Till Divorce Do Us Part (eBook)

Barb McIntyre (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-9192-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Three couples. Three divorces. Six new lives. Viola's husband has filed for a divorce because he has finally accepted the fact that his need for travel and adventure is stronger than his love for her. Jason and Annabelle, his next-door neighbour, have filed their divorce applications because they found out that their spouses were having an affair. While recovering from the shock and adjusting to their new lives, everyone involved will make surprising discoveries about themselves, as well as about the people they loved and thought they knew. The Palais de Justice, or the Courthouse if you're one of the five percent of Quebecers who speak only English, is located in the historic district of Old Montreal. This modern, black metal, granite, and glass high-rise is where people go to settle issues with neighbours, where victims of domestic violence can get help, where a judge and jury will decide whether you are guilty or innocent, where marriages begin with joy and love, and where they often end with sorrow and anger.

Textauszug

CHAPTER THREE

 

As Jodi stripped the bed and put the sheets and the clothes she’d been wearing before Aiden arrived into the washer, she couldn’t help remembering the one other time she and Aiden had had sex in her house. The difference was that there was no need to hurry the cleanup this time. Jason’s silver Audi was not going to pull into the driveway anytime soon. He’d called her from his Paris hotel room just before he left for dinner. He was an ocean away.

Jodi had never forgotten the feeling of panic she’d felt that first time. She still remembered the fastest shower of her life, feeling the blast of cold water because she hadn’t had time to wait for it to warm up. She remembered quickly erasing all traces of Aiden from her body while frantically going over her steps of the last few minutes, reassuring herself that Aiden hadn’t left anything in Jason’s office and that she’d erased all traces of them in the guest room. Even though Jason never went into that room. Even though she knew he’d be distracted and in a great hurry to get to his office.

Jodi had been working from her home office that day. The small corner room at the back of the house was all that had been left of the main floor den after the previous owners had doubled the size of the kitchen and turned the powder room into a full-sized bathroom. They’d used the room for storage, but Jodi knew it would be her room as soon as she saw it. It felt comfortable. It was light and airy for such a small room. But mostly, it reminded her of her grandmother’s sewing room.

Jodi had spent hours sitting on the old linoleum floor, filling in her colouring books or dressing and undressing her dolls while watching her grandmother guide material through the ancient, noisy Singer sewing machine. When her grandmother wasn’t at the machine, she’d rock back and forth on her armless rocking chair and mend torn clothing or knit beautiful sweaters. Sometimes the sweaters were for one of Jodi’s dolls.

The room had been her sanity when Pete was a baby and ideally suited to her slowly growing business once he started going to school. The large oak dressing table she’d found at a yard sale when she was sixteen was still in use. Jodi had removed the cracked mirror, spent a good part of one summer sanding, staining, and polishing it, and had used it as a desk ever since. The two deep drawers on either side, that had held her books and papers throughout high school and university, now held the ledgers and bits and pieces of paperwork she picked up from her client’s offices, in varying states of organization, and returned as meticulously organized as her personal files and ledgers. The shiny desktop was always bare except for her iPhone, her laptop, the file she was currently working on, and a Bluetooth speaker. She brought her laptop upstairs and used the state-of-the-art printer in Jason’s second-floor office when she needed paper copies of her work. The two offices and the guest bedroom, which was used only a few times a year, were the only rooms in the house that were always meticulously neat.

Jason thought the room was too small for the big desk, along with the old brushed nickel floor lamp, with the slightly cracked glass table that held the coffee cup Jodi almost never finished, and the past-its-prime, comfortable recliner, where she often sat to read and think. He thought the room needed smaller, modern furniture. But Jodi thought it was perfect.

Jodi had worked in the head office of a large chain store every summer after high school, gradually taking on more and more complicated bookkeeping tasks. She graduated from university with a minor in literature and a major in mathematics and statistics and found a well-paying job as a data analyst for a firm of chartered accountants. She found that she didn’t enjoy the work or the people she worked with and was relieved to have an excuse to quit when Pete was born. She and Jason had agreed that she’d be a full-time mother until Pete started school.

Her business actually began when Pete was three, but Jodi saw taking over her mother’s hairdresser’s books as a favour to her mother. She bought the latest version of bookkeeping software and was thrilled to bring the financial side of the woman’s business out of the dark ages. The woman’s praise brought other clients, and they brought even more clients. By the time Pete started high school, Jodi’s workload had increased to twenty-five, very enjoyable and profitable, hours a week. And that was enough. It gave her time for all the other things she wanted to do, and it wasn’t as if they needed the money.

