The Last Anniversary by Liane Moriarty Read Free Book Online Page B

bad mood.’
    ‘That’s not relevant!’
    Grace begins to feel exhausted. Her mother doesn’t own a walkabout phone. The phone is kept on an antique table in the hallway, so you have to stand up with your shoulders back while you talk. No cosy, curled-up conversations in armchairs. She slides down to the floor with her back against the wall.
    ‘Look. If this is what Aunt Connie wanted…’
    ‘Sophie could only have met Aunt Connie twice at the most!’
    ‘Well, she obviously had an impact.’
    ‘Yes, what a conniving, manipulative witch!’
    ‘I thought she was your friend?’
    Veronika ignores that. ‘This morning I heard an ad on the radio for solicitors who actually specialise in this sort of thing. I’m thinking that we all contest the will.’
    Suddenly Grace is angry. ‘We haven’t even had Aunt Connie’s funeral yet! I don’t want anything to do with contesting the will. Aunt Connie was perfectly sane and had every right to leave her house to whoever she wanted.’
    Veronika’s voice bubbles up and over, relishing the opportunity to argue. ‘You have no sense of family, Grace! No sense of history!’
    ‘I’m hanging up. The baby’s crying.’
    ‘I don’t believe you. I can’t hear the baby. You’ve always avoided confrontation!’
    ‘And you’ve always sought it. I’m hanging up.’
    ‘Don’t you dare hang up on me! Face this conflict!’
    Grace hangs up. She lets her head drop forward onto her knees.
    There is a sharp, cross cry from upstairs. Grace looks at her watch, terrified that another hour has vanished without her. What if the baby has been crying and crying without her hearing?
    It’s fine. Only a few minutes have passed. The incident in the kitchen was an aberration.
    She gets slowly to her feet like an arthritic old woman. With her hand on the banister for support she walks up the stairs, hoping with each step that this time she’ll feel it. But when she walks into the baby’s room and picks up her screaming son, she feels nothing except intense boredom. A drab, dreary sense of nothing much at all.
    She changes his nappy and takes him into the bedroom and sits on the end of the bed, unbuttoning her shirt with one hand. The baby’s agitated mouth sucks at the air for her nipple. Finally she manages to get him to latch on and his eyes roll back in ecstasy while he sucks feverishly.
    Grace’s aunt, Margie, had mentioned yesterday that she didn’t know about any ‘Mozart effect’ but she had certainly sung to Thomas and Veronika when she was feeding them as babies. ‘It did seem to keep them focused on the job!’
    Dutifully, wearily, Grace begins to sing.
     
     
    In the afternoon, Grace puts Jake in his state-of-the-art stroller. It’s one of those ones you can jog behind, but she can’t imagine having the energy or desire to ever go for a run again. She and Callum had practised running around the shop with it. They’d made other shoppers laugh and there’d been a chummy community feeling about it. That sort of thing was always happening with Callum.
    Outside, it is cold and bright and still; the river is flat and hard.
    Grace looks worriedly at the cooling marble cake in her mother’s cake tin, sitting on top of the stroller. She had to throw it together in a frantic rush and she’s not even sure it’s cooked all the way through. It’s just her luck that it’s a group of older women doing the tour rather than school kids.
    Aunt Connie had told her about the group booking just a few days before she died.
    ‘Are you sure you can manage it?’ she’d asked. ‘I wouldn’t ask you, but Enigma, Rose and I are going to that recital at the opera house and Margie has her ridiculous Weight Watchers meeting. It’s like a new religion for her. She can’t miss one session.’
    ‘I’ll be fine!’ Grace had said. ‘At this age they’re still so portable! It’s not like he’s a toddler.’
    She’d stolen that ‘portable’ line from a friend. She’d even stolen