Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 2: The House on Willow Street, The Honey Queen, Christmas Magic, plus bonus short story: The Perfect Holiday. Cathy Kelly
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The woman reached for a packet of cigarettes, tapped one out, lit up and inhaled with the practice of a forty-a-day smoker. For once, Suki didn’t feel like a cigarette.
‘You’re not a run-of-the-mill psychic are you?’ she asked.
‘I’m a psychic who can’t follow her own advice,’ the woman said laconically. ‘Look at this place.’ She gestured around her. ‘It’s no palace. Bad men: that’s what I go for every time and it’s brought me nothing but trouble, despite seeing all that I can see. And I can see, sister. But every time you think it’s going to be different, doncha? That’s it,’ said the woman. She motioned with the cigarette hand that it was time for Suki to go.
Suki was at the door of the trailer when the woman spoke again.
‘Oh yeah, you need to call your sister.’
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Suki anxiously.
Her reply was a shrug. ‘That’s all I saw. Call her.’
Suki left. She didn’t see the teenage boy and she wondered was he the only thing left from a lifetime of bad men. She slammed the door behind her, took out the keys to her car, backed out of the road and sped on the highway back to town.
Ring your sister and Give up powerful men. That was it?
Well, what did you expect for $110?
After twenty-six years of poverty, Suki Power Richardson had loved having money. It wasn’t hers, essentially, it was her husband’s. But she got to use it, to spend it. And spend it she did. She had accounts at all the big stores: Saks, Bloomies, Bergdorf Goodman. She found that she didn’t really like the old rock-chick clothes she’d worn for years, she’d been kidding herself when she said she preferred old jeans and scuffed leather jackets. It turned out that she loved new, elegant clothes made from luxurious fabrics that clung to her hourglass figure in all the right places and cost more than a month’s rent on her old apartment. Her failsafe tight black polyester pants went in the garbage and she bought beautifully cut pants off the rack at Donna Karan, along with marvellously draped jackets, and rabbit-soft knits. Her shoes were Italian, her fair hair was no longer given added oomph with a store-bought highlighting kit applied in a washbasin in her apartment: she went to a chichi hair salon where ordinary joes couldn’t even get an appointment.
Kyle loved to see her spending money on her appearance.
‘You need to look the part, honey,’ he’d say. ‘Daddy always says, “Look the part, son, and they’ll think you are the part.”’
For the first year of their marriage, Suki didn’t care what ‘the part’ was, she was simply pleased to be able to indulge in an orgy of spending. After a childhood of scraping by in draughty old Avalon House, it was like being released from prison and relishing the freedom. She bought art for the walls of the house on D Street, perused antique auctions with a gimlet eye and repainted the hall four times before she’d achieved the right shade of subtle grey. She bought flowers – too many for the house, sometimes. But she didn’t care about the excess: the Richardsons had serious money; nothing she could do could put even the slightest dent in it.
She and Kyle went to charity balls, dinner parties, and Republican party fundraisers where the wives of party bigwigs wore Chanel suits and worked the room. Even Antoinette seemed to be thawing towards her. Suki had been brought up in an important Irish mansion, she was clearly from upper-class stock and she knew how to behave.
But as Tess might have told them all, Suki got bored easily. She became fed up with statements referencing Kyle Senior. Daddy had an opinion on everything: he said it was a ludicrous idea to buy a house in Taos as Suki was suggesting instead of a cottage in Newport where Daddy wanted them to buy.
‘It’s none of his business where we buy,’ Suki shouted at Kyle as they stood at their matching his and hers sinks in the cream marble bathroom en suite.
‘Oh, come on,’ said Kyle angrily. ‘You’re not that naïve are you? I thought you prided yourself on your intellectual abilities, Suki. It’s like listening to a Renaissance painter saying he doesn’t want to paint what his patron wants him to paint. My father pays for it all!’
This last statement, and the way Kyle had hissed it at her, stuck in Suki’s mind: did his father’s absolute control over the whole family rankle with Kyle, or was he merely angry that she’d threatened to upset the applecart?
She flew to Taos to look at properties in spite of them all and then received an irate phone call from Antoinette.
‘If you continue with this nonsense, Suzanne—’ only Antoinette refused to use the nickname Suki had had since she was three – ‘you will upset my husband. And we don’t want that now, do we?’
‘Don’t we?’ said Suki truculently. ‘What do I care if he gets upset?’
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
Finally, Antoinette spoke. ‘Kyle said you’d say that. Personally, I thought you were too clever, but I can see I over-estimated you. Kyle Senior and I control you, whether you want to admit it or not. That goes for everything: from where your children go to school to whether you holiday in Europe or on the Cape with the rest of the family.’
Suki felt rage overwhelm her. She wasn’t sure which part of the conversation infuriated her most: the fact that her husband clearly told his mother everything, or the veiled threat that Antoinette and Kyle Senior could stop her going home to Ireland for the summer, because she wanted to be in Avalon again and was fed up with Massachusetts and its social set.
‘Oh, and the house in New Mexico – don’t even bother. You won’t get a red cent for that. You’ll summer with us. Perhaps, in time, you might get a cottage of your own on Martha’s Vineyard. That’s it. You’re a Richardson now, Suzanne, and you play by our rules.’
Boredom wasn’t something Suki was used to, but in the gilded cage the Richardsons had constructed around her, boredom dominated her daily life. She wasn’t expected to do anything other than look beautiful at functions, know all the right people, do a little charity work, have her hair done expensively, learn how to make small talk at elegant dinner parties and never, as Antoinette explained to her, say anything controversial, even as a joke: ‘There are no jokes in Washington.’
At this, Suki had thrown her head back and let rip with a great, throaty laugh, but Antoinette had stared at her, stony-faced.
‘I am not joking,’ she said. ‘Junior has a very good chance of a Senate seat and he needs a wife by his side, not a loose cannon. I can see that in you, Suzanne – a certain wildness. It must be the Irish blood.’
Suki could take Antoinette’s insults because she always managed to get her own little barbs in. However, saying anything about her Irishness inflamed her.
‘My ancestors were living in a castle when yours were still …’ Suki searched her mind for some suitable retort, ‘digging for vegetables in a field somewhere, and on your knees at night praying for redemption.’
Antoinette glared at her. ‘I will not lower myself to your insults,’ she said.
‘Oh, but you can insult me and that’s fine, is it?’ said Suki. ‘We all know the truth, don’t we, Antoinette: I’m the one with the blue blood in this family.’
In truth, Suki didn’t really care about the Power name or what it meant. Her father had been proud of his De Paor ancestry, but proud in a gentle way. Proud to be able to trace back his family, and yet deeply sad that a succession of feckless Powers in the past had frittered away the family fortune. As a result, the Powers had lost the ability to keep their lovely home, had lost the ability to take care of the people of the village. Her father would have been a philanthropist, if only he’d had the cash. So Suki hadn’t been brought up to think that being a Power meant that she was better than anyone else. But if it riled Antoinette, then she would remind her at every opportunity.
Angry,