Between Sisters by Cathy Kelly

and an emergency chocolate biscuit to get Adriana smiling and out of the shop, after which Coco began to wonder if she’d done the right thing.
    It was just hard to be tough with people you worked closely with … Yes, that was it. Adriana would buck up. Coco knew it.
    As for now, she’d have to shut the shop to grab a sandwich and she hated doing that. The success of the shop rested entirely on her shoulders and though the place was doing pretty well on the internet, a random person shopping on her lunch break and encountering a ‘closed’ sign on the door might assume Twentieth Century was always closed and never come this way again.
    Coco took off her heels, put on a pair of flats, grabbed the keys and her purse, stuck a ‘back in five minutes’ sign on the door and ran out into the September day, racing to the café where she could grab a ready-made sandwich.
    Maybe she should have done what Great-Aunt Edie wanted and done something boring in college, instead of Fine Arts, she thought, panting as she ran. But then she wouldn’t be her own boss. And Coco loved that more than anything.
    Life was too full of twists and turns, decisions taken out of your hands, people leaving and never coming back. Her mother and Red came to mind.
    No, if you were your own boss, you were in charge and nothing happened if you didn’t like it. Because when random things happened, people got hurt and nobody recovered from the hurt. That was what Coco feared most of all.

    Coco always said she’d never minded not having a mother.
    ‘You don’t miss what you never had,’ she’d told her new girlfriends at college when they were on their second night out at the college bar and had moved on to sharing mother stories – the fabulous mother who was the kindest woman on the planet; the mother who behaved as though men were all raging sex maniacs and had sent her daughter to a convent lest one of the said maniacs got his paws on her; the mother who had a narcissistic streak and couldn’t hold a conversation for longer than two minutes without dragging it back to herself.
    The other three had been silent for a beat when Coco Keneally mentioned that she’d never known her mother.
    ‘She left home when I was one. I don’t even remember her,’ Coco said lightly, because it was easier to tell this story in such a manner rather than imply it had hurt in any way.
    ‘But a mother … You need a mother,’ said Janet with great sadness – Janet who was the youngest of the four new students and had been explaining how she had the kindest mother ever .
    Beers had been consumed and a level of honesty had been reached between the four women who’d been strangers until a month ago when they’d met on registration day for First Arts: four eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, anxious but hiding it, madly trying to appear cool.
    Even then, Coco’s love of vintage clothing had been obvious: she’d worn Grammy’s felted wool swing skirt with the kick pleat at the back, a red fake leather trench coat, and a black beret over her long, insanely curly dark hair.
    ‘Coco,’ Janet went on, ‘how can you bear it?’
    ‘Lots of people don’t have mothers. I had my older sister, Cassie,’ said Coco simply. ‘I had Dad when he was alive, and Grammy. Between them they made it not matter that my mother had left.’
    ‘I’ve just realised: you won’t have a mum to help you buy your wedding dress!’ hiccupped Lorraine from the convent, where it appeared that, despite reports to the contrary, convent girls were not wild and were certainly not able to hold their drink. On her second beer, Lorraine was already well beyond the tipsy stage. ‘That’s so sad.’
    ‘Look on the bright side: your mother will never want to upstage your wedding,’ added Carla (narcissistic mum) cheerfully. ‘At my brother’s twenty-first birthday party, my mother wore a leather mini skirt, a crop top that showed off her belly bar, and flirted with all my brother’s