by Abby Smith
“And how wonderful that her friends could come, where are they from again?”
“Allie, this must be so hard on you.”
“You were obviously very special to her.”
I smiled politely and nodded but didn’t speak. What was I going to say? That, no, I felt surprisingly un-sad? That I loved Aunt May but hadn’t felt I was particularly special to her? I let Mom handle the niceties. She knew what to say to people, how to act normal. I gazed toward the main driveway, wondering how soon we could leave.
Dad joined us. He was folding his hat and poncho over his arm. I withdrew a few steps from him and Mom.
“Dan, Pat. Nice service.” Mr. Cutter, a local land developer I’m sure Aunt May would never have been friends with, stepped forward to shake my dad’s hand. He was tall with slicked-back hair the color of black shoe polish. His suit looked expensive, and his tanned skin seemed like it was stretched too tightly across his skull.
“Thank you, Jim.” Dad grasped his hand.
“So what was the bet?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
My normally polite father was suddenly abrupt.
Something warm and soft touched my neck, causing me to make a ridiculous noise.
The little brown alpaca peered at me from under her hat. She had apparently gotten away from the others.
“Hey, Sunshine.” I held out my hand.
She reached forward with her long neck and sniffed it, humming softly. I scratched behind her ears and ran my fingers through the soft, caramel fur on her neck.
Bob rushed over, her lead dangling from his hand.
“Hey, Allie, I’m sorry she got away.” He looked into my eyes for just a fraction of a second.
“No problem. Sunshine is kind of my favorite. Aunt May got her when she was just a cria, and she used to let me feed her with a bottle.”
Bob clipped the rope onto Sunshine’s halter.
“Actually, I’m glad she came over to you.” He dropped his voice. “I’m not sure all of these people are alpaca people, if you know what I mean.”
I looked over at Mr. Cutter talking to my parents. “Yeah, well, I’m not sure all these people are even Aunt May people, if you know what I mean.”
He followed my gaze, tracing a finger down the bridge of Sunshine’s nose. “I know what you mean.”
2
Mom and I drove home together so Dad could help Aunt May’s friends load up the alpacas. I stared out the window as the town buildings changed into long, flat stretches of fields, old farm houses, dairy barns, and grain silos.
“How are you holding up, Al?” Mom’s voice made me jump.
“Fine.” I turned away from her and scowled out the window.
“You know, it’s normal to feel upset when something like this happens.” She reached over to touch my arm.
“I’m fine.” I shook off her hand. Even I was a little surprised at how mean my voice sounded, but now that I had said it, I wasn’t sure how to un-say it.
“You shouldn’t frown like that.”
Mom let it drop, but I could almost hear the wheels turning in her brain, analyzing. I didn’t like feeling that she was inside my head, trying to figure me out. I scowled harder. I didn’t exactly know what I was feeling, except that suddenly everything about Aunt May’s death and funeral was weirding me out, and not in a nice, normal, I-miss-my-dead-great-aunt way but in a freaky I-want-to-run-away-and-hide-from-everyone-and-not-think-about-this way.
We drove the rest of the way to the house in silence.
My parents held a reception for Aunt May in her cottage. The people from town arrived with cakes, pies, casseroles and other baked goods. I felt guilty about my behavior in the car, so I helped Mom arrange the food, a large urn of coffee, and pitchers of lemonade and iced tea on the shabby but sturdy oak table in Aunt May’s kitchen. It was stuffy in the cottage after the heat of the day, so we opened the windows. There were no screens, but Mom said there probably wouldn’t be too many bugs this late in the season. Once everything was set up and Dad arrived, my parents took pity on me and said I didn’t have to stay if I didn’t want to, so I slipped out the back door and trudged up the broad, grassy lane that led from the cottage to our house.
The lane ran down the middle of a large cornfield that we rented to our Amish neighbors. The corn had already been harvested for the year, the long, brown stalks dried and tied together into shocks that looked like giant teepees. When I was a kid, I used to play inside of them.
