A Catered Affair Read Online Free Page B

the bed and took his hand. After a moment or two, Dad’s eyes opened. He took off the mask and with a weak movement of his fingers beckoned her closer. She leaned in and they exchanged a deep, passionate kiss. Any other time, Scarlett and I would have blushed and told them to get a room. Standing there in that hospital room, though, we started to weep in silence.
    Mum was sobbing again, begging him not to die. Dad reached out and managed to stroke her head. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “For what happened to us. It was my fault. I neglected you, but I never stopped loving you.”
    Mum touched his cheek and gently shushed him. “I love you, too.”
    Then he looked over at Scarlett and me. “I love you both—so much. You have been such wonderful daughters. Look after your mum.”
    Mum beckoned us over, and Scarlett and I gave him a final hug. He felt warm and he smelled of Dad. I don’t think that either of us could believe he was about to die.
    The nurse came in and felt his pulse. She asked him if he was comfortable. Dad smiled at her. “I make a living,” he murmured, managing a shrug. Then he looked at Mum. “OK, maybe it’s not the greatest joke in the world, but it’s the best I can manage under the circumstances.”
    He closed his eyes, took one last, difficult breath and died. The smile was still on his face.
    Mum managed to hold it together for the funeral, but a few days later, the strain got too much and she took to her bed. Nana Ida moved in to look after us. It was hard on her, too, because Grandpa Joe had been gone only a year or so. He’d finally had that stroke he was always promising.
    Eventually Mum started seeing a bereavement counselor, which seemed to help. Plus all her friends rallied—particularly Aunty Brenda, who wasn’t our real aunt. She was Mum’s best friend. They’d known each other since kindergarten. She’d been part of our lives since we were babies, so she just became known as Aunty Brenda. In that first year after Dad died, they spoke on the phone nearly every day. On weekends Aunty Brenda would pop in for coffee or take Mum out shopping.
    In the beginning, Scarlett and I were still in shock and took to sleeping in the same bed for comfort, but we were teenagers and even though the dad we both adored had just died, we had so much living to do. Despite her own grief, Mum didn’t hold us back. She said it cheered her up to hear us gossiping on the phone to our friends and to know we were still going to parties and gigs.
    A couple of months after the funeral, Mum went back to work. Her job and looking after Scarlett and me were all that mattered to her. It would be five years before she started dating, but to this day, almost twenty years later, there had never been anybody serious. The way she saw it, men her own age wanted sexy, slim twenty- and thirtysomethings. “And as an older, curvy woman, I end up with all the dross—self-obsessed bores, old enough to remember when the Dead Sea was only ailing a bit.”
    Besides parties and friends, the thing that kept me going was school. I’d always been a bit of a bookworm, but now I threw myself into my studies—partly because I knew that’s what Dad would have wanted me to do. Scarlett couldn’t be bothered. Not that she’d ever been very interested when it came to school.
    My sister was certainly as smart as me, if not smarter, but she’d always found school tedious. Instead, she had put all her energies into her after-school drama classes and learning her lines for her latest dramatic role.
    After Dad died, she seemed to lose all interest in acting. She carried on going to drama classes, but her heart wasn’t in it. What’s more, she was spending hours alone in her room watching TV. Mum thought she might be depressed and threatened to send her to a shrink.
    This forced Scarlett to come clean and explain that although she was still sad about Dad, she wasn’t remotely depressed—quite the opposite, in fact. She