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

harder than I thought,’ she says. ‘I just feel like everything’s falling apart.’

Join the club, I want to say, but I just smile and pat her arm. ‘Anything I can do, just yell.’

‘Well . . . Could you possibly give Tatum a lift home today? I have to take the baby to the nurse and I just can’t figure out how to do both.’

‘No problem.’ I do a mental reshuffle. I can’t say no to this – I’ve just offered to help. And it isn’t really a big issue. I’ll just have to phone Mackenzie’s art teacher and explain that she’ll be slightly late for art class.

Liandri hugs me, an awkward sideways hug to avoid squashing the baby, and finally I get into my car.

On the way to the hotel, I take a wrong turn and suddenly I’m in a street I don’t know. I slow down to get my bearings and then I see it: a garden full of gnomes. Full. I pull over and I stare.

Garden gnomes are mine and Daniel’s in-joke. On our first date he took me to a party. As we walked into the house, he pointed to the two garden gnomes flanking the door and said, ‘You’re never going to come out with me again – you’ll think I’m a garden gnome kind of guy.’

I looked at him and said, ‘Oh, you’re definitely a garden gnome kind of guy.’

The garden gnome thing gained momentum and turned into an ongoing joke. Whenever we see gnomes, we stop and photograph them to send each other. In recent years, we’ve added ‘My gnome is sad because . . .’ So Daniel will send me a picture of a gnome saying, ‘My gnome is sad because he thinks he’s fat,’ and then I must comfort the gnome, and say that it is all muscle, or that he looks distinguished. It’s so silly. It’s so Daniel. It’s so us. For my thirtieth birthday he had a white gold necklace made with a garden gnome charm on it. The gnome is holding a diamond in his fat little hands. It is perfect.

I stare at the garden full of gnomes and I don’t know what to do. After about a minute, I get out of the car and take a picture. I know I shouldn’t, but I do. And then I send the picture – there must be about twenty gnomes just in the frame I caught – to Daniel. And I type, These gnomes are sad because everything has changed.

As soon as I press send, I regret it. I start madly pushing buttons trying to find a way to recall the message, but of course I can’t, and then I see that he’s read it already. And I watch as the phone shows that he’s typing, and I’m imagining all the scathing things he might say.

And then the message comes through and it says, Those gnomes can’t be sad. They’re looking at you.

And I sit in my car, and I cry and I cry.

Daniel

I answered Claire before I could think, but I don’t regret it.

The rest of the day, I can’t stop looking at the photo of the gnomes. I want to ask Claire where she was. I want to ask her how many there were, because it looks like there might be even more than I can see in the photo. But instead I just look at the picture she sent me, and I think.

Claire thought I broke her heart when I left her for Julia. But I think that when I see her tomorrow and tell her Julia is having a baby . . . I think that’s when it might break for real.

And no number of gnomes can fix that.

Julia

When my affair with Daniel started, I didn’t think about him leaving Claire and Mackenzie. I wanted him for my own, I wanted him to be with me, I wanted to be able to go out in public and introduce him as my boyfriend and stop in the road and kiss him. I wanted not to have to sneak around and tell lies and have furtive sex at strange times in uncomfortable places. But in all that wanting, I somehow didn’t think that Daniel would have to leave Claire and Mackenzie. That they would be left. And that I would be the baddie in that story.

That I am the baddie in that story.

In the beginning, I worked hard to keep up the front of my friendship with Claire. Because if I was friends with Claire, there was nothing suspicious about me hanging around. And I still loved being friends with Claire. I still loved Claire. I just didn’t love her as much as I loved Daniel. So I still went to pottery. And I still came to visit and I ate meals at their family table. And it was awful and wonderful and secret and sexy and I felt constantly alive. I would sit across from Daniel, knowing that just hours before he had been inside me, and now he was sitting with his family, and I would get so turned on it was difficult not to pull him into the bathroom and have my way with him right there with Claire and Mackenzie sitting outside.

But Daniel hated it. He hated me being in his home and he was consumed with guilt, and across the table his eyes were dark and held none of the lust I felt certain must be spilling out of me, staining the table.

Things had to come to a head, and they did.

Daniel and I had met at lunch-time. We’d rented a room – a seedy hotel just off the highway that lets you pay by the hour – and we’d pretended that I was a hooker he’d picked up, and I was wearing cheap sex shop underwear under my work clothes and when he unbuttoned my shirt and saw it, he looked at me like he couldn’t believe I was for real,