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

spend her life with? Over the years that followed – those dreadful teenage years when being without a mother led me to dark places I no longer allow myself to remember – I painted a picture of her in my mind, a picture of a free spirit, wild and beautiful, too wild in the end for marriage and children and suburbia, a woman who could not be tamed. But they were the romantic musings of a teenager, for I don’t know why she went at all in truth, not really.

I have only one photograph of my mother, Alice, on her wedding day in the late 70s, Dad dapper in white trousers and a navy blazer, Mum in flowing lace with flowers in her hair. In a rare fit of rage – Dad never gets angry – he threw the rest of the photos, every album, every framed picture, on a bonfire a few months after she went, once it became clear she was gone for good, that it wasn’t just a temporary thing, something that could be fixed. But I squirrelled the wedding photo away, slipping it under my mattress. I would take it out to look at, to weep over, when I was alone in my room at night, and run my finger across her face, whispering: ‘Please come home, Mummy. Please, please come home,’ over and over and over again.

She didn’t of course. The emptiness was so … so big, at first. It got smaller over time, slowly shrank away over the years until I could barely feel it anymore, but now and again, even decades later and usually when I’m least expecting it, it returns, just briefly. That void, that pain.

‘What’re you doing tonight, love? Hitting the town?’

Dad was speaking to me again and I dragged my attention back to him, to my father, the one person who’s always been there for me. I smiled.

‘Girls’ night in,’ I said. ‘Jacob’s taking the kids and Brenda and Barbara are coming round. An Indian probably, and a couple of bottles of wine. That will do nicely.’

‘Sounds good. Enjoy, love. You deserve it.’

Now, back in my office, I think again of Nadia, the poor homeless woman, then I sit down at my desk and try to count my blessings. My dad is safe and happy and looked after, the kids are doing well, I have a secure job that I love, great friends and colleagues. I’m even on amicable terms with my ex. There’s nothing to worry about. I tap my keyboard to wake up my computer and get back to work, but as the afternoon drags on one niggly, persistent thought repeatedly wriggles its way to the forefront of my brain.

Everything might be fine now. But that’s only because nobody knows what happened back then. What if that changed?

That would be the end of everything, wouldn’t it?

Chapter 4

‘Right, got everything? I’m not going to get a call in two hours’ time asking me to drive over with your nightie or your book or something else crucially important?’

I poke Eloise gently in the tummy and she squirms and slaps my hand away.

‘Get off, Mum! No, I haven’t forgotten anything this time. Check if you don’t believe me.’

She points at her little rose-gold weekend case which is still open on the hall floor, and I shake my head.

‘Nope, I believe you. Thousands of mums wouldn’t, however.’

I grin at her and she rolls her eyes, then grins back and kneels down to zip up the case. I watch her, my heart twisting a little as it always does when she and Finley have to leave me. She’s growing up so quickly, my little girl, fine, dark-brown hair swishing around her slender shoulders, long lashes like her dad’s. She’s only ten, not quite at the stage where she wants to start putting make-up on her smooth olive skin or punching holes in her soft earlobes, but I know those days are getting closer and I dread them. Finley, who’s now trudging down the stairs, dragging his own bag behind him – THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! – is as like me in appearance as Eloise is like her father: blonder, paler, rounder of face.

‘OK you two, let’s get out of here. Give your mother some peace.’

Jacob is standing in the doorway and I drag my gaze from my children – our children – and I smile at him. Over his shoulder, I can see Crystal sitting in the front seat of his blue Land Rover which is parked in the driveway, long black hair pulled into a neat knot on top of her head. She’s still in her business suit – he must have picked her up from work – and she’s holding her phone to her ear, nodding, her face solemn. I meet her eye, raise a hand, and she waves back, flashing her perfect white teeth. We’re OK now, Jacob and Crystal and I. Not close friends, but amicable, cordial, all three of us putting Finley and Eloise’s happiness first. It took a while, but it’s as good as it can be under the circumstances.

It was all so clichéd really: Jacob and I started dating at university, got engaged the day we graduated, and were married a couple of years later, both of us just twenty-four. Too young. We did, at least, wait a while before we had children, building our careers, buying a house. I had Eloise when I was thirty, Jacob’s landscape gardening business finally making enough money for me to take extended maternity leave, and Finley was born three years later. On his fifth birthday, as we tried to restore order to the chaos our son and sixteen over-excited classmates had wrought on our living room, as I picked party popper streamers off the pot plants and wiped jammy fingerprints from the cushions, Jacob told me he’d been having an affair with one of his clients and was leaving me.

Our marriage was over, just like that. My happy