The tall grasses and timothy that bordered the lane gradually tapered into our back yard, near a grove of maple trees. Our tiny, antique farm house was over a hundred years old, storm-cloud gray with a rust-red metal roof and white trim. I steered past our garage, up a small hill to the back porch. The back door was unlocked, as usual. I pushed it open and a dark figure lunged toward me.
Two enormous paws landed on my shoulders, and my face was mopped by a pink tongue the size of a washcloth. I wrapped my arms around the neck of our oversized black German shepherd Socrates and stumbled backwards to push the screen door open again. He bounded outside, a whirlwind of frenetic dog energy. My only dress was covered with faint, dusty paw prints and fur.
I went upstairs to change. My bedroom used to be two rooms, but my parents had removed a wall when I turned ten so I could have more space. Half of the room was my sleeping quarters—an antique four poster bed with a colorful patch quilt, a dresser, and a closet. The other half was my workspace—a large desk with my computers, a wall of built-in bookshelves crammed with books, and an old yellow rocking chair with a pink cushion that had been there since I was a baby. A fluffy black and white cat, one of five who lived in the house, lay curled in the middle of my bed.
I pulled off my dress and wadded it in the corner of my closet. A voice in my head told me that probably wasn’t the right thing to do with it, but I ignored it. I squeezed into my favorite pair of jeans, pulled a clean T-shirt over my head, and went downstairs.
I rummaged through the refrigerator but didn’t see anything I wanted. I settled for a diet pop and sat down at the kitchen table. I felt better just being alone and in my normal clothes. A stack of mail and a fat, gray cat sat on the table.
“Hey, Blue.” I scratched under her chin and began flipping idly through the mail while she purred.
A crunch of gravel made me look out the window. A pretty Chinese girl wearing a backpack way too big for her small frame steered her bike down our driveway.
Andie Wu. My best friend.
I stepped onto the porch.
“I’m going to kill him,” she growled as she leaned her bike against our garage. “Oh, I’m sorry, are you OK? How was the funeral?” She adjusted her backpack and made her way up the red brick walkway to the porch.
“I’m fine. It was weird. Who are you going to kill?”
“Mark, of course. Down Socks!” Andie’s words were preemptive as she saw the familiar black dog loping toward her. He pressed himself against her legs, tongue lolling, while she rubbed his neck.
“What happened?”
“He frickin’ asked Hope to go to Homecoming with him, that’s what happened.”
“Hope? Seriously? The freshman?”
“Seriously. After we stayed up until two last night texting.” Socrates bounded off again and Andie came up to the porch.
I handed her my still unopened can of pop and went inside to get another one for myself. “That seriously sucks. What in the world was he thinking?” I called over my shoulder from the kitchen.
Andie was fifteen, but we were both sophomores because I had skipped a grade, thereby dooming myself to be too young to do anything for the rest of my life. If it wasn’t for Andie, I probably would have been a complete social outcast.
“It’s not the fact that she’s cute that bothers me, but that she is such an airhead,” Andie said when I returned. “How can I have any respect for him after this?”
“Did he get his Ritalin dosage wrong
this morning or something? I was sure he was going to ask you.”
Andie laughed, which made me happy, then hesitated. “You know Brett’s taking Tracy, right?”
Why did my heart start pounding faster just hearing the name? It annoyed me.
“No, but I figured.”
Brett Logan: seventeen, a senior, and the only guy I had ever kissed. We dated for three months over the summer, but he broke up with me when school started because suddenly I was too young for him. Tracy Sloane was also a senior and, he said, more mature.
Andie said mature was just a euphemism for something else.
She regarded me over her pop can as she took a sip.
“So what was so weird about the funeral?”
I shook my head.
“Some of Aunt May’s friends were there, and they brought the alpacas, wore weird costumes, played these weird instruments.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“This will be all over the Internet by tomorrow.”
