Read Home Truths Online

Authors: Freya North

Tags: #Man-Woman Relationships, #Fiction, #Chick-Lit, #Women's Fiction, #Love Stories, #Romance

Home Truths

 

 

FREYA NORTH

Home Truths

For Georgia
my beautiful, beautiful girl

In loving memory
Liz Berney
12.2.1968–24.12.2005

Write your sister's weak points in the sand
and her strong points in stone.

Anon

Table of Contents

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter 1 -
Django McCabe

Chapter 2 -
Tuesday

Chapter 3 -
Django McCabe and the Nit-Pickin' Chicks

Chapter 4 -
The Rag and Thistle

Chapter 5 -
Penny Ericsson

Chapter 6 -
Home from Home

Chapter 7 -
Winter Ice

Chapter 8 -
Road Kill

Chapter 9 -
Waterworks

Chapter 10 -
He's Not There

Chapter 11 -
April Fool

Chapter 12 -
My Round

Chapter 13 -
Freeze a Jolly Good Fellow

Chapter 14 -
Derek

Chapter 15 -
Then What?

Chapter 16 -
1960s and All That Jazz

Chapter 17 -
The M1

Chapter 18 -
Dovidels

Chapter 19 -
Kate and Max and Merry Martha

Chapter 20 -
Sweet is the Voice of a Sister in the Season of Sorrow

Chapter 21 -
Coupling

Chapter 22 -
On the Phone

Chapter 23 -
Seeds Sown

Chapter 24 -
Seeds Not Sown

Chapter 25 -
Seeds in a Packet

Chapter 26 -
Bad Seed

Chapter 27 -
Stray Cat Blue

Chapter 28 -
A Fish Out of Water

Chapter 29 -
Al and the Girl from Purley

Chapter 30 -
Cat Out of the Bag

Chapter 31 -
The Ten o'Clock News

Chapter 32 -
Where Were You When You Heard that Django McCabe Had Cancer?

Chapter 33 -
Testing Time

Chapter 34 -
Time for Tests

Chapter 35 -
VT 05154

Chapter 36 -
Lester Falls

Chapter 37 -
Plastic Tubing

Chapter 38 -
Love at Long Distance

Chapter 39 -
No-Brainer

Chapter 40 -
Freedom Trail

Chapter 41 -
Red-Eye

Chapter 42 -
Return of the Natives

Chapter 43 -
Fen McCabe and Matt Holden

Chapter 44 -
Pip and Zac Holmes

Chapter 45 -
Cat and Ben York

Chapter 46 -
To the Bone

Chapter 47 -
Hard Facts and White Lies

Chapter 48 -
Sundae

Chapter 49 -
Moving On

Chapter 50 -
Christmas

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

‘How do you say goodbye to a mountain?’

From her vantage point, Cat York looked across to the three Flatirons, to Bear Peak and Green Mountain. She gazed down the skirts of Flagstaff, patting the snow around her and settling herself in as though she was sitting on the mountain's lap. ‘It's like a giant, frozen wedding dress,’ she said. ‘It probably sounds daft, but for the last four years, I've privately thought of Flagstaff as
my
mountain.’

‘There's a lot of folk round here who think that way,’ Stacey said. ‘You're allowed to. That's the beauty of living in Boulder.’

The sun shot through, glancing off the crystal-cracked snow on the trees, the sharp, flat slabs of rust-coloured rock of the Flatirons soaring through all the dazzling white at their awkward angle.

‘When Ben and I first arrived and I was homesick and insecure, I'd walk to Chautauqua Meadow and just sit on my own. It felt like the mountains were a giant arm around my shoulders.’ Cat looked around her with nostalgic gratitude. ‘Then soon enough we met you lot, started hiking and biking the trails and suddenly the mountain showed me its other side. You could say it's been my therapist's couch and it's been my playground. It's now my most favourite place in the world.’

Stacey looked at Cat, watched her friend cup her gloved hands over her nose and mouth in a futile bid to make her nose look less red and her lips not so blue. ‘This time next week, the only peaks I'll be seeing are Victorian rooftops,’ Cat said, ‘grimy pigeons will replace bald eagles and there'll just be puddles in place of Wonderland Lake. Next week will be a whole new year.’

‘Tell me about Clapham,’ Stacey asked, settling into their snow bunker.

‘Well,’ said Cat, ‘it's a silent “h” for a start.’

They laughed.

‘God,’ Cat groaned, leaning forward and knocking her head against her knees, ‘I'm still not sure we're doing the right thing – but don't tell Ben I said so. I can't tell you about Clapham, I don't think I've ever been.’ She paused and then continued a little plaintively. ‘God, Stacey, I have no job, my two closest friends don't even live in the city any more and I'm moving to an opposite side of London to where I used to live, where my sisters still live.’

‘It's exciting,’ Stacey said, ‘and if you don't like it, you can always come back.’ She tore into a pack of Reese's with her teeth, her chilled fingers unfit for the task. ‘And there's some stuff that's really to look forward to.’

