the far side of the table, he was having a fork-jabbing competition with TJ. ‘Vinnie? What’s going on?’
‘Vinnie!’ Cara called. ‘Jessie’s talking to you.’
Surprised, Vinnie looked up. ‘Hi, Auntie Jessie.’
‘How are you, sweetie?’
‘I have attention deficit, but it’s not bad enough to be a disorder. And I set fire to a wooden crate in the field near the school.’
‘Just testing his boundaries,’ Tom said.
‘That’s all. And I won’t do it again.’
Menus appeared on the table. Could she skip the starter? No, that would cause a medium-sized outcry. Okay, she’d have a Caesar salad – dressing on the side, skip the croutons. Basically that was only lettuce.
For the main course, maybe the fish. Protein was good. No potatoes, though. Potatoes were very bad. But she needed carbs: if she let herself get too hungry, there was a danger she’d binge later. Oh, God, here came baskets of bread. Bread was always a mistake: it lit a fire in her, making her crave all the food and stripping her of any power to resist.
‘Look at you.’ Jessie scanned the length of the table, all the kids from seven-year-old Dilly to seventeen-year-old Saoirse. ‘Everyone’s getting so grown-up!’
‘We need more babies,’ Johnny said. ‘Fresh blood.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ Cara said. ‘I’m done.’
‘And Nell won’t, because of the state of the planet.’ Liam flashed a smile at his wife. ‘It’ll be up to the next generation. How about it, Saoirse?’
‘Stop!’ Saoirse squealed. ‘Anyway, Ferdia’s older than me. Let him have the next Casey baby.’
‘No!’ Jessie actually went pale. ‘No way. He’s got his studies and – no. Just no.’
Pity the misfortunate woman that Ferdia brought home to meet his mammy, Cara thought.
Where was he, anyway?
‘Missed the train.’ Jessie sighed. ‘The clown.’ She rolled her eyes but her heart wasn’t in it. She tried so hard to pretend that Ferdia wasn’t her favourite child. ‘While I think of it,’ she said, ‘is anyone free tomorrow afternoon around four thirty to collect Ferdia and Barty from Killarney station?’
‘I’ll do it,’ Nell said, super-fast.
‘Or I can,’ Ed said.
‘No, please, let me.’ Nell was insistent and Cara understood. She was embarrassed by the money being spent on her this weekend and was attempting a – frankly, impossible – rebalancing of the scales.
Cara had been the same back in the day.
Jessie and Johnny had become an item around the same time as she’d met Ed. Very quickly, Jessie had begun inviting Ed and Cara to come along on their family holidays. But when they’d admitted that the costs were out of their reach, Jessie offered to subsidize them. They’d refused. The whole idea made them uneasy. Jessie didn’t give up. Over and over she explained that as an only child she’d be getting more out of these family holidays than Ed and Cara. Jessie’s generosity was sincerely meant but it didn’t stop Cara doing whatever she could to show her gratitude.
Seven months earlier, an opportunity had presented itself. Johnny had made a chance remark about keeping track of their online purchasing. ‘It’s the returns,’ he’d said. ‘So much of Jessie’s stuff goes back, but I keep forgetting to check if we were refunded.’
‘Just set up a spreadsheet,’ Cara had said. ‘Easy. I can do it for you.’
‘But wouldn’t you need access to our emails?’
Johnny had misunderstood. Cara’s offer was merely to set up a spreadsheet, not to track their online shopping.
‘You’d need to come to the house to see them?’ Johnny asked. ‘Or could you access them remotely? How often could you do it?’
‘Er, once a month?’ She’d decided to go with this unexpected acceleration. ‘But don’t you mind me seeing all your financial stuff?’
‘Course not! Jessie, come here! Cara’s going to monitor – that’s a lovely word, “monitor”, very reassuring – our online buying. Making sure we get our money back for any returns.’
Jessie wasn’t quite as delighted. ‘Cara, don’t judge me. I’m trigger-happy, especially late at night if I’ve been on the sauce, but most of the stuff goes back. I know the couriers cost money, but if I was to get in my car and drive to the shops, the cost to my time and the petrol, well, it’s probably better –’
‘Stop. I won’t do it if it makes you uncomfortable.’
Jessie had chewed her lip. ‘Ah, it needs to be done.’
‘It does.’ Johnny was adamant.
‘And you’re family, Cara.’
After a couple of months when Cara had traced over a thousand euro in misdirected refunds, Jessie was fully on board. So much so that Johnny asked if she’d take