The Marriage by K.L. Slater (any book recommendations TXT) 📕

of Fraser sale last week. She always asked the cleaner to work an extra hour on Tuesdays, and the woman had done an excellent job. The heated ceramic tiles in the kitchen sparkled and looked clean enough to eat lunch off, but Jill thought she spied a smear and took a cloth to it before her friend arrived.

Bridget Wilson wasn’t like most of the other women around here, and she wasn’t like Jill herself, either. She didn’t appear to expect or want anything fancy and elaborate. But then Jill setting the table and cleaning the floor wasn’t really about Bridget. It was about trying to satisfy the almost constant niggle inside herself, wanting everything to be perfect. Which it invariably never was.

She suspected it came from having parents who fostered high expectations. Then she’d left home and married Robert, who had similar aspirations of striving for perfection in all things. But she’d lived enough life by now to know that almost nothing was perfect, no matter how hard you tried.

She stood at the kitchen island and watched Tom running around the garden excitedly in his little padded coat and mittens, waiting for Jesse to arrive. It was early March, but it had been a bleak winter and there had been snow on and off for what seemed like months.

After meeting at playgroup a year ago, the women had become firm friends. Bridget had had the opportunity to take up an evening cleaning job twice a week but had nobody to look after Jesse. Jill invited him to stay at their house. As Bridget didn’t have a car and didn’t finish work until eight, it made sense for Jesse to stop over on Wednesdays and Fridays.

‘She’s certainly fallen on her feet,’ Robert had grumbled. ‘You providing free overnight childcare.’

But Jill didn’t mind at all, and Tom loved it. She’d swapped his single bed for bunk beds painted to look like Thomas the Tank Engine, which both boys adored. They played so well together, hardly a cross word between the two of them.

Bridget repaid the favour and regularly took the boys to the park, and Tom would sometimes stay over at hers at the weekend. Jill worried about the area, about crime, but she’d learned to push that out of her mind. She trusted Bridget to look after Tom and that was what mattered.

In any case, with the extra income, Bridget was soon able to move and rent something nicer just a twenty-minute walk from Jill’s house. Unbeknown to Robert, Jill paid for the removals service as a housewarming present. She had a contact at the school and, although Bridget’s address didn’t fall into their catchment area, she put Bridget and her friend in touch and Jesse was able to get a place from the waiting list. Now, the two women saw even more of each other, meeting up for coffee, and Jill often popped over to Bridget’s for a chat.

Tom was changing from being a shy, clingy boy when other people were around to seeming completely comfortable when he was with Jesse. And more than that, Jill really liked Bridget. She liked her transparent manner, the way she never tried to impress anyone. She didn’t try to convey an image different to her reality. She seemed to be saying, ‘This is me, and if you don’t like it then that’s your lookout.’ Surrounded by neighbours who seemed obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses, Jill appreciated that.

She didn’t feel judged by Bridget like she did with a lot of the other women in the area, acquaintances she met at playgroup and coffee mornings. There was an expectation to look a certain way, do the right things – like volunteer for mind-numbing community events and the school fete, for instance, or host people you didn’t overly know for dinner because you wanted to show off your new kitchen, as neighbours down the street had done only last week. Jill had never been as concerned with the latest fashions and status symbols as most of the women around here were, and it set her apart.

Bridget was the first one to admit she was poor and living a life she hated. Yet Jill found it endearing she would often speak, with astonishing conviction, of her plans and ambitions for the future for both herself and Jesse.

She was a free spirit all right, and Jesse had that in him too, even at this young age. Jill saw it in his sense of adventure. Where Tom held back in new situations, Jesse would charge in head-first without a thought. More often than not, after a few moments of caution, Tom would follow his lead and end up enjoying himself.

Jill wondered if Tom liked the fact that Jesse seemed a little wild. Last time they were here, she had run out alarmed when she spotted Jesse chasing a terrified Tom around the garden armed with a big stick – a tree branch, it turned out to be. But when she got out there, Tom was laughing so hard he was unable to catch his breath, and before Jill reached the end of the garden, they’d swapped and he was doing the chasing.

Jesse was a little boisterous at times, for sure. But Jill felt sure he’d grow out of that in time. They always did.

Seventeen Bridget

October 2019

We lay there entwined after making love on waking up in our big new bed. I felt satiated, calm. For the first time since Jesse died, I felt truly loved.

‘I was thinking,’ I said tentatively. ‘About asking your parents around here for a meal next weekend. You know, to try and break the ice a bit.’

Tom sucked air in through his teeth. ‘I don’t know about that.’

‘But why?’ I turned on my side, hitched up onto an elbow and looked down at him. ‘The worst is over. You’ve told them the situation now and your mum has to accept we’re a couple.’

‘That may be so, but she’s taken it