Placated and sustained by the pack of peanut butter, the comfort of chocolate, Cat agreed. ‘I've missed my family – by the sound of it, my middle sister Fen is having a tough time at the moment. And it's going to be a big year for Django – he'll be seventy-five which will no doubt warrant a celebration of prodigious proportions.’

‘I'd sure like to have met him,’ Stacey said and she laughed a little. ‘I remember when I first met you, I thought you were like, so exotic, because you came to Boulder with your English Rose looks and a history that Brontë couldn't have made up. You with the mother who ran off with a cowboy, you who were raised by a crazy uncle called Django, you and your sisters brought up in the wilds of Wherever.’

‘Derbyshire's not wild,’ Cat protested, ‘not our part. Though there are wallabies.’

‘What's a wallaby?’

‘It's like a mini kangaroo,’ said Cat. ‘They were kept as pets by the posh folk in eighteenth-century Derbyshire – but some broke free, bred, and now bounce happily across the Dales.’

Stacey took a theatrical intake of breath. ‘So we have you and your sisters, living in the countryside with your hippy dude uncle and a herd of mutant, aristocratic kangaroos because your mom eloped with J. R. Ewing?’ She whistled. ‘You could sell this to Hollywood.’

‘Shut up, Stacey,’ Cat laughed. ‘we're just a normal family. Django is a very regular bloke – albeit with a colourful dress code and an adventurous take on cuisine. I'm starting to freeze. Let's go into town and get a hot chocolate. My bum's numb even in these salopettes.’

‘Weird, though,’ Stacey said thoughtfully.

‘What is? My bottom?’

‘Your butt is cute, honey,’ Stacey assured her, as they hauled each other to their feet. ‘I mean it's a little weird that your mom runs off with a cowboy from Denver when you were small, right?’

‘Yup.’

‘And you've been living pretty close to the Mile High City these last four years, right?’

‘Yup.’

‘But you never looked her up?’ ‘Nope.’

‘Never even thought about it? Never went shopping in Denver and thought, Hey, I wonder if that lady over there is my mom?’

Throughout Cat's life, it had always been her friends who'd been far more intrigued by her family circumstances, her absent mother, than she. ‘But I never knew her. I was a baby. I have no memories of her,’ Cat explained. ‘I'm not even curious. We had Django, my sisters and I – we wanted for nothing. Just because we didn't have a “conventional” mother or father didn't mean that we were denied a proper parent.’

Stacey linked arms with Cat. ‘Conventional families are dull, honey – stick with your kooky one.’

‘Oh I'm sticking with my kooky one all right!’ Cat laughed. ‘I love them with all my heart. And now that Ben and I want to start our own, it feels natural to want to be within that fold again.’

At the time, Cat and Ben York had argued about putting the set of three matching suitcases on their wedding list. Cat had denounced them as boring and unsexy and why couldn't they peruse the linen department one more time. Ben told her that some things in life were, by virtue, boring and unsexy and he pointed out there were only so many Egyptian cotton towels a couple could physically use in a lifetime. Three years later, Ben and Cat are contemplating the same three suitcases: frequently used, gaping open and empty, waiting to be fed the last remaining clothes and belongings. The process is proving to be far more irksome than the packing of the huge crates a few weeks ago, now currently making their passage by sea back to England.

‘Weird to think that this time next week we'll be back in the UK,’ Ben says.

‘Weird that we both now refer to it as “the UK” rather than “England” or simply “home”,’ says Cat. ‘Stacey and I went for a fantastic walk this morning.’ She looks through their picture windows to the mountains, a huge cottonwood tree in its winter wear with stark, thick boughs boasting sprays of fine, finger-like branches, the big sky, the quality of air so clean it is almost visible. ‘God, it's stunning here.’

‘Hey,’ says Ben, ‘we'll have Clapham Common on our new doorstep.’

Cat hurls a pillow at him. He ducks.

‘We can always come back,’ Ben tells her, ‘but for now, it is time to go. We have things to do. That was the point, remember. That's why we came here in the first place. It's the things we do now which provide a tangible future for our daydreams. That's why it's timely to return to the UK.’

‘Do dreams come true in
Clapham
?’

Ben hurls the pillow back at Cat. She hugs it close and looks momentarily upset. ‘I don't even have a job to go back to,’ she says, ‘and not from want of trying. And I'm not pregnant yet – not from want of trying. I feel like I'm just traipsing behind you.’

‘we're a team,’ Ben states, ‘you and me. I've been given a great job which will be big enough for both of us. I've taken it – for the both of us – so you can take your time and think about you.’

‘I know,’ Cat smiles sheepishly. ‘But what'll I do in Clapham all day? Are we packing the pillows?’

‘I don't know – do furnished flats come with pillows?’

‘I'm not sleeping on pillows used by God knows who,’ Cat protests, though she calculates that three pillows will fill an entire suitcase.

‘You do in hotels,’ Ben reasons, with a frustrated ruffle through his short, silver-flecked hair. ‘It's not as if we're going to some boarding house – I told you, the flat is really quite nice. And when I'm up and running, we'll look for somewhere to buy.’

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