Someone Like You Read Online Free PDF Page B

thought miserably, tucking her self-help book into her small handbag.
    She hadn’t planned to bring Positive For Life - Your Guide To Increasing Your Self-Esteem by Dr Barbra Rose with her. She must have been off her rocker. On this trip, she wouldn’t simply need the book - she’d need Dr Rose herself, complete with a case packed with the most cutting edge pharmacology to keep her father in a coma. Now that would be the holiday of a lifetime.
    Satisfied that her daughter was now suitably dressed and wouldn’t disgrace the family en route to the pleasures of the Nile, AnneMarie O’Brien happily kept up her monologue all the way to the airport: ‘You’ll never guess who I met this morning,’ she said cosily, with not the slightest intention of drawing breath long enough for either Emma or her father to guess. ‘Mrs Page. Lord Almighty, if you could have seen the get up she was wearing. Jeans. At her age! I wouldn’t have bothered to talk to her at all, but she was beside the toothpaste and I wanted an extra tube in case I can’t get any when we’re away. I can’t imagine the Egyptians will be too keen on the hygiene products,’ she added.
    Squashed in the back seat of the Opel with the luggage threatening to fall on top of her every time they went round a corner, Emma closed her eyes wearily. Was there any point in explaining that the Egyptians lived in a sophisticated, highly civilized society, built the pyramids and studied astronomy when the O’Brien ancestors were still banging rocks together and trying to figure out how to make things with sharp stones?
    ‘… If you’d heard her going on about that Antoinette of hers, well.’ Mrs O’Brien’s voice registered the fiercest of disapproval. ‘Scandalous, that’s what it is. Living with that man with two children and not a ring on her finger. Does she not think that those little children deserve the sanctity of marriage instead of being …’ her voice sank to a whisper, ‘illegitimate!’
    illegitimacy doesn’t exist any more.’ Emma had to say something. Antoinette was a friend of hers.
    it’s all very well for you to say that,’ her mother said, ‘but it’s not right or proper. It’s a mockery of the Church and the ceremonies. That girl is making a rod for her own back, mark my words. That man’ll up and leave her. She should have got married like normal people do.’
    ‘He’s separated, Mum. He can’t get married until hi divorce comes through.’
    ‘That’s more of it, Emma. I can’t understand young people today. Does the catechism mean nothing to them: At least your father and I never had any problems like that with you. I told Mrs Page you and Peter were so settled and happy, that Peter is Assistant Sales Director at Devine’s Paper Company and that you’re Special Projects Coordinator.’ Pleasure at remembering a most enjoyable bit of boasting made Mrs O’Brien smile.
    ‘He’s one of the assistant sales directors, Mum,’ Emma said in vexation. ‘There are six of them, you know.’
    ‘I didn’t say anything wrong,’ her mother insisted, tart at being corrected. ‘And you are Special Projects Coordinator.
    We are so proud of our little girl, aren’t we, Jimmy?’
    Her father never took his eyes off the road where he was busily making it a dangerous morning for cyclists. ‘We are,’ he said absently. ‘Very proud. Of both of you. I always knew our Kirsten would do well,’ he said happily. ‘Chip off the old block there.’
    Emma smiled weakly and made a mental note to phone Antoinette Page when she got home to apologize for her mother’s insensitive remarks, which would no doubt have filtered through by then. If AnneMarie O’Brien continued boasting about Peter and Emma’s brilliant careers as if they were rocket scientists with matching Porsches and millions in the bank, they wouldn’t have a friend left. Pete worked as a salesman in an office-supply company and her job involved huge amounts of exhausting work