The Secrets of Married Women Read Online Free

because northern men were bred to be stronger than anyone else, and he’s afraid someone is going to suggest she goes in a home. ‘Oh Dad!’ My work friends all send me sympathetic looks.
    ‘She’s still in her dressing gown. I couldn’t get her to get dressed this morning. Oh…’ his voice wobbles; he starts to sniffle.
    Hearing my dad cry makes a big lump rise up in my throat. ‘Dad, you know somebody’s going to find her and bring her home! Just like last time.’ Silksworth is small. You couldn’t run away if you wanted to. ‘But, I’m coming. I’ll be there as fast as I can.’ But it won’t be fast. Not in rush hour traffic. An hour probably, at least. ‘Hang on in there.’
    ‘I’m hanging,’ he says, pitifully.
    I ring off, throw my phone and cardigan into my bag. I’m forgetting something… I used to have a very understanding boss, until he dropped down dead before our very eyes about a month ago. But this new guy, Arnold Swinburn, is a different story altogether. He goes around like he’s got a large, splintery plank up his bottom, and he’s always watching me with eyeballs the size of small planets when he walks past my desk in his slip-on tan shoes with leather tassels that have all us girls giggling. I tap on his door. When I go in, he gives me that preparing-to-not-be-amused look over the top of his glasses, and I’ve not even said anything yet. ‘I’m afraid… I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to leave early. I have a family emergency.’
    ‘Another one?’ he says, as though I get them every day.
    I have worked here for five years and have an immaculate record of attendance, punctuality, efficiency. So this attitude does not sit well with me. ‘I’ll make the time up,’ I tell him.
    ‘You bet you will.’
    I feel like I’ve been called before the headmaster and am about to receive the strap. ‘You know, I don’t have children. If I did, I am sure there’d be all kinds of days when I’d have to skip out an hour from work or maybe not even make it in...’ I am talking to the top of his head. I put my best monotone voice on, my polite way of making it known that he needn’t think I’d put this job—any job, or any thing for that matter—before my parents’ well-being, so he really will have to sod off and deal with his disgruntlement, won’t he. ‘My mother is an old lady. She suffers from dementia. She ran away from the house and she won’t know where she is, or where she’s going. She probably won’t even know who she is, for that matter, if it’s a bad day for her. Then there are the days where she does remember, but she knows that something is not quite the same in her head, that there’s this hideous confusion, and there’s nothing she can do to make it go away.’ The top of his bald head has broken a fine sweat. ‘That’s what happens with this illness, and it could happen to any one of us.’ Including you . I chant a few more things silently in my mind that I wish I could say but can’t.
    ‘See you on Monday,’ he says.
    As I creep out of there, I feel his disapproving eyes bore into my back.
    Admittedly it didn’t help that I was late in this morning and I missed a Manager’s meeting because that hound Kiefer tried to take our neighbour’s bunny rabbit for a ride around our garden in his mouth. I had to streak around the lawn in my underwear trying to catch him, but he just thought we were playing a game. By the time he took my threats to kill him seriously and I got the bunny back in its hut and got dressed, I knew I didn’t have a rabbit in hell’s chance of being on time for the meeting. So it’s two nails in my coffin in one day. But using that same line to Arnie about my dog is only a puppy… he barely knows his own name…let’s face it, being a puppy could happen to any one of us doesn’t work quite the same.
    Of course because I’m in such a hurry to get through to Sunderland there has to be an accident on the Tyne bridge. As I