Read In My Sister's Shoes for Free Online Page B

her that I’d want to hug her and cry, but she hated displays of emotion. Having been dragged into adulthood at twelve, she had learnt to deal with everything that came her way calmly and efficiently.
    When we were younger Dad had tried to help out, but he had a business to run. In the end he’d hired Molly, who came in to clean and cook from Mondays to Fridays, but Derek and I hated the food she prepared and refused to eat it, so Fiona ended up with the cooking. Molly stuck to cleaning, ironing and telling us sad stories about her ten brothers and sisters and their thirty-two children.
    Over the years we heard about relations who ‘suffered terrible from their nerves’, others who had gone down the slippery slope of gambling, drinking, cavorting outside wedlock, drug-taking, teenage pregnancy– but the final straw for Molly was when one of her nephews turned out to be ‘queer’. This apparently was worse than all the rest put together.
    We had no idea what it meant, but from the look on Molly’s face it was very bad news. Fiona looked it up in the dictionary when Molly left and read out: ‘“Strange, odd, eccentric, ill, homosexual.”’
    ‘What’s that mean?’ I asked.
    Fiona shrugged and turned to ‘homosexual.’ ‘“Feeling or involving sexual attraction to people of same sex.”’ She went red and shut the dictionary, but I still didn’t understand. She told me to forget about it and left the room.
    When Dad came home later, I decided to ask him. ‘What’s “queer”?’
    ‘Strange,’ he said, shovelling mashed potato into his mouth.
    ‘What’s homosexual?’
    ‘ What? ’ he spluttered. ‘Where did you hear that?’
    ‘Molly said it. What’s it mean?’
    Dad put down his fork and chose his words carefully. ‘It’s when a boy likes a boy or a girl likes a girl.’
    ‘I like Tara so am I homosexual?’
    ‘No, pet, it’s more than that – it’s when a boy wants another boy to be his, uhm, well, I suppose to be his boyfriend. So instead of a boy and a girl being together it’s a boy and a boy or a girl and a girl together.’
    I wasn’t sure how to process this. ‘Like Derek and Frank?’ (This was before Frank was renamed Gonzo and developed hormones.)
    ‘No. It’s when a boy loves a boy and wants to marry him. Or two girls want to marry,’ said Dad, floundering.
    I frowned. Boys getting married was news to me. For some reason I wasn’t so bothered by the idea of girls doing it. Tara and I were always playing husband and wife. ‘Do they kiss other boys?’
    ‘Yes, they do.’
    ‘Yuck.’
    ‘Well, I’d have to agree with you there. It wouldn’t be my cup of tea.’
    ‘Do we know any?’
    ‘Rock Hudson,’ said Dad, deciding to use someone I idolized as a positive role model.
    ‘But he kisses Doris Day and they’re married.’
    ‘In the films they are, but not in real life. In real life, Rock likes to kiss boys.’
    I was devastated. I had planned to marry Rock when I grew up and spend my days in yellow headscarves driving around in open-top cars drinking martinis and generally having a swell time. This was long before I saw Dirty Dancing and gave my heart to Patrick Swayze. Molly had done untold damage to my future by bringing queerness into my house and ruining my marriage prospects. I never fully forgave her and decided to write Doris Daya letter to inform her of Rock’s sexual leanings – after all, the poor woman was making a fool of herself in all those films as his wife. Dad promised he’d post it for me, and produced it eleven years later on my twenty-first birthday when he read it out to Fiona and Derek’s hysterical laughter.
    I took a deep breath and rang the bell. Fiona answered the door, looking wretched. Her eyes were in the back of her head and her face was a shade of pale I’d never seen before. I hugged her and blinked back the tears that were forming in my eyes.
    ‘Good to see you, Kate,’ she said, prising herself away from me.
    ‘You too. Now