Callie didn’t ask anymore.
Evelyn and Rob were now divorced. She’d finally thrown Rob out of the house when his sleeping around had got too much for her.
‘I put up with so much for the kids, because I didn’t want them to have divorced parents, but hey, he’s never around anyway, always “working”,’ she’d said bitterly to Callie at the time. ‘Which means screwing his newest girlfriend.’
Six years on, Evelyn and Callie were still friends and it had been a bone of contention between Jason and Callie when she insisted on inviting Evelyn to the party.
‘Rob’s coming with Anka,’ Jason had said, jaw clenched. ‘We don’t want a scene.’
Anka was the girlfriend who’d stuck: the clichéd, much younger, tall blonde with ski-jump Slavic cheekbones, a fragile beauty and no apparent issues with waist flab.
She was also very sweet, was now Rob’s fiancée and the mother of his latest child.
‘So? They meet all the time over the children. Evelyn doesn’t blame Anka – she likes her. Anka’s great with the children. And Evelyn’s my friend,’ Callie said, even though she rarely argued with Jason.
He got bored by arguments: he just ignored them and walked out of the room. Argument over – simple.
‘You don’t understand . . .’ he began, actually engaging, for once, sounding on the verge of anger. ‘Rob’s coming. He’s part of what pays for all this.’
With his hands spread, he gestured to the huge house around them, all decorated by an interior designer in paints more expensive than La Prairie face cream, filled with flowers and with staff to make sure Callie didn’t have to lift a finger. ‘Rob and Ev squabble with each other,’ he went on. ‘I hate it.’
Then he’d walked out.
‘No sign of Rob or Anka,’ said Evelyn now, looking around. She never said a word against her ex-husband’s new partner. Rob had strayed. The fault was his and she tried to be nice to her replacement.
Callie felt huge pity for Evelyn. She didn’t know how she’d cope if Jason was unfaithful to her. But then he never played around. She was damn sure of it. He was devoted to her, even if he wasn’t the sort of husband who massaged her feet at night and said: ‘how was your day?’
You couldn’t have everything.
‘If they’re not here yet, they’re not coming. I’m glad they’re not,’ said Callie now. ‘Rob must be ill. He never misses any of Jason’s parties but silver lining and all that, you can relax. Well, a bit,’ she amended, looking round the house with its quota of done-up partygoers ready for a night out.
‘Plenty of our well-dressed pack here’ sighed Evelyn, ‘who all want to know am I seeing anyone else.’
She wasn’t, as Callie knew.
The market for older women did not take into account maturity, wisdom or a sense of humour. The buyers were looking for firm flesh, thighs that had never seen cellulite and faces free from wrinkles. Sometimes Callie wanted to hit Rob for hurting her beloved friend so much.
‘Is Poppy here?’ Evelyn asked.
‘Upstairs watching films with some friends,’ said Callie, trying not to mind.
Evelyn did not have teenage girls. She had sons, who were kinder, it seemed.
‘I’m going up there now to make sure everything’s OK,’ said Callie. ‘I know Brenda keeps looking in, but I’m freaked out over thoughts of them drinking, after . . . you know.’
She’d already told Evelyn about the empty bottle of Beluga vodka she’d found under Poppy’s bed last month, filched from the freezer. The row had been pyrotechnic.
She’d grounded Poppy for two weeks, but Jason, who was a fan of the ‘chip off the old block’ school of parenting, had only laughed and said: ‘Kids are going to drink, Callie. At least it was good stuff.’
It wasn’t that simple, Callie wanted to shriek. Genetics mattered. The age at which kids started to drink mattered. But Jason liked to think that being clever could get you past all that stuff. It had worked for him. But not for her brother, her drug-addict brother whom she hadn’t seen for ten years. Poppy had those genes too.
Callie had hidden the anxiety and had another Xanax.
Jason refused to be serious about it all, which made her furious. After all, he’d grown up in the same area where she’d grown up, the not-so-lovely streets of Ballyglen’s council estates where some people hadn’t worked in years and where a hardened contingent considered drinking a full-time occupation.
She did not want that for Poppy. Binge drinking was the start of it. Expensive vodka or cheap beer: it didn’t matter. All the same path, a path to risky choices that could affect her life.
Eventually, Callie managed to leave the room, and went through the corridor the hired-in catering staff were using to access the specially designed catering kitchen. She slipped up the stairs and came out in the back hall, then into the actual family kitchen. There she found Brenda, who’d looked after the house for them for twenty years.
Poppy was in the kitchen with Brenda and another girl from school, Zara, and they were busily loading up two trays with pizzas, soft drinks, and tiny desserts from the caterers.
Poppy had her mother’s mysterious eyes, and was wearing a vest top, leggings and a pink shirt from Callie’s own wardrobe. The time upstairs had given the girls a chance to pile on the make-up at drag-queen levels, so that Poppy was now caked in cosmetics that made her look far older than fourteen. Callie bit her tongue.
‘Hello girls,’ she said brightly and she went over to her daughter, about to pop a kiss on Poppy’s forehead until she remembered, again, that it wasn’t cool to kiss your daughter when one of her friends was present.
‘Hi Mum,’ said Poppy, in a voice that said don’t touch.
‘Hello Zara,’ Callie said to the other girl, doing her impersonation of a totally happy and cool mother. She was really good at the old impersonations these days. ‘This all looks completely yummy.’
‘Hi Callie,’ said Zara, ‘thanks. It’s totally delish.’
Callie remembered her mother’s friends and how she’d always called them Mrs: Mrs this or Mrs that. Nowadays all her daughter’s friends called her Callie and called Jason ‘Jase’, which he found wildly amusing.
‘Nice pizzas,’ Callie said now. She had to stop thinking about how things used to be when she was growing up. Was this another offshoot of being fifty – thinking about the past all the time? ‘Your home-made ones?’ she asked Brenda.
‘Course,’ said Brenda, finishing arranging the tray.