gone, the screen door slamming behind her.

It was pride that was holding her back. There was something pathetic about the rejected wife bravely pulling herself together, joining a tennis club, doing a photography course, cutting her hair, venturing timidly back out onto the single scene. It was like
accepting
the punishment handed over by the malevolent forces of fate. She wasn’t going to be a good little girl stoically picking up the pieces.

While her personal life was being pulverized, her professional life had been ticking along nicely. The “Seduce Yourself” Valentine’s Day campaign had been an unqualified success, with sales rocketing. There were even complaints! She’d always wanted to do a campaign that generated complaints. (“It was certainly not our intention to offend anyone,” said Marketing Director Catriona Kettle.) Breakfast show DJs made risqué jokes about Hollingdale Chocolates. “What are you going to do next, Cat?” asked Rob Spencer. “Give away a vibrator with every box of chocolates?” “Now you’re talking,” said Cat.

Rather than being embarrassed about their night together, Graham Hollingdale seemed to find it all rather delicious. He gave her twinkly little nudge, nudge, wink, wink looks in meetings. Sometimes she twinkled back. He was too dorky to be lewd. Polyamory was just a really interesting new hobby he’d taken up.

One day, he called her into his office and told her that he was
giving her a promotion. Her lengthy new title would be “General Manager—Marketing and Sales, Asia-Pacific Region.” Rob Spencer and his team would report to her. (Rob Spencer would rather be savaged by a rabid dog.) She’d receive a twenty percent increase in her salary.

Graham grinned, and Cat thought, Did I just sleep my way to the top?

“Twenty percent?” she said.

“Yes,” said Graham fondly. “The Board is over the moon about the last quarter results. Your new strategy is so powerful!”

How far could she push this? Could she get more? Could she double it?

“Triple it,” she heard herself say.

“You want a sixty percent increase?”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

Bloody hell!

She sighed and thought of her mother telling her to come up with some dreams of her own.

“The thing is,” she said to Graham. “I don’t really want to sell chocolates anymore.”

He looked at her with doleful sympathy. “No. No, neither do I. What do you want to do instead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I.”

They laughed guiltily, like two teenagers sitting outside the careers adviser’s office.

“Wednesdays still no good for you?”

“No, Graham.”

It was a Sunday afternoon, and Cat was legally behind the wheel for the first time in seven months. Driving again after so long was an enjoyable sensation. It reminded her of that flying-free feeling of her first solo drive as a teenager. Not nearly as good but then,
all her adult emotions felt like shadows, self-conscious imitations of those intensely real feelings from her childhood.

She had passed her driving test the first time, at 9
A.M
. on the morning of her seventeenth birthday—the earliest possible moment she was allowed to try for it. Her sisters didn’t bother. Lyn wasn’t in a hurry, and Gemma couldn’t stop driving into things.

Frank had been waiting for her in the registry office, his head down reading the newspaper. When he glanced up and saw the expression on her face, he grinned, folded the paper in half, and tucked it under his arm. “That’s my girl.”

He let her take his brand-new Commodore for a drive. “Please don’t kill yourself. I’ll never hear the end of it from your mother.”

She drove all the way to Palm Beach. No alert-eyed grown-up in the passenger seat, the car felt so empty! Accelerating around each new swoop of the road made her delirious with freedom. She could do anything! If she could parallel park—she could take on the whole world!

Her future back then, thought Cat now, was like a long buffet table of exotic dishes awaiting her selection. This career or that career. This boy or that boy. Marriage and children? Maybe later—for dessert, perhaps.

She didn’t realize they’d start clearing the plates away so soon.

Somebody pulled into the lane in front of her without signaling, and Cat slammed on her brake and her horn simultaneously. That was it. The novelty of driving had taken approximately four minutes to wear off.

She was going over to Lyn’s place for coffee.

The famously gorgeous Hank, Lyn’s American ex-boyfriend, was in Sydney, and Lyn, for some unfathomable reason, wanted Cat to meet him.

“You’re not trying to set me up with him, are you?” asked Cat. There was a suspicious breathlessness in Lyn’s voice.

“No!” said Lyn. “And anyway—well, you’ll see. Just come. Bring a cake.”

Cat pulled over across the road from the bakery and hopped out of the car. The traffic was beginning to slow and a truck pulled up beside her. The passenger, his arm resting along the windowsill and his feet up on the dashboard, glanced down at her and gave a relaxed wolf whistle.

Cat looked up and met the guy’s eyes. He grinned. She grinned back. The traffic moved and she ran across the road, the sun warm on the back of her neck.

As she waited in the bakery for her turn, Cat the sneering sideline observer popped into her head. You do know why you’re feeling a little bit happy, don’t you? It’s because that guy whistled at you! Instead of feeling objectified like a good feminist should, you’re actually feeling flattered, aren’t you? You’re feeling
pretty!
You’re even feeling
grateful! You must be getting old if you feel
good when some guy in a truck whistles at you. You make me sick!

“What can I do for this beautiful young lady?”

The little man behind the counter gave her a big flirtatious wink.

“Mmmm. I don’t know. What are you offering to do for me?” said Cat, and the little man roared with appreciative laughter, slapping his hand on the counter.

“Hoo-eee! If I was twenty years younger!”

Bloody hell. Now you’re getting off flirting with old men.

Shut
up, you boring cow! Get off my back!

As she drove toward Lyn’s place, the cake in its white paper bag on the seat next to her, together with a free chocolate éclair—“Don’t you be telling my wife!”—she remembered how Nana Kettle always flirted outrageously with the butcher and the man in the fruit shop. When you went shopping with Nana it was like shopping in a village. “Here comes trouble!” people would call out as she approached.

Cat reached over for the chocolate éclair and took a gigantic
bite. Chocolate, pastry, and cream exploded sweetly in her mouth.

Nana would have to make all new friends in her new local shopping center. She would too. She’d probably know all their names after the first week.

Cat was there when Nana had walked through the empty rooms of her house for the last time. Her bruises had faded to dirty yellow. Her hair was bouncy and curly again. “Looks much bigger now, doesn’t it, darling?”

Then she took a big breath, turned on her heel, and walked out the front door.

“That’s that,” she said firmly.

Cat drove with one hand on the wheel and licked cream from her fingers.

She pulled into Lyn’s street and took another gigantic mouthful of éclair.

The sun really was quite warm. The éclair really was quite delicious.

She parked the car and peeled off her sweater as she got out of the car and walked up the driveway to knock on Lyn’s door; she listened for the sound of Maddie’s footsteps pattering excitedly down the hallway, about to catapult herself into Cat’s arms.