Between Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page B

Pearl.
    It could hardly have come from Marguerite.
    Still, Cassie summoned up the strength she’d been summoning up since she was seven, closed off her own problems deep inside her, and began to calm Karen down.
    She might text Coco later and see if she could come round for supper that evening. Coco always cheered her up. And Coco never, ever let her down.

Two

    Coco Keneally liked to think that her vintage shop, The Twentieth Century Boutique, was a bit of a mysterious jewel: bijou-looking on the outside, a slightly shabby Tardis on the inside because it hadn’t been painted in a few years, and yet filled with sparkle. Set on the main shopping street in Silver Bay, a once down-at-heel but now up-and-coming part of Dublin Bay’s outer reaches, it stood out among a trail of shops that included two competing hairdressing salons, a small jewellers there since the year dot, a convenience store and a new coffee shop that had made the local pubs up their game in terms of morning coffee and cakes. There was a sprawling pet shop, a small strange establishment that never seemed to be open but had clocks, toasters, screwdrivers and the odd power tool in the dusty window, and a glamorous chemist where a quick trip for tissues could result in a haul of nail varnish, things for removing hard skin from feet and an essential oil known to cure all ailments if rubbed on every day.
    Coco had been running her shop for five years and the premises covered two shop fronts and a large upstairs, where the more expensively labelled clothes and accessories were: the rare and valuable Diors, Chanels, original Halstons, the tiny YSL Le Smoking nobody could fit into but which Coco found herself loath to sell via the internet on the grounds that, one day, the right person would come into the shop and Coco would know it.
    She couldn’t get so much as a leg into the suit – not without major amputation of a limb. Le Smoking suits had been made with svelte, tiny-boned women in mind and Coco was more of a pocket-sized Gina Lollobrigida: big hips, a DD bra to keep her breasts firmly in place, and the ability to put on weight by so much as looking at a bar of chocolate. So she went for a fifties look herself – sleek dark eyebrows à la Elizabeth Taylor, dark eyes emphasised with a cat flick, ruby red lipstick that suited her full mouth with its finely arched upper lip – and idly waited for the day when a woman walked into her store to befit the exquisite YSL suit.
    Vintage store was perhaps the wrong description for the place, Coco often thought. It was a treasure trove of the past, mysteries bound up in clothes, handbags and costume jewellery, memories of other lives.
    Coco loved the past. ‘Who knew what sort of life this nightgown has seen?’ she might say, holding up a crêpe de Chine garment when she was in Grammy Pearl’s house around the corner going through a cache of clothes, searching for special pieces.
    If Great-Aunt Edie, Grammy’s younger sister, was visiting at the same time, she’d sniff disparagingly and say something about how she couldn’t understand people buying second-hand clothes.
    ‘If faded old nighties from the thirties are vintage, then I’m from the moon,’ Edie would add. ‘Vintage is just other people’s old stuff, smelly and stained …’
    Edie disapproved of people working in shops that sold other people’s old clothes. She’d wanted Coco to go to college to study law or something … well, suitable.
    ‘I’m the oldest vintage here, Edie, and calm down,’ Pearl would say warningly. Nobody was allowed to criticise Coco or Cassie when Pearl was around. ‘Play nice or no cakes with the tea. I’ve got almond Danishes.’
    Grammy Pearl had encouraged Coco every step of the way with her shop but, strangely, she didn’t seem as keen on the past history of garments in the way Coco was. Grammy Pearl didn’t even like talking about the past. She was more of a looking-forward person; astonishing for someone of