for ten weeks and was the thinnest she’d ever been as an adult. She’d felt amazing. But it hadn’t lasted: as soon as she’d resumed normal food, the weight piled back on. The shame had been intense, she’d felt a type of grief to have lost that skinny self. Ever since, she’d been trying to find her way home to that paradise size.
Apart from a short relapse after each of her pregnancies, she’d thought she had the vomiting under control.
Why couldn’t she eat normally? Why did she have to know the calorific value in literally everything? Why was she always either on the way up or the way down, desperately clawing for control?
Or she could try looking at it another way: why couldn’t she accept herself, whatever her size?
There were lots of overweight people who were fine with what they were. Why couldn’t she be one of them?
Cara tuned back into the conversation around the table. Johnny was saying, ‘This fiftieth-wedding-anniversary thing, how much are we dreading it?’
Next month, the senior Caseys, Canice and Rose, were holding a weekend of festivities to mark their golden wedding. They lived on the other side of the country in the small County Mayo town of Beltibbet. Attendance at the celebration was obligatory.
‘Not that it matters,’ Johnny said. ‘We could give them actual Fort Knox and they still wouldn’t be impressed.’
‘Fuck them,’ Liam said.
‘Ah, Liam!’
‘Seriously, though, why did they even bother having kids? All they ever cared about was each other.’ Liam had made a good point.
In Beltibbet, Canice was the town solicitor, a justice of the peace and a local bigshot. Every one of his children was a bitter disappointment to him, something he liked to hold forth on: ‘Three sons and all I wanted was for just one to follow me into the family business. Keep the name alive. But Johnny is too thick, Ed is in love with a shrub, and Liam was a dead loss from day one, thinking he’d be Roger Bannister when it was clear to all and sundry that he was Forrest Gump. “That boy sure is a running fool”!’
It was always dressed up in laughter and ha-ha-has, but Cara knew that Canice’s sons didn’t find it remotely amusing.
And Rose was as bad as Canice. She was a ‘beauty’ – certainly she was where the three Casey men had got their good looks. She was also ‘fragile’ and very ‘proper’. The Casey family home, a detached two-storey with a half-acre of garden, standing apart from the rest of the great unwashed, was a haven of gracious living, with bone-china milk jugs and Waterford crystal sherry glasses. At eighty-one, Rose still got her nails and hair done twice a week. She’d never worked outside the home – or ever really worked inside it either, from what Ed had told Cara. Throughout his childhood there had been a succession of flustered, overstretched women from the town, Mrs Dooley and Mrs Gibbons and Mrs Loftus, who did the laundry, the cooking and the polishing of the silver.
No one knew where Rose had got her notions – she was from the nearby town of Ballina.
‘They weren’t great parents.’ Ed was matter-of-fact.
‘But was it our fault?’ Johnny asked Ed, like he always did. ‘Didn’t it bother you?’
‘It would have been better if they’d been kinder. But when I was about thirteen, I got it. I’d never be good enough for them. So it just stopped … mattering.’
‘Liam?’ Johnny asked.
‘Like I said, fuck them.’ Liam swigged from his beer bottle, then gave a short laugh. ‘Look, they were never physically cruel –’
‘You’re setting the bar pretty low there, Liam!’
‘Seriously, Johnny, calm the head,’ Liam said. ‘We all turned out okay.’
The varying reactions from the three brothers were interesting, Cara decided. Liam behaved as if he didn’t care. Maybe he got enough love and validation from the other parts of his life … But she sensed anger low down in him.
Ed was genuinely at peace about it. ‘They did the best they could.’ He seemed such a mild, unremarkable man, but underneath was a steady self-belief.
Johnny was the one who kept coming back to pick over the pieces. He still held out hope that this could be fixed. Still bound to Canice and Rose by strong, complicated ties.
THIRTY-ONE
Around 8 p.m., Ferdia finished a game of Fortnite and slunk up to the house. The fridge, rammed with beer, rattled as he opened it. He shouldn’t