Kitty sat at the kitchen table. It had been an awful, awful day. Sheila’s daughter Melissa had phoned her at lunchtime, telling her to come to the hospital, as her mum was very weak. She wasn’t surprised as Sheila O’Leary had gone downhill rapidly over the past ten days. The weight seemed to have fallen from her frame, and her eyes had looked scared. The doctors had her on a morphine pump to help with the pain, but at times Sheila hadn’t been able to bear it. The cancer was everywhere, and you could hear it in her breathing. Even a few words and she would be coughing and fighting for breath.
‘Don’t talk, Sheila, love … let me do the talking,’ Kitty had pleaded, as she had sat by the bed and held Sheila’s hand, and told her about her cookery class, and the recipes, and people in it, and the family, and the places the two of them would go when Sheila got back on her feet and was well again.
Sheila had looked like she was asleep. Her skin had gone a strange yellow colour, as her kidneys weren’t working any more, or her liver.
Kitty had sat with her for hours. Then Sheila had opened her eyes. She had been smiling. Kitty had leaned forward and kissed her.
‘You go girl … go away from here and all this pain,’ she had said slowly. ‘We’ll meet up again. Best friends for ever.’
Sheila had drifted back to sleep again, and Kitty had returned home, leaving poor Martin O’Leary holding his wife’s hand as all their family gathered together to say goodbye to Sheila in the hospital. There was nothing more to be said or done … just waiting now …
Melissa texted Kitty at 3 a.m. to say it was over.
Mammy’s gone. RIP.
Kitty got up and grabbed her dressing gown. She couldn’t sleep, and made her way downstairs to the kitchen. Larry was still fast asleep on his side of the bed. She put on the kettle. The tears came hot and hard as she thought about Sheila. She looked out at the garden, and a small vixen looked back at her, startled. It was burrowing in among the tall grass under the holly tree. A lovely fox with beautiful eyes and glossy red coat … its colour reminded her of Sheila’s hair. It stayed staring at her for what seemed like ages. She’d seen the odd fox out in the road late at night, or up in the park when it started to get dark, but they’d never had one in the garden! The vixen sat down, looking at her through the kitchen window. It was so strange. Next thing, she heard the kitchen door open and the fox was gone. Larry stood there in his striped dressing-gown.
‘Are you all right, Kitty, love?’ he asked sleepily.
‘No … I’m not,’ she said, crying again. ‘Sheila died a while ago. I’ve lost my best friend in the whole world … I’m going to miss her so much.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, sitting down beside her. ‘I know how close the two of you were.’
‘What will I do without her, Larry?’ she moaned. ‘We had so many plans, things we were going to do. We were going to go to Paris: get the lift up to the top of the Eiffel Tower, go on one of those riverboat cruises on the River Seine, say a prayer in Notre Dame and see the big paintings of water lilies Monet did.’
‘Monet?’
‘The French artist. She loved his paintings. She had a calendar of them in her kitchen,’ Kitty said softly. ‘And poor Sheila is not going to be there for when Paddy’s new baby is born in September. She was there for all the other grandchildren being born. It isn’t fair, Larry, she’s too young to be taken.’
Larry leaned over and hugged her, before switching on the kettle and making more tea and some hot buttered toast for the two of them.