The Aftermath by Gail Schimmel (books to read in a lifetime txt) 📗

Janice laughs. ‘Oh, I had very little to do with it. But I’m so glad you enjoyed it. And thank you for the generous donation.’

‘Such a good cause,’ I say, although I can’t remember what it actually was, because Janice has many causes and the speeches were very boring. Rhinos? Syrians? No, it was a medical sort of thing – there were diagrams on the PowerPoint. Cerebral palsy maybe. I’d arrived late after the mess of my morning, and after the call from the school, I couldn’t focus on anything.

‘So important,’ I say to Janice, hoping that will cover anything.

‘Not everyone sees it that way,’ says Janice darkly, which doesn’t seem to fit with cerebral palsy. Gay rights? Persecuted Muslims? Persecuted Christians? Palestine? Israel? – surely I would have remembered if it was that controversial? But then what were the medical diagrams about? I have another moment of insight: everything was pink. A woman’s disease. Cervical or breast cancer, or maybe osteoarthritis. But who would have anything against fundraising for that?

I nod, looking serious. ‘It’s a challenge.’

‘And it’s people like you who help the cause.’ Janice gives me another hug. ‘Lots of love!’

‘Lots of love,’ I echo as she walks off. I really must check what her cause is.

I finally get into my car. I have back-to-back meetings this morning with the bands I plan to use at the wedding venue. I’ve drawn up a careful schedule of which weddings have overlapping guests, and have realised that I basically need to design three prototype weddings, and then let each bride tweak a few details, so no guest will attend the same basic wedding twice.

Before I meet the bands, I need to send out a press release for the hotel, and set up a series of scheduled tweets on their account. Time is tight, and I start the car, determined to leave before anyone else interrupts me.

My phone beeps with an incoming WhatsApp. It’s Daniel.

Please fetch my suits from the dry-cleaners.

My brain is already making the calculations – if I swing past the dry-cleaners now, then I might not manage the press release but I’ll still manage the tweets, but if I wait till I fetch Mackenzie from school, then I can do the dry-cleaners between her ballet lesson and the tea date we have with her friend. Or I can ask my mum to help, because since everything happened, she wants to help all the time . . .

And then I stop. And I remember. Daniel’s suits are not my problem. I look back at my phone and I type: Do it yourself. I’m still laughing as I drive away from the school.

Julia

I’m still exhausted from the fight I had with Daniel yesterday after the school fiasco. He just can’t understand why it didn’t all go smoothly, and why Claire had become involved, and why I’d felt the need to tell the teacher about my relationship with him, and why I was so upset. His face had become very still and he’d muttered that he ‘doesn’t like scenes’ and that he ‘isn’t used to this sort of thing’, and he walked out.

And then of course I knew he was comparing me to Claire and everything he has given up to be with me, and I was sure he was regretting it. The thing about Claire is that she manages everything, and she manages it perfectly, and she does it all with a smile.

Oh God. At the beginning of our friendship, Claire used to make me laugh so much – she always had a funny observation. And even though she’s so nice, she’d say mad bitchy things about people, but the way she did it, it was just funny, so when you saw her talking to them later it wasn’t like she was being two-faced.

Like the widows in our pottery class – she could make me cry with laughter about the widows. She’d do these whole skits where she pretended to be one widow talking to another widow about replacing their dead husbands with pottery husbands, and it would be hilarious – especially the bits about sex with the pottery husbands (and the obvious advantages of the pottery husbands) and it was so surprising that for such a proper-looking person, Claire could be so outrageous about sex.

And we would weep with laughter; but then Claire would be lovely to the widows and knew which was which, a feat I couldn’t manage. And before I even knew their names, she was doing little chores for them and popping in to have tea, and bringing little gifts like a particular sort of jam that Grace (or Liz or Ivy) had mentioned that she loved. And it wasn’t like she was a person desperate for company, because she has millions of friends and always has spectacular arrangements – coffee with this one and lunch with that one, and weekends away at her parents’ farm. And she runs a successful business and looks after Mackenzie. Because Claire can manage everything and then some more. And Daniel had asked me to do one thing and I had completely messed it up and he couldn’t grasp it because he thinks all women are like Claire.

So he walked out and I wept and then I phoned him and I begged him to come back. He made me wait. His voice was tight and he said that he needed to think. I was convinced he’d gone straight back to Claire and that she was listening to the call, with sad eyes because he was in this terrible situation with a crazy bitch like me. I couldn’t think where else Daniel could have gone because he hates his parents, who fought throughout his childhood both with each other and with him, and in the times in-between basically forgot they had a child and just paid other people to look after him. That’s why Daniel hates chaos and conflict. And the truth is