Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 2: The House on Willow Street, The Honey Queen, Christmas Magic, plus bonus short story: The Perfect Holiday. Cathy KellyЧитать онлайн книгу.
office was really a glorified cupboard. Two years ago when she bought the house, the realtor had enthusiastically described it as ‘the nursery’. Suki had shot him an angry look at this description. Did he seriously think she was looking for a place to settle down and raise a family at her age? But the realtor was, she realized, a self-absorbed young man who was operating on auto-pilot, trotting out the same spiel whatever the house, whoever the client:
… through here the kitchen/diner, and look, an original wood-burning stove! And upstairs, conveniently placed next door to the master bedroom, a nursery!
She no longer walked into the tiny room and thought of it wistfully as the nursery. Even though she railed against older mothers, there was still a tiny place inside her that mourned her own childlessness.
But she was beyond that ever becoming a reality. These days, the ‘nursery’ was more of an office-cum-torture chamber. The place where she went to suffer and stare at a blank screen, wondering how to fill the endless pages that stood between her and the next tranche of the advance from her publisher – money she needed so desperately.
When she emerged from the wasteland that had been her life on the road with Jethro, Suki had been broke. Not a penny remained of the divorce settlement from Kyle Junior; it had either gone up their noses or on her back, indulging a penchant for ridiculously expensive clothes, jewellery, cosmetic treatments to make her look younger. The pretty Maine cottage she’d been given as part of her alimony had been sold to pay the debts she’d run up, splashing money around, settling bar bills with bravado to show that she was a famous feminist writer and not just another groupie hanging around with TradeWind. Except that’s exactly what she was – another groupie.
What shamed her most was that she hadn’t come to her senses and walked out. She’d hung on until Jethro had tired of her and tried to pass her along to someone else.
The thought of that night still made her feel sick. The following morning, she’d packed her bags and gone.
Out of the ravages of all that, she’d tried to rebuild her life. One of the few old contacts prepared to return her calls was her agent, Melissa, who somehow landed her a two-book publishing deal.
The advance was about a quarter of what she’d got on her last contract, and that was for one book.
‘You’re lucky to be getting this much,’ Melissa had said with customary frankness. ‘I suspect they’ve agreed to publish your feminist politik book on the basis that, come the day you write the bestselling “I married into the Richardson clan, then toured with Jethro and TradeWind and came out the other side”, they’ll make their money back and then some.’
‘I’ll never write that story,’ said Suki quietly, thinking that she wasn’t entirely sure she had come out the other side of either of those periods in her life.
‘Never won’t pay the bills, honey,’ Melissa pointed out. ‘Keep it in the back of your mind. We can talk about it when you come to New York for our meeting with the publishers.’
Suki had no intention of devoting any part of her mind to that particular project. But in the meantime, another book had forced its way to the forefront of Suki’s mind: Redmond Suarez’s book on the Richardsons. If he lived up to his reputation and succeeded in digging out all her secrets, Suki knew she’d fall apart completely.
It was late afternoon when Suki finally admitted defeat, having deleted just about everything she’d written that day. She went down to the kitchen and found Mick, still wearing the T-shirt he’d slept in, the one with his band’s logo on the front. His eyes were heavy with sleep, as though he’d not long got up. Mick was muscular, tall and admiring – just Suki’s type. He was also, she had begun to suspect, more than a little hung up on her relationship with Jethro and TradeWind. She wondered if she was a trophy girlfriend for him: ‘I’m dating Jethro’s ex.’
Maybe not. But he was becoming quite proprietorial. Last night, when she’d told him she was flying to New York to meet with her agent and publisher, he’d immediately started dropping hints that he wanted to come with her.
It seemed he hadn’t given up, because his first words were: ‘We need a little vacation, babe.’
He was sitting at her pine kitchen table, studying Mr Chan’s Takeout Menu as if there was a possibility he would deviate slightly from what he always had, which was chicken chow mein and peanut noodles. Suki teased him about it all the time, but today she found his careful perusal of the menu irritating.
Neither of them had money for a ‘little vacation’. Any more than they had the money for takeout every damn night of the week. Mick couldn’t cook anything except barbecue, which he thought should be added into the Constitution as an amendment: ‘Every man should have the right to grill in his own backyard and down a few cold ones at the same time,’ he liked to say.
He rented a ground-floor apartment in an old house two blocks away and he didn’t have a proper outdoor grill, just a makeshift one that ruined at least half the food. His friend, Renaud, band drummer by night and tax accountant by day, had a propane grill, and a decent backyard to go with it.
Mick and Steve, the bass guitarist, liked to bitch about Renaud, saying he wasn’t a real rocker because he had a ‘civilian’ job. They were true musicians: they didn’t do day jobs.
Suki was expected to agree with this assessment, but the more the bills came and the more it seemed as if Mick was living off her ninety per cent of the time and contributing nothing, the more she envied Renaud’s wife, Odette, who had the money for facials, a personal trainer and perfect nails.
A month ago, Mick had moved a lot of his stuff into her house. Now he was subletting his apartment.
Suki knew that if they stayed together, she’d have to be the one who earned the money. Which was about as modern feminist as it got.
She also knew that she’d never be able to mention the fact that she was the breadwinner, any more than she could tell Mick that his band was going nowhere.
Instead, she was expected to attend any gig they managed to get and stand at the side of the stage clapping and whooping over-enthusiastically. Anything less would upset Mick.
‘I don’t think you liked the show,’ he’d said once, early on, when Suki and Odette had been talking near the bar instead of frantically leading the applause.
‘I loved it,’ said Suki automatically, because that was what you did with performers. Only promoters and managers got to tell the truth, Jethro once told her. He’d been remarkably knowledgeable and clear-sighted about the industry, for all his drug-absorption.
‘Honey,’ she told Mick now, ‘New York is business. You know the cost of hotels there. I’m going to fly in and out the same day. Let’s have our vacation another time.’
He picked up her cell phone to call the takeaway.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘You want boiled or fried rice?’
Manhattan had once been Suki’s favourite place in the world. The glitter, the hum of excitement, the sense that anything was possible. She’d arrived the summer she was nineteen and she couldn’t wait to get her first waitressing job, didn’t care that she had to share a barely furnished house with eight other Irish college students in the Bronx. She was there – in the city that never slept. And she, Suki Power, was going to conquer it.
She’d been back to Manhattan many times during the years when Women and Their Wars was on the bestseller lists, and while she was with Jethro. Sometimes, they stayed in Jethro’s vast apartment on Park Avenue, but more often they flitted from hotel to hotel. Jethro was addicted to hotel living. He didn’t know how to boil a kettle and, if he thought about it at all, probably assumed the sheets were thrown in the garbage after being taken off his bed every day. He’d lived a normal life once, but that was a long time ago. He’d been a star so many years that he couldn’t or wouldn’t remember it.
Today, as the forever altered skyline came into view from