SERIAL FICTION
A Cup Of Tea To Help Her Think
Shadows Of Mayday #2: Cathy #1: Daughter of wealthy parents, she needs more from life to be happy
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Cathy looked around at the mess in her bedroom. Clothes were everywhere, scattered across the floor, on the bed, and over the chair in the corner. The doors to the closet stood wide open, as did the drawers of the dresser on the other side of her room.
“How am I ever going to decide which clothes to take with me?” she mumbled.
She didn’t really expect an answer to this question.
Cathy lived alone, but it wasn’t by choice. She was single, in her early thirties, and more than ready to be in a relationship. For years, she had tried everything to meet ‘Mr. Right’, but nothing had worked out the way she hoped.
Cathy glanced at the desk behind her and smiled when she saw her laptop. She had found her ‘Mr. Right’.
Her thoughts wandered back to the other ways she had tried. She remembered several dinners with friends. They invited single men to join them and tried to hook her up. Each time, she was glad to be home again.
After that followed a period in which she went out to bars to meet men, but she only met the creepy ones. She smiled at the memory of her desperation when she had told her friend she would just go out to walk her dog every Sunday, hoping to meet men in the park.
“Do you want a dog?” her friend asked.
Cathy fiercely shook her head.
“Then what should the man you might meet do with his dog?” was her friend’s next question.
Cathy never walked her friend’s dog.
Cathy shrugged and returned her attention to the mess in front of her. She needed to get her suitcase packed, but it was still empty.
“Maybe a cup of tea will help,” she said and walked to the door of the bedroom. She stopped halfway towards the door and glanced at her laptop again.
“No, Cathy,” she said, “not tonight!”
It was still early, but with her alarm set to wake her up in the wee hours of the morning, there would be no online time tonight.
In the kitchen, she switched on the kettle and put a big mug on the counter. She made herself a peanut butter sandwich while she waited for the water to boil. Minutes later, she sat on the couch, eating the sandwich and slowly sipping her hot tea.
She was right about the tea, or at least about taking a break from the mess in her room. Tea had always been her remedy when her mind was in chaos, and this time, it also helped. While she sipped her tea, she organized her thoughts and, with that, she knew what she should pack.
As soon as her cup was empty, she walked back to the kitchen, rinsed the cup and the plate and put it away. On her way back to the bedroom, she thought about her life.
Cathy came from wealthy parents and had moved in middle-class social circles from a young age. About two years ago, she had had enough of the snobbish attitudes in those circles. Men pretended to be the perfect husbands while they fucked around with their wives’ best friends and women constantly visited spa retreats for treatments they believed kept them young.
Cathy had never seemed to fit in with the others. She was always the odd one out. Twice, she went to a spa retreat with her mother and three of her mother’s friends, but both times it bored her after the first hour. Cathy preferred to stay busy. She didn’t enjoy spending her days under tanning lights or having her nails painted or her feet massaged. It was not even the activities that bored her, but the endless tea-drinking, together with the senseless chatter and the afternoon naps. Her mom was upset when Cathy declined to join them a third time, but Cathy had refused to change her mind.
Being of middle-class parents had its benefits. Cathy received a superb education. Her parents had opted to enroll her in a private school, which only the ‘rich kids’ attended. It was nothing different from a normal school, except that her parents had to pay an enormous sum each year for her tuition. Kids were mean everywhere, no matter their parentage.
There was no question whether Cathy would go to university. Money was never a problem. She studied Business Administration, but didn’t stop after she had her bachelor’s degree. There was no need for her to start work just yet, so she continued studying for three more years until she had her Master’s, specializing in international marketing.
Only then she looked for a job. Her father wanted her to take a job in his company, but again she went against the norm of the higher-class and refused. She landed a job with another company where she started at the bottom of the corporate ladder. Cathy worked hard to get herself to where she was now: head of a small marketing department. She loved her job, and she was good at it.
The only thing in which Cathy saw herself as unsuccessful was finding a life partner. This was much to the despair of her mother, who couldn’t wait to see her only daughter — her only child — in an extravagantly expensive wedding dress.
Cathy knew that would bring on the next disappointment for her mother, because she wanted something simple and classic. She didn’t share her mother’s love for earthly goods or the lust for status. Her mother had tried many times to introduce her to unmarried men during the famous dinner parties held at her parents’ house, but without success.
Cathy’s taste in men differed hugely from that of her mother. All the men at her parents’ dinner parties worked for her father. They all hoped to marry the boss’s daughter and climb the career ladder quicker than their peers did. This disgusted Cathy so much, she often declined her mother’s dinner invitations, claiming she had to work.
She found peace in herself when she stopped going to the dinner parties, or tried to be hooked up with single men by her friends. Cathy concentrated on her work, went out frequently, and connected with people on social media. The last thing she looked for online was a relationship. It was just a way to unwind after work — a way for her to meet people outside the closed circles in which she had been moving.
It happened when she had least expected it.
She met her ‘Mr. Right.’
It took time for both of them to admit it to each other, since they lived so far apart. But after several weeks, they could not deny it anymore: they were in love. They spoke about it: where this could go, whether they should pursue it and what the outcome could be if they met each other. Both of them agreed they had to keep on talking to each other and take things day by day.
Time would tell where it would lead. Time would tell whether they would still feel the way they did when the novelty wore off.
Continued: Shadows Of Mayday #3
Find all chapters here.
This story is a work of fiction, and the author’s tribute to all victims of air crashes. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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