The Happy Family by Jackie Kabler (electric book reader txt) 📕

kitchen island, drinking wine, polishing off the last of the cheese and crackers, and laughing until our stomachs ached.

As I’ve said before, it is maybe a little odd that all of my closest friends are twenty years older than me, but it’s just the way it is. I do have younger friends, of course: old uni friends, although we’ve largely lost touch these days as a result of careers and families scattering us across the UK and indeed the world; there are ‘mum’ friends, parents of Eloise and Finley’s schoolmates; and ‘couple’ friends Jacob and I made when we were together. But they’re all … more acquaintances, I suppose. We get together for coffee, discuss sleepovers and school events, have nights at the cinema or the odd dinner, but I’ve never really felt that I can talk to them, not about the things that really matter. I suppose that for years I had Jacob for all that – my teenage sweetheart, my husband, my best friend. I didn’t need anyone else. When my marriage fell apart, it was Ruth and Deborah at work who saved me, who took me under their motherly wings, and helped me put my life back together. They’re both married: Ruth is on her second marriage after her first husband died young, and Deborah, ‘a late bloomer’, in her own words, didn’t meet her soulmate until she was forty-five. She doesn’t have kids; Ruth has one son, now in his thirties and living in Canada. The three of us were already friends – they’d both joined the practice not long after I did and we’d hit it off straight away – but during those long, sad months they almost took on the role of surrogate mums too, doling out hugs and advice (and cake and wine, of course, on occasion) with unending patience and kindness.

Brenda and Barbara, who only knew me after the worst was over, have been equally kind, both more than happy to pop round and watch the kids at short notice if I need to go out, despite neither being mums themselves. Brenda, she confided once during a leisurely Sunday lunch last summer, was unable to conceive with her late husband, although I never got the impression that this was a great sadness in her life, rather something to be accepted and moved on from. Barbara, who’s had several long-term female partners but never married, simply shrugged when I asked her if she’d ever wanted to be a mum.

‘It was never a priority for me, no. And it all seemed so complicated, you know, with two women? I mean, I know nowadays there are lots of options, but you know … I’m fine with it,’ she smiled.

‘How’s Robin these days?’ asks Ruth now. ‘No more … odd incidents?’

‘She’s great,’ I say. ‘No, nothing odd. I don’t know, I probably read too much into that, you know? She’s invaluable, to be honest. Can’t imagine what I’d do if she ever left.’

‘Good. Well, let’s hope she won’t then,’ says Ruth. ‘Right, shall we head back down? I need coffee.’

We stand up and start the descent, following the winding path that will take us back down to where we’ve parked our cars. Ruth and Deborah start chatting about some work thing and I tune out, my mind drifting back to one of the ‘odd’ incidents Ruth mentioned. The first was on a Monday morning a few months after Robin started working for me. I’d got halfway to work when I realised I’d left some files at home – stuff I’d been working on over the weekend – so I’d rushed home again to pick them up. I pounded up the stairs to my bedroom, which doubles as a home office with a small desk fitting snugly into an alcove by the window. When I burst in, breathless, Robin, who was wearing headphones to listen to music as she cleaned, was standing at the desk. She had a sheaf of papers in her hands and was leafing through them. When I tapped her on the shoulder she jumped so violently and whirled round to face me so abruptly that I almost lost my footing, staggering backwards.

‘Beth! I … sorry, I was just tidying these … Is everything OK?’

She pulled the headphones from her ears and waved the papers vaguely at me, her cheeks glowing, then turned and put them back on the desk.

‘Sorry,’ she said again. ‘I … I wasn’t …’

‘It’s OK, Robin. Sorry to have sneaked up on you like that. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’ve just popped back to pick up some files. I forgot them and I need them today,’ I said.

‘Oh! Right, well … I’ll get out of your way. I’m pretty much done in here anyway,’ she said, and, picking up her duster and polish, she scuttled from the room.

I stared after her for a moment, wondering. Had she really just been tidying up the papers, or was she flicking through them as I’d thought when I first walked into the room? I picked the pages up and examined them. Nothing particularly interesting – a few bills, confirmation from the council that I’d paid my green waste bin subscription. And to be fair, if I were cleaning somebody’s house, I’d probably glance at papers left lying on a desk too. It’s human nature, isn’t it? She did have to move them to dust, after all. And so I’d let it go, forgotten about it. There’d been a couple of other things though, after that … similar incidents when I’d walked into a room to find her opening drawers she had no need to open, when I noticed that my passport was on a different shelf in my bedside cupboard, and that documents were out of order in my in-tray. I’d let those go too. Robin was a treasure too valuable to lose over a little bit of nosiness, curiosity, whatever you wanted to call it. I needed her.

Half an hour