Free The Stone House by Marita Conlon-Mckenna

hear the radio blaring as she pushed down the handle of the back door. ‘Mrs O’Grady, please can you come up to the house and help my mammy?’ she called.
    The kitchen was warm, with the windows wide open and two plates and two cups on the table. She started to walk towards the hall, stopping suddenly at the curve of the staircase where two large men’s leather shoes were neatly placed, the laces open, the brown leather familiar. A beige suit jacket was hanging from the banister. It was her father’s: she recognized it from the tear at the corner of the pocket, which he’d kept asking her mother to mend.
    She stood in the hall listening. What was her father doing in O’Grady’s? They were upstairs, she could heartalking, laughing and other sounds. Sounds she couldn’t believe. She wanted to run away and hide, close the back door and disappear, but she thought of Moya back in the wasp-filled garden with her mother and called his name.
    â€˜Daddy!’
    She could hear the sudden silence, the whispers.
    â€˜Mammy’s hurt. She needs you!’ she shouted urgently. ‘You’ve got to come now!’
    â€˜Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’
    Mortified, she escaped and stood out in the lane beside the door waiting for him.
    â€˜What the feck are you doing here?’ he demanded.
    â€˜The wasps attacked Mammy and I came to get help.’ The words came out in a torrent as she watched him fix his belt and pull on his shoes. ‘A wasps’ nest fell on her and she’s covered in stings. She’s real bad, Moya’s with her but she needs to go to the doctor or the hospital.’
    She flinched at the image of Sheila O’Grady in a flowery dressing gown, her hair loose around her shoulders, passing him his jacket and pushing her father out the door.
    â€˜How did you know where I was?’
    â€˜I looked everywhere for you. I saw your car.’
    â€˜It’s better you say nothing to your mother about this, do you hear me, Kate? You know how she is.’
    In the heat and sun and quiet of the lane she saw the expression on his face, the wary look in his dark eyes, the threatening stance in his heavy shoulders.
    â€˜You’ll say nothing about this to your mother! Promise.’
    She nodded.
    â€˜It’s between us, then.’
    He was trying to make her his accomplice. He need not have worried, because Kate was determined that nobody should know what an utter bastard her father had become, least of all her mother.
    Unwilling to get into the car with him, she went to retrieve her bike and cycled home, slowly. She stopped for a few minutes to get her breath back and to quell the awful feeling of nausea and nerves that almost made her fall to the ground. How could her daddy do this? She had always believed him to be a bit blunt and rough in his ways but at least hardworking and honest and now she had caught him out in a lie! Her mother had no idea he was involved with another woman, least of all someone she knew. Kate didn’t know what to do. She was sixteen years old and already disillusioned. She had always trusted and looked up to him and now she felt disgusted by him. She tried to compose herself as she cycled the rest of the way home.
    Luckily her mother and father were already gone, had left for the hospital and Moya, standing in the cool of the kitchen in her bikini, made Kate sit down as she put Caladryl on the stings on her arm and hand. Momentarily she was tempted to confide in her sister, share the burden of unwanted knowledge about her father’s sexual behaviour and expose his affair, but the thought of the impact of such a disclosure on their fragile family was too much to bear and instead she decided to keep it quiet, keep it secret.
    They returned a few hours later, her mother’s face and arms and hands and legs swollen. Her eyes, half closed,were so puffed she looked like a prize-fighter. She’d had injections and been