By This Time Tomorrow by Charlotte Butterfield

Author:Charlotte Butterfield [Butterfield, Charlotte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Published: 2022-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

Don’t sweat the small stuff

Maggie’s words stay with me all night and into the next day. I replay them over and over in my mind whenever I can. It seems to me that she did two things wrong, each at opposite ends of the spectrum. First, she made monumental, life-altering changes. She went from being a teacher to a multi-millionaire in a day. Of course that path was never going to be easy; marking essays on the democracy and dictatorship of pre-war Germany one minute then having your sunglasses polished for you next to an infinity pool in the Maldives the next – ‘Fruit kebab? Lovely, don’t mind if I do.’

Maggie got greedy, which was her downfall. She should have gone for five numbers and the bonus ball, not all six. No one needs that kind of money. A couple of nice holidays a year and maybe a sofa upgrade and an American double-door fridge, that’s the sort of comfortable lifestyle you want, not a walk-in wardrobe with rails that rotate by a remote control. It’s like people who say they want to be famous. They don’t. They want the odd person to tell them they’re brilliant, they don’t want pictures of them buying loo roll and thrush cream splashed all over the Internet. Everything in moderation.

Secondly, she got hung up on perfecting the minutiae of a day. That’s where she slipped up. I know that I once went back a day to sort my hair out, but I don’t think that I can quite explain how bad it was. I really couldn’t have fixed it myself. It was that or wear a hat for a month, so that’s completely different to nails, which grow back so much quicker. And I only did that because it had happened on the same day that Fergus needed help; I wouldn’t have been so shallow as to repeat the day for a hairstyle alone.

She did say something that I hadn’t thought of, though, about Eileen. I’ve been so hung up on what I can change for the better, it hadn’t even occurred to me that I can go back to relive a moment and not change anything at all. I could see Dad again. I could go back to a time when the kids sat on my lap, and I can breathe in their scent, I can read them a bedtime story, I can redo it and appreciate it so much more this time, because I know what they are going to change into. How quickly it is lost.

I could see Anna.

The next day I wait for Eileen to work her way through her morning patter, answering mechanically as I do most mornings: ‘Yes, it is very wet’, ‘Yes, Evelyn is a bit late with the post today’, ‘Peppermint tea for me please’, ‘No, I didn’t see Emmerdale’. And when there is a break in the conversation, as there always is at the point where she removes the teabags from the mugs because, bless her, she’s not a multi-tasker, I jump in.

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