‘What’s wrong, Mother?’ asked Kim when Tom was gone.
She knew that something was wrong with her mother. Elsie’s face was white under its dusting of pinky face-powder. She had said no to a second cup of tea. She had stared into space for ages. Even worse, she hadn’t given out to the twins about their loud music. Rows about loud music made up most of the arguments in the house. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ said Elsie. She drained the rest of her cold tea.
‘Mother …’ warned Kim. ‘I’m not blind. Please tell me what’s wrong.’
Elsie knew it was time to be honest. ‘This came this morning.’ She handed the letter to her daughter.
Kim read it carefully. Her face got grimmer with each word. ‘Aunt Maisie has a nerve!’ she said when she had finished. She was furious. There was no room in their house for two American visitors. There was no room for any visitor. They only had three bedrooms. Where did Aunt Maisie think the Americans would sleep? In the garden? On the roof with next door’s ginger cat?
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Laura, her mouth full of cornflakes.
Kim was furious. ‘Your Aunt Maisie in Chicago has told us that Charleen is coming to stay. In August and with a friend.’
‘Cool!’ said Emer. She had never met her American cousin. She wondered if Charleen would look like a movie star. American teenagers on television all looked like movie stars. They never seemed to have spots and they all had long legs. Emer dreamed about having long, long legs.
‘Where will they sleep?’ asked Laura. She was the practical one.
‘I don’t know where they will sleep.’ Kim was still angry. ‘This is a small house. Why does Aunt Maisie think we have room for two guests?’
Elsie bit her lip.
‘I think that’s my fault,’ Elsie said in a small voice.
The eight o’clock news began on the radio.
‘Blast. We’re going to be late,’ said Kim crossly. She always left before the news.
‘Come on, girls, you’ll be late too if you don’t get a move on.’ Kim quickly shoved the breakfast dishes in the sink. ‘I’ll do them tonight,’ she told her mother. ‘And then you can tell me what this is all about.’
The school where she worked was very near the twins’ school, so she dropped them off every morning. Emer and Laura always fought about who sat in the back of the car. The Mini was well over twenty years old and the back seat was uncomfortable. This morning, they didn’t discuss where they’d sit. They knew that their normally easygoing mother was in a rare temper. Laura hopped quietly in the back.
‘I bet your grandmother has been inviting Maisie to stay with us for years, without telling me!’ Kim raged. ‘I don’t want Maisie turning up here. I’ve never met her in my life! We can do without rich relatives landing here.’
Laura wondered what it must be like for Gran to have a sister she hadn’t seen for over forty years. Gran had told her about growing up on the farm in Leitrim. She and Maisie had been the youngest in a big family. There was a year between them, so they were like twins.
‘I remember spending hours getting ready to go to dances,’ Gran had fondly recalled. ‘Maisie would try and sneak out of the house without Da seeing that she was wearing red lipstick,’ Gran said. Maisie had a great romance with a local lad around about the time Gran had met Grandad. But the lad Maisie liked was the oldest son and he was getting the farm.
‘Maisie wasn’t one for settling down on another farm. She couldn’t wait to get out of the West,’ Gran said sadly. ‘She had her heart set on America for years. This lad came home from Boston to his mother’s funeral and Maisie upped and married him.’
‘Why did she never come back to visit, Gran?’ Laura asked.
Gran shrugged. ‘It wasn’t like now, Laura,’ she said. ‘Plane journeys were expensive. Maisie lived in Oregon for a long time. That’s a long way away. She always meant to come home but it never happened. And then, her children were growing up.’ Elsie didn’t tell Laura that she’d often wondered herself why Maisie hadn’t wanted to come back to Ireland. They’d shared so much as children. It hurt that her sister could stay away for so long. Elsie and her husband, Ted, God rest him, had never been rich. They couldn’t afford to fly to America. But sure, wasn’t Maisie as rich as sin? She could have afforded to fly home. And her two children had great jobs as a doctor and a dentist. They could have given her money too. Elsie could never understand why Maisie had stayed away so long.
Sitting in the back of the car, Laura looked at her twin sister. Emer was tapping her fingers along to the song on the radio. Sometimes, Emer drove her mad. But Laura would hate to spend forty-something years without seeing her.
Class 3A were quiet as mice all day. This was not normal. But sweet Mrs McDonnell looked so angry that they were all scared of making noise. Even Barry Smith was good and he was always the boldest boy in the whole school.
Barry had a water pistol in his pocket. He’d planned to fire it at everyone when the teacher wasn’t looking. Then he saw the cross look on Mrs McDonnell’s face. He hoped she wasn’t angry with him. She was never angry. But just in case, he put the water pistol back in his school bag. There was always tomorrow.
At the top of the class, Kim McDonnell tried to concentrate. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see poor Charleen. They’d love to see her. But where could she sleep? And why did Aunt Maisie think they had loads of room?
23 St Jude’s Villas was not a big house. Not like her brother Rob’s house. He lived in a detached house in Raheny. He had a spare bedroom for guests.
