Between Sisters by Cathy Kelly Page A

friends.’
    ‘Midlife crisis?’ said Janet hopefully.
    ‘Ah no, just my mother,’ shrugged Carla, with a glitter in her eyes.
    ‘That’s so sad—’ began Janet, tears at the ready.
    ‘Thirty’s a nice age to get married,’ Coco said, wanting to cut off Janet before she really started to cry at the thought of mothers unlike her own fabulous one and how had people coped?
    ‘Yeah, thirty,’ said Carla.
    ‘Twenty-seven,’ insisted Lorraine. ‘Still in your twenties; any older and you seem sad.’
    An argument started on the wisdom/sadness of getting married in your thirties and Coco never got around to saying that she knew she’d have her sister and her grandmother by her side when it was her turn. And who needed a mother they couldn’t remember, anyway? Little kids didn’t remember that far back.
    When she got married, she thought, allowing herself to imagine this event with all the talk of weddings, the pretty green in Delaney Gardens would be the venue. Cassie would plan it all like a military campaign: a hundred tea lights lit by 3 p.m., sir! Cassie could organise anything: her two tiny daughters, her husband, her job, even the newly purchased semi-detached house a mile from Delaney Gardens where the previous tenants had left it looking like a squat and had somehow removed all the grouting from the bathroom tiles.
    A small marquee would fit in the patch of glorious green in Delaney Gardens between the gnarled crab apple trees, the bluebells and the huge old fig tree. Grammy would source food from all her cooking pals, so no fortune would have to be spent on four courses or sorbets or any of that nonsense.
    Coco wanted the music of The Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller, with a hint of the seventies thrown in to get people up dancing.
    ‘You’ll need disco music,’ said Cassie, shocked, when Coco had explained how she and the girls from college had been talking about weddings. ‘You can’t get married without Abba, at least.’
    And the sisters had giggled at the thought of this lovely imaginary event to plan, and had discussed how it was handy Coco was waiting for several years, because right now, Beth would be a very bad flower girl as she was going through a stomping phase in nursery school.
    Had she really been that naïve? Coco thought now. Thinking thirty was the right age to get married – as if it were something you had the slightest control over.
    Coco had grown more and more accustomed to the concept that life rippled along in its own way no matter what you did to intercept it, but she was still shocked by how powerless she was about it all.
    She was thirty-one now, and her last serious relationship had been with Red, four years ago. Since then she’d had a couple of dates and then, for a whole year, nothing. Nada. Zip. Until last month and the disastrous blind date at a friend’s dinner party with a recently separated guy who’d muttered endlessly about his ex-wife and her new man, and then grabbed Coco as she tried to leave and slobbered drunkenly on her in a manner he clearly thought was kissing. Nice.
    ‘Sorry,’ said her friend who’d set it up. ‘I thought he was over it. I shouldn’t have made Brandy Alexanders …’
    ‘No,’ said Coco, and she’d nearly said, It’s me. I am catnip to the wrong men and the right men run from me.
    Red had run from me, the man I wanted to marry, was what she’d thought, but she never told people things like that.
    Instead, she’d said, ‘He was drunk. Hardly your fault. You didn’t pour it down his throat. But no more blind dates and dinner parties, please? They make me feel hopeless and pitied. Trips to the cinema and things like that, lovely. But dinner parties with other couples just make it worse.’
    In the years since Cassie and Coco had planned the perfect wedding, Cassie and Shay had long since renovated their house on the cheap and Coco’s nieces were now thirteen and fifteen. Beth had gone back into a stomping phase, Cassie