Rory reached out and tugged the end of my ponytail. “You’re something else, Lolly Blanchard.”
I looked down, feeling bashful. “Come on, we’ve got a long walk home.”
I didn’t know it then, but those few hours on the beach were a turning point of sorts. That was the day we truly became friends. And that was the day, without even realizing it, I started to fall for Rory Shaw.
6
“Rise and shine, morning glory.”
Blinking in the pale morning light filtering in through the window above my pantry-office desk, I lifted my head from the stack of invoices and bills where I’d accidentally fallen asleep. I’d been dozing, half dreaming about Rory and that long-ago New Year’s Day on the beach. Aunt Gert was standing over me with her hands on her hips. I squinted at her. She was wearing a khaki ensemble that I was pretty sure I’d last seen on Jane Goodall in a National Geographic documentary. She looked like she was ready to venture into the wilds of equatorial Africa in search of a family of chimps. The only thing missing was the pith helmet.
“Greetings and salutations,” she said, eyeing me suspiciously. “Did you sleep here all night? Terrible for your spine.”
I sat up, scrambling for coherence and searching for my glasses. I found them and slipped them on. “I came in early to make the pies and must have drifted off.”
The pies were now sitting in two perfectly gleaming rows on thecounter, cooling. My life might be a slow-burning bushfire, but my pies were perfectly composed.
“Humph.” Aunt Gert pursed her lips. “I fed Bertha and let her out to have a wee before I came over. By the way, you left this on the prep table.” She held out my diary, open to my life goals page. I snatched it from her, embarrassed. Had she read it? We didn’t have a close relationship. The thought of her scalpel eye dissecting my life goals made me shrink a little inside. She, who had accomplished so much.
Besides being a professor at a prestigious women’s college in New England, Aunt Gert had worked for the United Nations on a special council on world religions during the Cold War. She’d hiked the Atlas Mountains and lived with Bedouins and studied the religious practices of remote tribes along the Amazon. Compared to her, my accomplishments looked paltry.
Aunt Gert was eyeing me in a way that made me uncomfortable. She was generally a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps sort of woman, not high on empathy or displays of affection, but occasionally I caught glimpses of a tenderheartedness and compassion that surprised me. She was looking at me now with an expression that hovered somewhere between disapproval and sympathy. It made me squirm.
I turned away and tucked the diary in my top drawer. “Daphne found my old middle school diary when she was looking through some boxes for a school project.” I shook out my hopelessly rumpled kitchen apron, which was smeared with lemon filling. “It’s funny to look back on the things we wanted when we were young, isn’t it?” I tried to brush off the life goals list as inconsequential, a childish fancy.
“On the contrary, I think we’re the most honest when we’re young,” she replied brusquely. “It’s later in life we get good at lying to ourselves.”
I took a moment to let that sink in. “Do you have any regrets about your life?” I asked suddenly. “Would you change anything if you could?”
I knew only the broad strokes of Aunt Gert’s life. Her hardscrabble upbringing on a berry farm in southern Ohio. How she’d gotten herself a full ride to Columbia University through sheer perseverance and a brilliant intellect. She’d had an illustrious career, but I didn’t know how she felt about her life. What, if anything, did she think of longingly when lying in her narrow twin bed at night?
She paused for a moment, then shook her head decisively.
“Life is too short for second-guesses.” She sniffed. “You make the best choice you can, and then you stick with it. I don’t look back.” She gave me a shrewd look. “What about you? Are you regretting your life choices at so tender an age?”
“I don’t know if I’d call them regrets,” I hedged, tucking a stray strand of hair back into my ponytail and smoothing my bangs. I could feel them swooping wildly to the left across my forehead. “Maybe just thinking about what-ifs. I had to make a lot of hard decisions; a lot of things happened that I didn’t have control over.”
She made a small grunt of agreement. “Your mother’s death.”
I nodded. “Sometimes I wonder what my life would look like if she were still alive.” I pictured Rory, and my voice faltered. “I know it can’t be changed, but I do wonder what if. What would my life look like now?”
Aunt Gert eyed me speculatively. “If you were given the chance to find out, would you take it?” she asked.
It was obviously a theoretical question, but she was staring at me intently, as though my answer really mattered.
“Of course,” I stammered. “Why wouldn’t I? But it’s impossible.”
She cocked her head at me. “Is it? Often we say ‘impossible’ whenwhat we really mean is ‘unknown.’ So many things are possible; far fewer are known to us. You will discover this soon enough.”
I just sat looking at her, unsure how to respond.
“Well, you’re young.” Aunt Gert clapped her hands together briskly. “You still have time. You have so much opportunity still laid out before you despite your present circumstances. You must try, as my dear colleague the esteemed mythology professor Joseph Campbell used to say, to ‘follow your bliss.’ ”
“Follow my bliss?” It sounded like a slogan in a yogurt commercial.
Aunt Gert nodded again. “You must follow your bliss no matter the circumstances life thrusts upon you.”
“But what does that mean? I have responsibilities. I can’t just up and leave everything to pursue my own happiness,” I protested.
