Read Online Spin Cycle by Sue Margolis - Free Book Online

the wedding invitation catalog from the passenger seat. Her mother had forgotten to take it home after she and Jack stayed the night and had rung in a panic an hour ago, begging Rachel to drop it round. The printer had been on the phone, pointing out that she’d promised to return it first thing Monday morning and that it was now Thursday. If he didn’t have it back by the following morning, he said he would charge them for it.
    Rachel protested that it was already past six and that she had to help Sam with his homework, get him bathed and into bed.
    “I mean, why can’t Dad come and collect it?” There was no point in asking her mother to drive over. Although Faye had passed her test years ago, she’d only driven a couple of times since, on account of having developed a morbid fear of highway overpasses.
    “He’s constipated.”
    “Oh right. So he won’t have to stop on the way then, will he?”
    “Rachel, stop being so obtuse. He’s too frightened to go far from the toilet in case the floodgates suddenly open and he gets caught short.”
    In the end, Rachel caved in and Shelley agreed to keep an eye on Sam.
    * * * * *
    Rachel’s father opened the door, the cordless clamped to his ear.
    “They’ve put me on hold,” he whispered to Rachel, giving her a peck on the cheek and motioning her to come in.
    “Who has?” she asked, stepping into the hall.
    “The Royal Opera House. I thought I’d take your mother this weekend. It’s a surprise. She can’t hear me. She’s upstairs Hoovering.”
    Rachel could hear a distant hum of vacuum cleaner.
    “But Dad, you hate opera.”
    “Yeah, I know,” he shrugged. “But your mother loves it and she hasn’t been in ages. So I thought—” He broke off and began making stabbing motions at the phone, signaling to Rachel that the person he’d been speaking to had returned. “Oh right, you’ve got two in the dress circle for Saturday. Wonderful. Look, miss, I’m not a great opera buff. In fact, just between you and me, I think opera’s a load of high-pitched squawking. The only way I can tolerate it is if there are a few decent tunes I recognize. You know, like the ‘Cancan’ in
Orpheus in the Underworld
. Now then, this
Götterdämmerung
—I’m not familiar with it. Could you hum a few bars, maybe?”
    Rachel felt herself go crimson with embarrassment.
    “You can’t. OK,” Jack went on, “not to worry. Well, perhaps there’s a bit that’s been used in a TV commercial that I might recognize. You know, like that bit of Elgar they used in the Hovis ad.”
    As he started to hum loudly and tunelessly into the phone, Rachel escaped to the kitchen and put the kettle on.
    While she waited for it to boil and Jack continued his increasingly ridiculous conversation with the Opera House woman, she sat at the kitchen table thumbing through the wedding invitation catalog. It wasn’t the first time she’d done so in the last couple of days. There had been at least three occasions when she’d found herself opening the catalog with its padded leatherette cover, embossed with silver wedding bells, and having secret fantasies about white weddings.
    Before her first wedding, Rachel and Joe, being old-fashioned, unreconstructed leftie students at the time, had refused to even consider a huge ostentatious Jewish wedding on the grounds that it was a shameful waste of money. On top of that, Rachel knew full well her mother would hijack the entire event and that it would all end in lavender meringue bridesmaids’ dresses and tears.
    As a result, the couple decided on a secret wedding. Without telling either set of parents, they married in a register office late one sodden afternoon in November and spent the evening getting drunk in the pub with a bunch of their university mates. When Faye found out she wept for a week. Each night she would lie in bed with Jack demanding to know how her only child could have done it to her.
    “What sort of a daughter gets married and