Kim’s house didn’t even have a spare seat for guests. The kitchen was so small that there wasn’t room for a dishwasher. Kim would have killed for a dishwasher. She sighed. Whatever her mother had said, it was all a big mess.
Emer and Laura sat beside each other in school. Between classes, they talked with their friends.
‘I bet she’s got blonde hair,’ Emer said dreamily.
‘Who?’ asked Laura.
‘Charleen. Will she bring presents, do you think? I’d love real American jeans, not ones like you get here.’
‘The ones you get here are American, stupid,’ said Laura.
The Irish teacher marched into the classroom. Laura felt sick. She hated Irish and she hated exams.
‘Will you help me if I get stuck on any questions?’ she whispered to her twin.
But Emer wasn’t listening. She was in dreamland, thinking of the American visit.
Elsie was off her food. She had a cup of tea with Mary across the street but didn’t fancy one of her friend’s scones.
Mary was talking too much to notice. Mary’s eldest grandson was in trouble at school for vandalism. He might be thrown out, Mary said. She suffered with those children, Elsie thought. Mary’s troubles made her feel guilty. After all, there were no real problems in Kim’s house. The twins were good girls, for all their loud music. They wouldn’t dream of vandalising anything at school. Their father would kill them. Tom might be a man of few words, but he wouldn’t stand any nonsense from the girls.
After tea with Mary, Elsie walked to the chemist for her tablets. The chemist always chatted to her. Today, Elsie didn’t chat back.
‘Are you not feeling yourself, Elsie?’ he asked.
Elsie said she was fine and tried to smile. There was no way out of it. She had to tell Kim the truth.
When Kim got home that afternoon, there was a great smell of cooking in the house. Things must be really bad, she thought. Elsie never cooked any more. She baked cakes and her lemon sponge was admired at local church sales. But she didn’t cook dinners.
‘I made a chicken casserole,’ said Elsie brightly when Kim went into the kitchen.
She looked up from peeling potatoes and saw Kim’s pale, angry face. Kim was a good daughter. She had a lot on her plate, what with teaching those youngsters in school. Elsie felt her heart become heavy with guilt. She left the potatoes in the sink.
‘Sit down,’ said Elsie. ‘I’ll tell you. It’s all my fault. I lied to Maisie.’
She looked so miserable that Kim felt sorry she’d been so cross. She patted her mother’s hand. ‘Go on,’ she said.
Elsie sighed. ‘You know that Maisie’s eldest is a doctor and that Sandra, Charleen’s mother, is a dentist.’
Kim nodded. She knew all this. When she’d been growing up, she got fed up hearing about her clever cousins, the Madison family from Chicago. Aunt Maisie’s letters had been full of praise for her children. Cousin Sandra was the prettiest girl in her school and was so clever. The teachers had never seen anyone so bright. And popular, Aunt Maisie always added. Phil was the best in the school at maths. He was good at baseball too.
Kim had hated the sound of her goody-two-shoes cousins. They sounded awful. She hoped she never had to meet them. And she never did. She’d never met her Aunt Maisie, for that matter. The Madisons had never come home from America to visit. They hadn’t even come for Kim’s dad’s funeral two years ago. Elsie had been very upset at that, Kim knew. But she’d never said anything.
‘You’re going to be so mad at me,’ said Elsie miserably, thinking of the letter.
‘I won’t, Mother,’ replied Kim. ‘Tell me the story, will you?’
‘Maisie was a great one for boasting when we were children,’ Elsie began. ‘She always had to have the nicest dress or the best toy. She loved to show people that she had the best of everything. When she told me how well they were all doing in Chicago, I got fed up. I told her all about you and your sister but …’ Elsie looked really miserable now. ‘I lied. I told her that you were the principal of the school.’
Kim gasped.
Elsie ploughed on. ‘I told her Tom is the boss of a big company and that you live in a huge house in a posh estate on the outskirts of the county.’
Kim gasped some more.
‘And that the girls had ponies and you had a housekeeper.’
‘Mother!’ said Kim finally. ‘How could you make up all that stuff?’
‘I never thought she’d find out,’ protested Elsie. ‘She was always going on about her pair and how successful they were. Sandra has a housekeeper, so I said you did too.’
‘And now Sandra’s daughter is coming here. And she thinks we have a big house and a housekeeper,’ Kim said. She looked around the kitchen. The wood-effect lino on the floor was ten years old. The kitchen units were orange. Orange had been big in the seventies when the house was built. Kim hated orange but kitchen units cost a fortune. There had been no money to spend on the house for ages. Setting up Tom’s business had been tough. The twins had wanted to go on that school trip to France and Kim hadn’t wanted to say no. Clothes for teenagers cost a fortune. The kitchen had been last on the list.
‘What are we going to do?’ wailed Elsie.
‘You’ll have to tell Maisie the truth,’ Kim said finally. ‘We don’t mind Charleen and her friend staying here. But they’ll have to sleep in sleeping bags. We can turn the dining room into a room for them. I’ll push the table back but that’s it.’
Elsie looked as if she could cry.
‘What else can I do, Mother?’ asked Kim. She felt like crying herself.