Read Online Two Fridays in April by Roisin Meaney - Free Book Online

a mutual aversion to sudoku. Before they were summoned by George’s uncle for the meal, they’d exchanged phone numbers and promised to keep in touch. And they had. They do.
    He never moved to Canada. He trained as a teacher in Ireland and got a job here, in the school where he still teaches. He travels to Canada during the holidays, and his mother has been back to Ireland a couple of times. From what Daphne can gather, there’s no communication between her and Alex. A bitter split, it would seem.
    In the almost ten years they’ve known one another, George has never mentioned a girlfriend; she wonders if he’s ever had one. It’s none of her business, but it doesn’t stop her wondering. Maybe he’s gay, although she never got that sense from him. She’d love him to find someone, sad to think of him on his own. At least she’d had Finn, even if it was only for a short while.
    She watches a sparrow pecking at something in the grass. Four weeks yesterday to her own birthday, the second last day of April. Her thirty-sixth coming up; she’s still young. Finn, if he’d lived, would have been turning fifty-three in July. The age difference hadn’t mattered a damn to either of them.
    He’d had a life before he met her. At thirty-eight he married Susan; they’d spent just four years as man and wife. Susan died in her early forties, a fortnight after stepping on a rusty nail that sent its poison zinging through her bloodstream. Six years after that, a driver opened a car door and Finn Darling cycled straight into it.
    It used to frighten Daphne, how accidental their meeting had been. What if she’d opened the door a few seconds earlier or later, or glanced in her wing mirror and spotted him in time to prevent the calamity, or simply parked further along the road? What if illness, or a dental appointment, had prevented her going to work that morning, or being on that street at that particular time? All the variables that might have stopped them coming into contact.
    But maybe there
was
such a thing as destiny; maybe the Fates would have conspired to bring them together in some other way if that encounter hadn’t happened. She might have twisted an ankle one day as she walked past his bicycle shop; they might have chosen neighbouring seats on a train, or stood next to one another in a checkout queue at the supermarket, or reached for the same magazine at the newsagent’s.
    She used to feel sorry for Susan. She used to think
They only had four years together; we’ll have so much more
. But in the end Susan had had the longer marriage, and Susan had been spared the heartache of losing him.
    They lie together now in the cemetery, he and Susan. Their mortal remains rest side by side in the plot Finn had bought when she’d died. It is a reality that Daphne must live with.
    Her phone gives three shrill beeps. She takes it from her bagagain.
Una
, it says. She opens the text message.
Sorry, having dinner at Ciaras, her dad will drive me home, hope thats OK, c u later
.
    She reads the words, re-reads them. Not coming home, not putting in an appearance on her birthday? Could she have forgotten that Mo is due, that they’re making a special effort? It doesn’t seem possible.
    She scans the short message for a third time. Of course Una hasn’t forgotten, she’s simply avoiding it. She’s pretending it’s not happening. So much for Daphne cooking her favourite dinner, so much for the pricey cake that wasn’t even collected.
    Mo will undoubtedly be put out when she arrives, but there’s not a lot Daphne can do about that.
    She should try, though. She presses the call button and listens to Una’s phone ringing, and waits until the voicemail recording clicks on:
Sorry I missed you
,
please leave a message
.
    She hangs up, half relieved. What could she say, after all, that Una would want to hear? Better, maybe, that the call went unanswered. Better to let her put this first painful birthday behind her, and hope she’s