Her clients included a number of hairdressers, dance teachers, a fitness instructor, a few small, family-operated convenience stores, two small bake shops, and a used book store. She loved the interaction with her clients when she picked up the necessary paperwork. She enjoyed chatting with the ones who were organized, but she loved listening to the ones who handed her plastic bags of unsorted receipts and invoices even more. She loved putting things in order. She loved it when everything was neatly arranged and when the numbers balanced, especially when the numbers balanced. And she loved her alone time in the little room, managing the accounts, as well as dealing with inventory, payroll, and suppliers while instrumental piano and guitar mixes played softly in the background. She found the music calming and had given up trying to understand why she found those sounds completely unacceptable anywhere outside of that room.

Jodi’s parents had been surprised not only by Jodi’s interest in, and enjoyment of, anything to do with numbers but by her ability to focus on that one topic for such long periods of time. With anything else, she was easily distracted, often starting several projects at the same time, getting bogged down in unnecessary details, and constantly going off on unrelated tangents. But they did have to admit that, although it took her much longer than it should, she always finished what she started and finished it well.

It had been raining on and off all day, and Jodi had just finished the accounts for a bake shop called La Cuisine de Mémère. The outside sign obeyed Quebec’s language laws. The French version at the top was more than twice as big as the English version at the bottom. But Susan Gault, the owner, and her staff wore aprons with only the English version of the name, Grandma’s Kitchen, embroidered, along with miniature cakes and pies, around the edges. Susan was proud of her aprons. She was fairly confident that the language police would never look that closely, and she enjoyed her little rebellion.

She told Jodi that the owner of the nail salon across the street had had to not only put up a new sign but pay a five hundred dollar fine because the French words on her sign were only seventy-five percent bigger than the English words instead of the required one hundred percent. Susan had watched the surly, overweight man climb up a few steps of his stepladder and carefully measure several of the letters before climbing back down. She’d also watched Marie, the owner of the salon, give him the finger as he walked back to his car. The best part of the story, Jodi thought, was that Marie was what the Quebecois call pure laine, meaning pure wool, sometimes translated as dyed-in-the-wool, and the English equivalent of old stock. In other words, Marie’s ancestry was exclusively French-Canadian. Marie had had had the sign printed in both languages before the size differences became law because the salon was in a predominantly English area.

Jodi both liked and admired Susan, who had the energy, speed, and agility of a woman half her age. Jodi still found it hard to believe that this mother of four, and grandmother of nine, who worked ten hours a day, six days a week, was twenty-four years older than she was. The business was doing well, and Susan was one of her more organized clients. The job hadn’t taken much effort at all.

Jodi was sending the completed forms to Jason’s printer when her phone rang.

“You ‘are’ home,” Aiden said with obvious relief. “I was afraid you’d be out. Listen. I’m in a bind. My printer just decided to pack it in. And Jason would be happy to hear me use the expression correctly because the damn thing did die. It gurgled, it thumped, and it spat out the paper before going silent. Anyway, I need to print out this chapter so I can proofread it. And I need to do it today. Any chance I could use Jason’s printer?”

Jodi smiled. She remembered the conversation during the New Year’s Eve party Aiden and Annabelle had hosted. They’d all tried to outdo each other by explaining the meanings of various common expressions. Aiden started it by explaining that people saying “break a leg” to actors and musicians before they go on stage to perform reflected a theatrical superstition in which wishing a person “good luck” is considered bad luck.

She’d also found out that “easy as pie” referred to the eating of the pie, not to the making of it, that when somebody called Josephus banned alcohol from Navy vessels, soldiers had to drink coffee and grudgingly came up with the term “Cup A Joe,” and that when fairground stalls used to give out cigars as prizes and people who lost heard the expression, “close, but no cigar.”

Jason had just finished explaining the expression, “pack it in,” when Annabelle unmuted the TV, and they all counted down with the partiers in Times Square. He’d told them that the expression had initially meant stopping work, as in “Let’s pack it in for the day,” but that during World War 1, it had become military...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 20.2.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Partnerschaft / Sexualität
• ISBN-10: 1-6678-9192-8 / 1667891928
• ISBN-13: 978-1-6678-9192-7 / 9781667891927