The Lives of Women by Christine Dwyer Hickey Page B

don’t?’
    â€˜No. Not really.’
    â€˜All right for you, I suppose. You got away. You got to go to New York while… I was left here, facing them all. Day after day. The shame of it. We couldn’t even put our house up for sale. We had to stay here.
Stay
.’
    I open my mouth to swipe back at her, but I don’t need a row with Brendie Caudwell right now.
    We watch the dog waddle around the kitchen, then ease himself down into his battered basket. My father continues to work the piano. I can usually gauge his mood by the tone of his playing. Today he’s morose – even his scales have a touch of the Death March about them.
    â€˜Well, I should probably go…’ she says.
    â€˜Mrs Hanley,’ I say then. ‘Sometimes I think about her. And Agatha. Of course I do. I’ve never stopped thinking about her.’
    Â 
    I follow her through the hall, open the front door and we exchange a sort of grimace, easier with each other now that we are almost done. She steps outside and turns to me.
    â€˜My youngest will be home from school soon. Fourteen. The others are seventeen, nineteen.’
    â€˜Yeah?’
    â€˜The two lads, they’re great. Both in college, one doing business studies, the other… one of those fancy computer courses – I can’t even think of the name of it. She’s a bit of a handful, though. Misses her old school. Her home. We’d a lovely home, Elaine, you know, we really did. She blames me for everything. Thinks it’s my fault the marriage broke up and that we lost the house. It wasn’tmy fault. None of it was my fault. It wasn’t even his, before you ask.’
    â€˜No?’
    â€˜It was the bank’s fault. And he wouldn’t fight them, you see. He just wouldn’t—’
    â€˜The bank’s?’
    â€˜It’s always the fucking bank, Elaine. If you don’t know that, you’re one of the lucky ones.’
    I can see she’s getting a bit tetchy now.
    â€˜Okay, sure.’
    â€˜God, you sound so New Yorky,’ she says, and I know this is supposed to be an insult.
    â€˜Well, I have lived there longer than I ever lived here.’
    â€˜And you know, you shouldn’t really leave the front door key out here like that, just lying there under a brick. Jesus.’
    â€˜No?’
    â€˜Anyone could just walk straight in. It’s not like the old days around here, you know.’
    â€˜Just as well, maybe.’
    She turns away. ‘Anyway, I better get back. If I’m not there, it’ll be dump the schoolbag and off with her till God knows what hour. Walks over my mother. And she’s not been well at all. Poor old Mums.’
    I watch her pass through the gate, her tweed coat tightening at the hips as she closes the buttons, the sleeve of her coat on the far side of the wall, buffing the gaps in the hedge.
    And, ‘Fuck poor old Mums,’ I think.
    *
    Back in the kitchen, I stand for a moment looking out into the darkening garden. Another day sneaked off behind my back.
    I empty the tea down the sink, put the biscuits back into the tin and tidy away all traces of Brendie Caudwell. Then I open the connecting door to the garage, step down and prise open the lid of the chest freezer. For a moment I can’t remember what I am doing standing here, watching gusts of icy breath whisper around my wrists. My mind is stuck in New York, in the moments following that first phone call from my mother. The way everything stopped after I’d hung up the phone. Where there had been television voices in another room – there was a silence. Where Serena had been banging around the kitchen making canapés for an event the following day – there was a deathly stillness. Even the purl of traffic coming up from West 57th ceased in that moment of absolute deafness.
    And I can see myself now as I was then, standing in the hallway of Serena’s apartment staring at the