“That’s exactly what I said. Please, can I have the brain back?”
Our inside joke that we shared a brain came from our propensity to finish each other’s sentences, say exactly the same thing at exactly the same time and win at Pictionary no matter how bad our drawings, as long as we were a team.
I sat down on a small bench next to the side of the house.
“I can’t wait until I graduate and can get the heck out of Ohio. Anyway, in addition to that weirdness, Aunt May dedicated a poem to me, of all things.”
“What poem?”
“Something by Theodore Roethke. I need to go look it up. Dad has a book of his poems in his study I think.”
“Oh, speaking of studies, I brought your assignments for you, and notes on the classes you missed, if you even need them. Mrs. Greene gave you a pass on the pre-calc problems, though. She said you would probably ace the test whether you did the exercises or not.”
“Actually, I already did them yesterday in study hall. I was bored.” I cringed a little admitting that.
Andie rolled her eyes at me.
“Of course you did. Anyway, I also brought all the notes that Mark and I passed in chemistry class after Mr. Steele confiscated our cell phones. I thought we could go down to Walden and burn them.”
Walden was our name for a small pond hidden in the woods behind Aunt May’s cottage. Andie and I had named it after we snuck a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s book from my father’s study when we were in the sixth grade. I’m not sure we completely understood the book, but it seemed like a good name for a pond, and Walden had served as our secret hiding place and strategy-planning headquarters ever since. My dad, who had been to the real Walden Pond, said ours was a pathetic excuse for the real thing. He called it Walden Puddle.
Even from this distance we could see that there were only a few cars left in the private lane behind Aunt May’s cottage. Dad stood outside talking to someone. Was it Mr. Cutter again? What was up with him?
“It’s too bad about your Aunt May. She was pretty cool. Like, the kind of old lady I would like to be someday if I have to get old.”
I had thought the same thing more than once. Aunt May must have been in her late sixties or early seventies, but she was tall and thin and spritely somehow. Her hair was gray, but that sort of golden-gray color, so it made her look pretty instead of old. She was almost always cheerful, and was completely self-sufficient. My dad often said she had more energy than he did.
We watched as the last of the cars pulled away from the cottage, and my parents walked slowly, hand in hand, toward the house.
“Hey!” Andie turned to me. “Let’s ask your parents if we can spend the night in the cottage!”
“Aunt May’s cottage?”
“Yeah, I mean, it’s Friday. Unless you have plans, or something I don’t know about.”
She knew I didn’t. One of us almost always ended up at the other’s house on the weekends.
“Yeah, but, I mean, she just died. Isn’t that a little, I dunno, creepy?”
Andie snorted. “Oh, come on. It’ll be so cool. We can order a pizza and watch movies, assuming she has a DVD player down there. I brought all my overnight things anyway, just in case.” She pointed to her bulging backpack.
I watched my parents trudge up the hill. “All right, I’m game. We can ask them.”
“Hello, daughter. Hello, other daughter.” Dad said as he and Mom approached the porch.
“Hi Mr. and Mrs. Thomas. How was the reception?” Andie asked.
Mom sat down next to me on the bench and snatched my pop can.
“Exhausting,” she said, taking a sip and handing it back to me. “Oh, that tastes good. Allie, would you be a dear and go get one of those for me?”
“Me too!” Dad added as I stood up.
“Yes, master,” I said in my best Igor voice as I set my can down and headed for the fridge.
“What was the bet?” I heard Andie asking from out on the porch.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I returned to the porch with the pop. Dad took my place on the bench next to Mom, and she was looking at him with an amused expression.
“I assume you are aware that your shirt says…” she said.
“I know what the shirt says. But I’m not going to talk about it.”
“Well, geez, Dad, you might have thought of that before putting it on. Or you could have just kept that poncho on over it,” I said.
I handed them their drinks and sat next to Andie on the porch.
“How bad could it be, anyway? It’s not like I have some inheritance you could have lost or something.”
