Lessons in Laughing Out Loud Read Online Free PDF Page A

Willow was thinking or feeling with eerie accuracy. Willow didn’t seem to have quite the same prowess for sisterly intuition, although she could always feel Holly there, almost like hearing her heart beating in the back of her mind, and sometimes she would get a muffled sense of how Holly was feeling, as if another, mirrored presence was passing through a dream that wasn’t precisely her own. It wasn’t an exact science, though; it could never be predicted and it didn’t always come at the right time. “Ah, Dave,” she said, rather apologetically.
“What do you mean ‘Ah, Dave’? He’s gorgeous!”
Willow thought of Dave’s halfhearted kisses and her mechanical response to them.
“No, sorry. Not for me. And I am not the one for him, either.”
“Oh, Willow.” Holly sounded quite cross. “I had high hopes for Dave too.”
“Sorry, sis.” Willow paused by a display of Liberty-print-covered notebooks, picking one up to flick through the blank pages. Since she was a very young girl, there had always been something about the neatly bound, gilt-edged potential that comforted her. Other little girls had teddy bears or age-old scraps of material to cuddle up to. It was a blank notebook that Willow always kept under her pillow. The world’s most boring secret diary, Holly always said. But Willow knew—she knew what she would write in it if she could—she didn’t have to spoil the beautiful pure white pages with the stream of wordsthat so frequently threatened to break the dam of her firmly closed mind. Picking up a particularly lavish pink, purple and gold affair, she decided to add it to her purchases. She would put it carefully in her drawer full of empty notebooks.
“Well, anyway, I’ve got to go, you ungrateful wretch,” Holly said, her affectionate tone belying her words. “Jem seems to have taped Jo-Jo’s hair to the back of the table—but call me later to tell me about your big secret.”
“Okay, that had to be a guess, how did you know? I barely even know!” Willow said, as her sister hung up without a good-bye.
Willow caught her breath in surprise as the phone rang again and she saw Daniel Fayre’s name on her screen. Daniel, the one person, among the four she loved, whom she would not openly admit to loving.
“What now?” she asked as she took the call, studiously careful to be flippant and brusque, as always.
“Nice.” Daniel laughed. “Where’s the hello, where’s the how are you, Dan, what’s up, it’s been a few days. Did you get that assignment in Panama? None of that then?”
“Dan, you and I both know you only phone me when you want something, so what is it?”
“I want you!” Daniel teased her, without knowing how just by uttering those words, even in jest, he made Willow’s heart ache. Daniel Fayre, photographer, Willow’s former next-door neighbor back when she had been married. Originally from Fort Worth, Texas, he’d come to the UK in his twenties and, upon discovering that British women could never get enough of his accent, never went back and never lost his accent. Willow’d first gotten acquainted with him when she’d found him on the steps outside his ground-floor flat, staring bleakly at a smashed bottle of gin that had proved too weighty for the flimsy plastic bag it came in.
“Careful,” Willow said, watching him gingerly pick up the shards of glass. “You might hurt yourself.”
“I might kill myself,” he’d said, directing a heart-melting smile at her. “I had been planning to drink myself to death, but that was my last ten-pound note.” His American accent pronouncing those alien words had charmed her instantly, and taking pity on him, she went to retrieve her dustpan and brush, then invited him in for a glass of wine. When she told him her husband imported wine for a living, he declared on the spot that she was his new best friend, and somehow, that flippant remark had come true. When Willow was lost in the depths of divorce, Daniel had taken it