Cage of Love by V. C. Andrews

CAGE OF LOVE
    V.C. Andrews
    Copyright © September 2001
    ISBN 0-7434-4869-3
    .
    My mother died when I was only twelve. We had just begun to enter that womanly magical place together where she would be my guide. Through her eyes, her wisdom and experience, I would know where to stand and where to walk.
    “The world has always been full of minefields for any young girl, Madge, but it’s so much truer today than ever,” she told me the year she passed away.
    She had a horrible virus in her heart that destroyed it slowly, weakening and aging her right before Daddy’s eyes and mine. In her final months, I felt more like the mother taking care of her, the child.
    She taught me so much so quickly, realizing that her days were ticking down like some windup clock. In fact, the moment she died, I looked at the clock and memorized the hour and the minute forever and ever.
    My mother anticipated it all and began teaching me how to care for myself and my father almost the day she was diagnosed. For a long time, she had me fooled. She pulled me into the kitchen to work beside her and learn recipes and cooking techniques, making it all seem like just another mother-daughter activity.
    Subtly, she dropped hints and comments about my daddy’s needs and ways.
    “He won’t wear a shirt he’s worn the day before and he has to have it starched just right. He’s not very good when it comes to tying his tie, Madge,”
    she said, and then demonstrated how to do it and had me practice on her. “Just in case I’m busy,” she said,
    “and you have to do it.”
    I felt a little alarm go off inside me when she said that, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. I didn’t want to.
    “Your father has little patience for the seemingly inconsequential things,” she told me, “but if he goes out of this house with a button too loose or a scuff on his shoe, it throws him out of kilter and he loses confidence in himself.
    “He’s too busy to shop for himself or too insecure about it,” she continued, giving me what I would later think of as Lessons in Daddy. “He doesn’t keep up with style and couldn’t tell you the price of a decent pair of slacks or even a package of underwear or socks.

    “You see how he is when we go shopping on Saturdays. He gets caught up in some new electronic gadget and spends hours learning about it while we’re off doing what we came to do, and then he’s always asking us why we take so long and how we can spend so much time sifting through clothes. He took almost a half a day just to buy a new telephone answering machine, remember?”
    I smiled and laughed. She would talk about Daddy right in front of him as well. They had such a warm, loving relationship that he never felt insulted, even if she did it in front of other people. It was always loving.
    “I tried cooking for us,” he defended, when she made fun of his culinary skills, “didn’t I?”
    “Yes, Spencer, you tried. You roasted the chicken until it shrank to half its size and you overcooked the vegetables, but you did make good ice tea.”
    “That came in a bottle already made,” he declared.
    “Well, you poured it well,” she said, and everyone laughed, even Daddy.
    I used to think that if two people loved each other as much as my parents loved each other, nothing bad could happen to either of them. Their love was like invisible armor keeping out the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” Bad things happened to far less substantial people, to selfish people, but surely not to people who depended upon each other as much as my parents depended on one another and cared for one another. They were too happy to make the sort of errors depressed and unhappy people made.
    They would live forever.
    Mommy was surely the spine of strength in our world, but she did depend on Daddy, too. She wanted him to make the business decisions, to manage their money, to negotiate for the bigger purchases.
    “I know I do a lot to take care of him, but he