“I don’t want to talk about it, because I’m not convinced I lost the bet yet,” Dad said. “But speaking of inheritances, Aunt May, it turns out, left everything she owns to you.”
“To me?” I looked at Andie. “Seriously? Wait, what exactly does she own?”
“Pretty much nothing. I guess everything that’s in the cottage, her books and what little furniture she has. The alpacas. The cottage, of course, your Mother and I still own, despite Mr. Cutter’s best efforts.”
“He’s scary,” Andie said. “My mom said he bought Mrs. Schmidt’s property right out from under her after her husband died and she couldn’t afford the mortgage payments anymore. She lived there for forty years and had to move into a nursing home. Mr. Cutter tore the house and barn down to build condominiums.”
“‘Heritage Estates,’ I believe he named them,” Mom said drily.
“He apparently just bought a bunch of land on the other side of our property as well, and for some reason he wants to add our cottage to his acreage,” Dad said, looking serious. “He offered me more money than it’s worth.”
“I don’t even get why he was at the funeral to begin with,” I said.
“He and Aunt May go way back,” Mom said.
“You’re kidding me. They were friends?”
“Hardly friends,” Mom said. “I don’t know all the details, but I do know they grew up together. Mr. Cutter is just a few years younger than May. I get the feeling there was some type of rivalry between them, and that he was always trying to prove himself to her.”
“Prove himself? What does he have to prove? Seems like he has everything, he’s so rich and all.”
“Teachable moment, daughter,” Dad said, using his most pedantic voice. “Being rich and having a lot of material possessions won’t necessarily make you happy.”
“Is this my punishment for not going to church? You’re going to preach to me anyway?”
We grinned at each other. Dad was always surprisingly cool about my not going to church, even though he was a pastor. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in God, just that I wasn’t sure I believed in God the way everyone else was saying I should believe in God.
“At any rate, I don’t like the thought of him being our new neighbor,” Mom said. “Who knows what he’s planning to do with tha
t land? He might put up oil wells.”
“I should go put up some more “No Trespassing” signs in the woods tomorrow,” Dad said.
“So I assume you’re not going to sell the cottage to him, right?” Why did I feel nervous at the idea?
“Of course not,” Dad assured me. “We would never do that.”
Andie nudged my foot with her toe.
“Oh, yeah, so, um, speaking of the cottage, Andie and I were wondering if we could spend the night down there.”
Mom and Dad looked at each other as if they were communicating telepathically.
“Isn’t that a little creepy?” Dad asked.
“Yeah, well, ask her,” I jabbed a thumb toward Andie.
“Oh, come on,” Andie said. “It’s not like we’re going to see Aunt May’s ghost or something. And even if we did, she’d probably be a pretty cool ghost.”
“I guess that’s true,” Dad said.
“I suppose it would be all right,” Mom said. “The phone still works down there, and you have your cells. I would feel better if you took Socrates with you, though.”
At the sound of his name, Socrates’ head popped up from a hole he was digging in the yard. He looked at us with his ears cocked and head tilted to one side, then bounded over to the porch. He plopped down on his haunches in front of Mom and gazed at her adoringly, nose caked with dirt, eyes expectant.
Mom laughed and stood up. “Well, now I’ve done it, I better get him a biscuit. Do you girls want to take the sleeping bags down there? I’m not sure what May has in terms of sheets. Oh, and if you could do me a favor and clean up the kitchen and put away the food. I put the perishable items in the fridge, but we were so tired, we left everything else out. I planned to go back down later, but you could save me a trip.”
“Sure thing, Mrs. Thomas.” Andie, as the guest, was more polite than I would have been.
I ran upstairs and threw my overnight things in my backpack. When I got back downstairs, Mom had taken the sleeping bags out of the closet for us, and Dad was testing the battery in a yellow flashlight the size of a large brick.
“Here, better take this with you, in case you need to come back up to the house for anything.”
