Jess Thomas holds down two jobs: she does housecleaning and works in a pub. She also has two kids to take care of, teenager Nicky, her husband's son from a previous relationship and her daughter with her husband, Tanzie, a grade schooler math prodigy. The husband, claiming stress and illness, vanished from their life and moved back into his mother's house. Claiming also to be too ill to hold down a job, he pays no child support. So when Jess found a big wad of money on the floor of a taxi cab, she decided to keep it even though she knew who it belonged to, having just helped a drunk customer home from the pub where she worked.
You see, an opportunity had come Tanzie's way, a chance to attend an elite school that offered Tanzie a scholarship that covered 90% of the cost of attending. The rest would have to be paid by Jess. And she just didn't have the money. But this opportunity was too good to pass up. So she took the man's money that he unknowingly dropped in the taxi.
The man, Ed Nicholls, was one of Jess's housekeeping customers. Their relationship was casual, as he was never home when she came to his house to clean it. But she knew him by sight and where he lived, of course, and so offered to make sure he got home safely that night when he got sloppy drunk. She got him into the taxi, got him home, used her copy of his key to get him inside, got him laid down on his couch and left. When she got back in the taxi is when she found his money roll. It wasn't a huge amount, 500 pounds British, but when you're as strapped for cash as Jess was, it was just too hard to resist. And Ed lived in a new, luxury home and drove an expensive new car and she figured he would think he just lost it in his drunken haze. Not very ethical of Jess but the temptation was overwhelming. Because that remaining 10% not covered by the scholarship, about 5000 pounds, might be acquired if Tanzie enters a math competition being held in Scotland and the 500 pounds stolen money might be just be enough to Tanzie, Jess, Nicky, and Norman, their oversize dog north from Britain to Scotland. So Jess loads the family into an old junker car of her husband's that he left behind when he split and they head north.
They don't get far. It's an old car and it breaks down. Ed happens to be driving by at the time and he offers them a ride. Now Ed has problems of his own. He is being investigated for insider trading, which apparently is as illegal in Britain as it is supposed to be here in the USA. Getting away from his troubles for a few days is an attractive idea, so he agrees to drive them all north to Scotland so Tanzie can enter the math competition and win the money that will enable her to attend the elite private school. Complications ensue. And just when it seems Jess and Ed were destined to be together, Ed finds out what happened to his missing 500 pounds!
I really enjoyed this story as unlikely as the circumstances that brought Ed and Jess together were. I found it very touching at times and even shed a tear or two.
Here are some excerpts that really spoke to me. This first one from teenager Nicky:
"Mostly, I don't understand how the bullies and the thieves and the people who destroy everything—the arseholes—get away with it. The boys who punch you in your kidneys for your dinner [lunch] money, and the police who think it's funny to treat you like an idiot, and the kids who take the piss out of anyone who isn't just like them. Or the dads who walk right out and just start afresh somewhere new that smells of Febreze with a woman who drives her own Toyota and owns a couch with no marks on it and laughs at all his stupid jokes like he's God's gift and not actually a slimeball who lied to all the people who loved him...I'm sorry if this blog has just got really depressing, but that's how our life is right now. My family, the eternal losers. Mum always told us that good things happen to good people. Guess what? She doesn't say that anymore."
And this description of Nicky, when he first came to live with Jess and her husband:
"And when Nicky turned up two years later, and everyone had told her she was mad to take on someone else's child, a child who was already eight years old and from a troubled background—you know how boys like that turn out—she'd ignored them. Because she could see instantly in the wary little shadow...a little of what she had felt. Because she knew that something happened to you when your mother didn't hold you close, or tell you all the time that you were the best thing ever, or even notice when you were home: a little part of you sealed over. You didn't need her. You didn't need anyone. And without even knowing you were doing it, you waited. You waited to anyone who got close to you to see something they didn't like in you...and to grow cold and disappear, too, like so much sea mist. Because there had to be something wrong, didn't there, if even your own mother didn't love you?"
So it's just a silly and unlikely romance story, but there were parts of it that really hit hard and a bit too close to home. But it all come out like it should in the end because it is a romance and light reading and a break from the reality we all deal with in this life.
