I Hope You Dance by Beth Moran Read Free Book Online Page B

have stomped on my heart and laughed about it.
    Mum sat down at the table, pushing out another chair with her foot to indicate I should join her.
    â€œRuth. You need a job. This is two and a half days a week, a fifteen-minute walk away. Vanessa schmoozes the customers. She’s looking for someone to sweep the back room and count the stock. You are a mathematical wizard. This is no pressure and as safe as you’re going to get. Why not try it until you find something better? It’ll be something to put on a CV. And a chance for a good reference. All I’m asking is that you try it.”
    â€œFine. I’ll give it a go. But you are not allowed to nag or moan at me if I can’t hack it.” I breathed out a long sigh at the thought of working for Vanessa Jacobs. “When do I start?”
    â€œYour interview is Tuesday at half-ten, so you’ve plenty of time to settle Maggie in at school first.”
    â€œInterview! I don’t even have the job? Mum, I cannot have a job interview with Vanessa Jacobs.”
    â€œOh, give over, Ruth. The interview is a mere formality. Vanessa Jacobs is not the sort of woman to be left trimming her grandmother’s toenails! Now, do you think a top without quite so many holes in would be more appropriate for the holiday club this afternoon?”
    The Oak Hill Centre grew out of the church my family had attended for over four decades. My parents had been among the founding members back in their twenties, when a bunch of hippy Christians got frustrated with the constraints of organized religionand decided to try something different. If the photographs from back then are anything to go by, “different” included replacing the organ with a rainbow-strapped guitar and tambourines, preachers wearing shorts with socks and sandals, and baptizing new members in the River Trent. Praise the Lord, and they certainly did, things had de-cheesed slightly over the years.
    I didn’t want to help out at the holiday club that afternoon. I was too tired, too weak, too depressed to smile and chat and sing happy-clappy songs in a room full of hyperactive children. I hadn’t been a regular at church since I left Southwell. As a young girl, I had believed in God. I just preferred exploring the wonders of his creation to singing about them.
    Then I got pregnant, which in 1998, in the older, middle-class congregation of Oak Hill, was still pretty scandalous for an unmarried teenager. Although the church members were amazing – they knitted baby clothes, sent over changing mats, baby baths, blankets and even a brand new pram – I felt their pity, and their dismay, real or imagined. At nineteen you haven’t yet realized that no adult has led a smooth, trouble-free life, with no mistakes or regrets. That pretty much everyone understands how easy it is to drink a few too many glasses of vodka at a party and do something stupid with a charming boy you hardly know.
    I felt exposed, embarrassed, ashamed. A lot of students get drunk and have sex with near-strangers at parties. Not a lot of them have their parents’ friends, their Sunday school teachers and half the town know this for a great big, round-bellied fact. I was still me, Ruth Henderson, but to them I must be Ruth: teenaged single mother, estranged from her dad, living in a bedsit with no money. Maths prodigy turned wasted opportunity, government statistic and source of much parental anguish.
    Many, many times I had imagined leaving Liverpool and coming home. I wanted to show my old friends, my family, and the women who had babysat me, prayed for me and given me thousands of toffees, that I had not become the cliché. I was a good mother, witha good man, living a great life, a successful one. I had never done this, because deep inside I didn’t believe it. Yet here I found myself walking up the steps into the Oak Hill Centre’s main hall.
    I was here for one reason: Maggie. She had decided to