Cecelia Ahern Short Stories by Cecelia Ahern Read Free Book Online Page A

living room, it was required of Mags to help prepare tea with her mother in the kitchen. Her first greeting was a slap across the face. ‘That’s what you get, Margaret Divine,’ her mother said breathlessly while rubbing her hand in her apron as if to try to rid herself of the guilt of the act. ‘That’s what you get for not obeying me, for running off and becoming a scorned woman who hangs around smoky clubs with men like you were some sort of fancy woman,’ she hissed. ‘That’s not the life you were reared to know, not the life your father and I worked hard to provide for you, and this is how you repay us?’ She busied herself making sandwiches, slicing the tomatoes with neat precision, almost obsessive behaviour.
    Mags stared at her mother, her eyes glistening from the sting of the slap.
    ‘Well, Margaret, what have you to say for yourself?’ She stopped slicing the tomato and turned to face Mags, sharp knife in one hand, other hand on hip trying to appear menacing. Margaret saw her then for the first time, for what she really was. A woman who knew very little about the real ways of the world. She realized that the woman who scared her all of her life knew very little at all. Margaret began to laugh, to her own surprise, quietly at first, but then she reached to the very bottom of her soul and found a loud bellyaching laugh that made her eyes run with tears of sadness and relief. This unusual act of disobedience angered her mother even more, and Mags received an even harder slap on the other cheek.
    This stopped her laughing immediately but her eyes still glistened with bitter amusement.
    ‘What have you to say for yourself, young lady?’ her mother said angrily through gritted teeth. Loose grey hairs flailed around wildly as though they celebrated their escape from the tight bun in her head. Her face aged in an instant in Mags’s eyes, sharp knife aimed pointedly at Mags’s face. ‘Well?’ she pressed, the delight of putting her daughter back in her place causing her shoulders to relax a little. Margaret glanced at the small mirror over the kitchen basin, at the small wooden stool that she was forced to sit on for all of her teenage years twice weekly and endure the pain of covering her flushed cheeks. She didn’t know what tosay. Margaret caught her reflection in the mirror and her stinging cheeks slowly broke into a sad smile. ‘Why Mother, you seem to have made my cheeks rosy.’
    Her comment was greeted with an icy stare. But a shocked one at that. No words came from her mother’s mouth. And, as the unusual silence hung in the air, Margaret turned her back and walked out of the kitchen, out of the cottage and out of the place where her mother had tried to hold such control over her.
    She and Cornelius married a few weeks later in a small church in Dublin. Her mother could not bring herself to attend but, for the last time, Mags’s father led her down the aisle of the church, with makeup on her face, up to the front row.
    ‘Four and seven, forty-seven.’
    Mags smiled. The year she and Connie had their first baby.
    He had been like an excited child himself when he found out about the pregnancy. He had picked her up and danced her around the living room of their new home, then quickly put her down again with worry, afraid of hurting her and the baby. They had finally managed to gather the money together to buy their first home in a new housing estate of brand-new three-bedroom homes in Cabra, Dublin. They had spent the first few years of their married life working all the hours under the sun to help pay for the house, and now they would have an addition. Mags smiled again. She couldn’t wait to talk to Connie later about the day they moved in. She loved doing that. Going over the memories of years gone by with him.
    They named their first son Michael after Connie’s father, and over the following years they had three more children. Two more boys, Robert and Jimmy, and one girl, Joyce. A daughter