Best of Friends Read Online Free PDF

Jess snapped. “Her grandmother’s birthday is tonight. I don’t know anyone else around this dump of a town.”
    Abby shut the fridge wearily. She didn’t need reminding. The guilt was enough to give her sleepless nights.
    She sighed. Although she adored their new home, the fact that it made Jess feel isolated was definitely threatening their relationship. Or maybe it was just the teenager thing.
     
    Abby left money on the worktop for a pizza and went upstairs to get ready. It was half-past six, they were due out at seven and there was no sign of her husband. Not that Abby was surprised by this. After nearly seventeen years of marriage, she knew that Tom had all the sense of urgency of an inhabitant of a desert island. Which probably made them a good match, she knew. She was fiery and wound up like a spring, while Tom was possessed of endless, monastic calm.
    “You shouldn’t get so hyper about everything,” was his standard phrase whenever Abby got in a flap about being late. Naturally, his saying this just made Abby even more hyper and irritated into the bargain. Could he not realise how annoying he was?
    It was a relief to retreat to their room to get ready. It was a pretty nice bedroom, and one of the first she’d redecorated when they’d moved in. Floor-to-ceiling wardrobes (“essential for hiding clutter,” as Abby herself said) and a bed with storage underneath. Everything was rich cream and cool apple green, and there wasn’t so much as an out-of-place magazine to ruin the aura of classic calmness. It was hell to keep it like that. As Abby professionally advocated the use of trios of decorative storage boxes to hide everyone else’s clutter, she felt she had to use them herself, but she could never remember which held what. She always ended up opening the wrong one for her jewellery and finding make-up instead. And she could never lay hands on a pen. It might be heresy to think so, but she almost missed the jam jar full of wonky biros that used to sit on her dressing table in the old house, before she’d learned how to declutter.
    Abby’s cupboards were where it had all started, really. Not her wardrobe—recently featured in Style magazine—or her bathroom—a shrine to Zen-like bathing that had cost a fortune to install—but her kitchen cupboards, where a simple rotation system of putting new tins and jars to the back meant that nothing ever had to be thrown out because it was months past the sell-by date. The list on the cork board also helped. Any item taken from the fridge, larder or cupboard was listed in the handy notebook with the pen attached, so that when Abby did her once-a-month stocking-up shop, she knew exactly what was needed.
    A naturally tidy person, she’d hit upon the idea of offering her tidy mind to others in an attempt to help people organise their lives. Jess had just turned ten and Abby found she had time on her hands.
    Originally, she’d started sorting out wardrobes: helping women with scores of identical black clothes prioritise and bin anything they hadn’t worn for years. It had been a cottage industry, really—a few mornings a week in which she’d given her clients the courage to throw out much loved but threadbare garments and sell on those barely worn. She wasn’t a stylist, she told customers, just a de-junking merchant.
    “You can buy new clothes yourself afterwards—I’m just helping you let go of the old stuff.”
    The breakthrough had come after two years of this when a customer had sighed at the pristine state of Abby’s kitchen cupboards and said she wished she was as organised.
    Abby offered to write down her system.
    “No, do it for me,” begged the woman.
    Soon Abby was organising clutter-free systems for home offices and sorting out houses stuffed with possessions where nobody could find anything anymore. She was ruthless with old cards, newspaper clippings and letters from old flames, but gentle with the person reluctantly throwing out all their