Page 3 of How Much Wine Will Fix My Broken Heart?
‘But Eggstravaganza… it’s an excellent play on words,’ Liz adds.
‘My lad’s in Reception and he can’t even say his own name,’ Helen adds.
I take a sip of tea to hide my smirk. Keep prodding, Hels.
‘Well, I’ll think about it,’ Carrie says, drawing that conversation to a close. ‘We also had a plan for the end of the month. We don’t normally put on extra things but I thought it’d be a really good idea to have a Chinese New Year event.’
Liz, stop clapping.
‘Like a normal quiz night,’ she carries on, ‘but Chinese-themed for the end of January. We could get Chinese food in, perhaps some decorations, and I found a company who could print fortune cookies and fans for us.’ My heart drops. I sense Helen taking a deep inhalation of breath.
‘Oh my days, I know somewhere we could get straw hats,’ Liz says. ‘I have a kimono I could wear, it’d be a riot…’
I wait for it.
‘What do you think, Grace?’
It was coming. Shitsticks.
‘I think there are possibly better ways of making money for the school. A raffle maybe?’ I mutter.
Carrie stops to study my pained expression. ‘I thought you’d like that idea, what with your girls?’
All the eyes of the room fall onto me. Oh dear, I have to do this, don’t I?
‘My girls are not Chinese. They’re Vietnamese.’
‘Oh, well, it’s all the same, no?’
‘It really isn’t,’ I reply. Crumbs, Carrie. It’s late. There’s no alcohol here. I don’t want a conversation about cultural appropriation and your lack of understanding of world geography.
‘Then what about their father? Their Asian roots? I think they’d appreciate the fact we’re trying to celebrate the diversity of our school?’
I pause for a moment. Carrie has never asked me about my family, my life, or my husband, which is really just typical of her self-obsessed personality, but Helen knows and I feel her body lean into mine.
‘Maya and Cleo are adopted.’
‘Oh,’ Carrie says bluntly without a hint of an apology. ‘You’d never tell. They speak English so well.’
I inhale sharply to cut off my words.
‘I never see your husband about so I assumed he was the Asian one. Maybe he works all the time so is less involved in your family life.’
Deep breaths, Gracie. Deep deep breaths.
‘He’s less involved because he’s dead. My husband passed away from testicular cancer three years ago.’
The room goes quiet. Not even quiet. Dead. As dead as this owl next to me. As dead as Tom. He’d have laughed hard at that joke. He’d literally have wet himself over the owl.
No one is speaking. When I throw that bomb, I never quite get why everyone goes silent. Is it the testicle bit, the cancer bit or the death bit? All three are the most loaded conversation-killers you can get.
‘I… I didn’t know that.’
‘Well, you do now. The girls actually never knew him. I went travelling after Tom passed away and I adopted them during that time.’
The room take stock of that story. Some look down, some shake their heads, others you can almost hear the awkward sound of them swallowing and it hitting the pits of their stomach.
‘And you should also know we have a huge mixture of kids from the South East Asian diaspora in our school. Blake in Year Four has a Cambodian mother and the twins in Year Six are Filipino. If you want to label some crappy quiz event as representative of all these different families and their cultures by wearing straw hats and dicking around with chopsticks and bad chow mein then you’re just going to insult a load of people. Kimonos are also Japanese.’
