After the One, Cass Lester [top romance novels .txt] 📗

‘Well?’ prompted Tara, ‘Any ideas?’

Charley forced herself back to the present. ‘No, not really.’ Then, catching the exasperated look on her mate’s face, she went on, ‘Sorry, I’ve just had a really rubbish day.’ She took a breath before adding, ‘It’s Josh’s birthday.’

Tara’s face softened, her eyes flooding with empathy as she leant over to embrace Charley. ‘Oh, my lovely, why didn’t you say?’

Charley let herself sink into the comfort of Tara’s hug, trying hard not to fall apart completely.

Birthdays. They both knew about birthdays, those agonising reminders that someone was missing, when opening a pile of cards which carelessly, thoughtlessly, wished you a ‘Happy Birthday’ was like rubbing salt into an open wound. As if you could have a happy day. As if everything was normal.

Bereavement had forged Tara and Charley’s friendship. A few months after Josh’s death, Tara’s mum had also died, throwing the two friends into a closeness that was intensified by a barrier that somehow divided them from the rest of their friendship group. None of their other friends had suffered loss and they were unable to understand what Tara and Charley were going through. They were all too young to have lost a partner or a sibling or even a parent, but then so were Charley and Tara. Way too young.

Tara’s mum, Kim, had died of breast cancer. ‘After a bloody hard battle and an even harder life,’ as Tara put it. Raising her daughter single-handed on a low income eked out by benefits had worn Kim down. She’d been easy pickings for cancer and was only fifty-six when she died. Everyone had given Tara hugs and sympathy cards and said how sorry they were… what a dreadful loss it must be… and to let them know if there was anything they could do to help. But only Charley had given practical help rather than platitudes: filling Tara’s freezer with meals, picking little Monnie up from school, running the hoover round and doing the laundry. It was Charley who’d helped arrange the funeral, the flowers and the wake, and who’d helped Tara write the eulogy they were both too choked to read at the funeral, and it was Charley who, with her arm firmly around Tara’s waist, had helped her friend stumble across the grass to the soft mud by the newly dug grave, their heels sinking into the ground, so that Tara could throw a sunflower down onto her mum’s coffin. And afterwards, Charley, and only Charley, had known how to help Tara cope with the juggernaut of loss bearing down on her, and the harrowing, hollowing pain of the wound it left behind. Not just for the first few weeks, but in the months afterwards when people either assumed you’d be over it or seemed to have forgotten about it altogether.

There were two kinds of people, Charley had learned: the bereaved, who understood what you were going through, and the rest – the ones who were emotionally naive about grief, who couldn’t understand, who weren’t in the fellowship of the bereaved.

Lucky them.

What you really want, when you’ve got to grovel around in the gutter looking at the underbelly of your car to see if the exhaust is actually going to fall off before you can make it to the garage, is a nice dry day. So, naturally, it was drizzling when Charley headed out into the street the next morning in a tatty old tracksuit to check it out. Oh, deep joy, she thought, zipping up her top against the damp. She knelt on the pavement, her trackies instantly soaking through at the knees, and gave the exhaust pipe a tentative nudge. She was satisfied, if not exactly thrilled, when a clunking rattle confirmed her diagnosis was correct. Peering underneath, the exhaust didn’t look like it was about to part company from the car, well, not immediately, and Charley decided she could risk driving to the garage. She wasn’t going to waste money calling out a pick-up truck if she didn’t have to.

The basic car mechanic course wasn’t a total waste of time then, she told herself wryly, although she was probably the only woman who’d done the course to think so. But then the others, mostly single women or divorcees, had signed up hoping to ‘meet someone’. Charley had only enrolled to fill one of her endless, empty evenings following Josh’s death, along with a dozen other evening classes – DIY, Fusion Cookery, Picture Framing, Drawing for All, Knitting, Beginners’ Spanish… They’d filled her diary and the hours, but the evenings were still empty, just like the flat, when she got home. Still, the course had paid off today.

Going inside to grab a quick shower and some dry clothes before heading to the garage, Charley was halfway down the outside steps to her flat when she heard the landline ringing indoors.

‘Bugger!’ She leapt down the last few stairs, burst through the front door, charged into the living room and breathlessly snatched up the phone.

‘Hello?’ she gasped.

‘Sorry, darling. Have I called at a bad time?’ It was her mother-in-law.

‘Pam, hi! No, not at all.’ Charley sank cheerfully onto the sofa, then realising her soaking clothes would make it damp, perched on the coffee table instead. A chat with Pam was always a welcome distraction.

‘I’m popping into Bristol this morning and wondered if you might like to meet up for a coffee?’

Ordinarily, Charley would have happily gone, but not today. If she went she’d inevitably have to tell Pam about her redundancy, and for some reason she didn’t feel ready to do that, not yet. So she lied. ‘I can’t do today, sorry! In fact, I’m busy all weekend.’

‘Never mind. Another time, darling.’

‘Yes! Absolutely!’

Putting the phone down Charley was instantly flooded with guilt and confusion. Why had she felt compelled to lie to Pam? To Pam of all people? She told herself it was because she hadn’t wanted to worry her. I’ll tell her when