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

have seen if she’d looked at my marriage. And then I pull up short because in the story I’m hearing, it is my daughter who is the interfering little hussy and she thinks she’s in the right.

And I have to let her think she is too.

But I know so much that she doesn’t know. I know that marriages are not about the affection revealed in front of people, and that support can be shown in one hundred different ways, and that a person outside a marriage can never judge what is happening inside that marriage – whether it is good or bad. And I know other things. I know that Julia’s attraction to this Daniel is not, as she thinks, because he’s different from anyone she has ever known, but because he’s like her father. Like Mike. And Julia may not have known Mike for long before The Accident, but she did have two years of his easy laugh and his silliness and his happiness and his irreverence. She is attracted to a bright, unusual, humorous man in a happy marriage. A man just like her father.

And the biggest thing that I know – as she is reaching the part of the story where she finds herself alone with Daniel and things take a new direction – is that you don’t have a future with a man you’ve seduced away from a happy home. Julia’s heart is going to be broken, and I know it, and I can’t say anything, and all I can think is that this will change everything. She’s going to need me more, not less. And I want to cry.

Then she tells me there might be a baby.

And the hope comes flooding back.

Daniel

Julia is at her mother’s, telling her about us, and I’m in her flat – our flat – and I’m alone, and I’m thinking about what she’s telling her mother, and I wish I could be there with her because as angry and trapped as I feel, Julia needs me.

I think back to the night it all started, when Claire went to one of her endless functions and I was at home alone with Mackenzie. It had been a bad day, a long day – we’d lost an important client. Their CEO said it was because our agency lacked gravitas, but we all knew it was because I didn’t take him as seriously as he took himself. When my buddy Ernst and I started the agency five years ago, we were very clear that we’d only work with people we had fun with. We’d both spent too many years licking arses and the whole point of our own agency was to break away from that mindset. For a long time we planned to call the agency ‘Arse-lickers’ in an ironic way, but our lawyer said we might have trouble registering that name. We’d also had second thoughts – it might have alienated clients. We should have known then that it’s one thing to say you’ll only work with like-minded clients, and a whole other ball game to do it. Maybe we should have stuck with ‘Arse-lickers’ just to remind ourselves where we stood.

Anyway, that’s what was going on the day it started with Julia – I was learning the hard way that losing a wanker of a client also meant losing a couple of million in the bank. I didn’t like that so much, and neither did Ernst. We’d had a few tequila shots at the office to comfort ourselves, and yelled, ‘Arse-lickers’ really loud over our panoramic view, but it didn’t really help.

I had to get home to relieve Thandi, our helper, because Claire was out. I phoned Claire on the way home and I was surprised that she answered and I was so pleased to hear her voice, I started telling her about the arse-lickers. But she said, in her strict voice, ‘You’ve been drinking and now you’re talking on the phone and driving.’ So I said it was worth the risk, I needed her, and she said, ‘Well, I don’t need to be a widow, and anyway I’m not at home, you idiot,’ which she normally only says when she’s joking around, but then she hung up the call. When I tried to phone back, she didn’t answer.

Just after I got home – perfectly safely – and before I could even change, the doorbell rang, and when I answered the intercom, there was Julia. I let her in, and she was all dressed up and carrying a bottle of wine and a bunch of flowers, and the silly thing had got the night of a dinner party wrong by a whole week.

Well, she was mortified but I was delighted. I liked Julia so much. She isn’t all blonde and thin and polished like Claire’s other friends. Her hair is long and dark and curly. Nobody has curly hair any more – I hear women talking about how much they pay to straighten their hair. But Julia’s hair is a wild mess of dark curls. And she is ditzy and messy and always looks slightly wrongly put together, like you just know there’s no way her underwear matches, and chances are that something’s on inside out. I like that. So I told Julia that since she was there anyway and I was all alone, she should stay and we could have something to eat.

I opened some wine and made us some pasta, and Julia was impressed that I could cook, which I liked, because Claire just complains about how much mess I make and that it’s always pasta. I was a bit drunk from the tequila, and stressed, and disappointed that Claire hadn’t wanted to speak to me. I barely touched my pasta but I drank a lot of red wine. Julia, on the other hand, ate all her pasta and asked for more. I wouldn’t say that Claire diets, but she’s ‘careful’. I liked that Julia