Positively Yours Read Online Free Page A

seemed to be either on his way to or from the golf club whenever Beth had time to call him. She had felt guilty she hadn’t seen him in weeks, and known the best way to catch up would be over a nice Sunday lunch in his new home from home.
    As they ordered food Beth was reminded of her dad’s popularity. Many members came up to say hello, and ask how she was, and they all seemed to have time for William. He was, indeed, very charming, and a real gentleman, but she could not help feeling that his fellow-golfers knew her father better than she did. Being an only child and a girl, Beth had always found it hard to connect with her father. She knew her parents would have loved more children, and her avid sports-fan father would have loved a boy to teach golf to, but it had never happened. And as the years of trying for another sibling for Beth had progressed it had become obvious that Beth’s mum wasn’t well.
    Beth had only been ten years old when her mother had died after a long battle with breast cancer. She could barely remember the weeks after the death, everything had seemed like a nightmare. One minute she’d been in her mother’s bed listening to her reading
The Worst Witch
, the next her dad had been coming home from the hospital and explaining that her mum had gone to live with the angels in heaven. Beth had tried to finish the book on her own, but without her mum’s funny reading voices it hadn’t been the same, and she hadn’t wanted to ask her father, as all he had seemed to do was cry when he thought she couldn’t hear him. At night she’d hear sobbingcoming from behind his study door. She’d been scared, and had just kept waiting for her mum to come home and explain what was happening, but she never had.
    Beth had been so lonely that she’d been glad when, after a few weeks, her father had suggested she spend the summer with her cousins in Cork. She’d missed her dad, but known he was busy with work, and she’d enjoyed the company: her boy cousins had taught her how to play cards, go-kart down steep roads, and keep the score in rugby. When she’d eventually returned to Wicklow at the end of the summer she’d realized her dad was finding it hard to deal with her. William had been old when she’d been born – and her being a girl was always going to be difficult for a man who couldn’t tell Barbie and Ariel, the little mermaid, apart. When September came around he’d sat her down and asked her if she’d like to go to school in Dublin. Beth had been excited, as she had always loved going to the big city with her parents, especially at Christmas, when she could gaze at the Switzers Christmas window display. But it wasn’t until her dad had explained that she would be boarding at this school that she had got scared. But before she knew it, William had had her uniform, books and clothes packed for St Teresa’s boarding school. Beth had looked jealously at the girls who had mums dropping them off. While her dad had given her an awkward goodbye hug Beth had watched over his shoulder as mothers ran fingers through their daughters’ hair, kissed them all over their faces, and waved at them right up until the last second.
    Boarding school had been difficult at first for Beth, but the nuns had been very kind to the new motherless girl, and soon she had not only settled into life as a boarder, but started excelling at her studies, too. It was here that she’d been set apart from the other girls. Of course she’d loved the girly chats and the obsessing over any boys who came near the school, but Beth had been very hard-working, and had soon becomea top student. She’d also known how proud it made her dad to receive her school reports, their pages filled with As and encouraging comments from her teachers. There had never been any chance she’d be on the top hockey team, but her brains had made sure that she was not