Don’t Forget to Write

by Sara Goodman Confino

And just like that, I realized that far from being a threat, she was going to be my biggest ally in this house.

good. I wouldn’t use Hemingway himself, but the aunt’s wartime affair was absolutely going to find its way into my book somehow.

I had never met a man whose sole interest in me wasn’t getting his own way.

Even Freddy cared about what I could do for him—putting off college so he could finish his school and then assuming I would marry him to save him from his mistake.

so we sat on the wicker sofa on the porch with our respective books. Dan was reading Ada’s copy of Hawaii, and I had turned my attention to Exodus, by Leon Uris, at Ada’s suggestion.

“I told you I’d been in love twice. John was the first great love of my life.”

The world loves to destroy what it doesn’t understand. Some things can be hidden to be protected. Some can’t.”

But she was wrong—she wasn’t masquerading as a house cat. She was a leopard, camouflaged against her surroundings, but still living her life exactly as she saw fit.

Reading was fine, but a woman’s place was in the home as a wife and mother—even if she burned the roast.

It would propel the story along if she died, but it felt like too much of a jinx for my own irascible aunt.

drily.

If I could have crawled into her skin and become her, I would have. She was fierce and ferocious and feminine all at the same time.

“That desire for freedom. A gilded cage is still a cage. Most people don’t see the bars that hold them. You and I do.”

She didn’t understand. And she never really would. She looked at the world through her own lens and didn’t know how to see it through mine. And I supposed I couldn’t see her life through hers either.

I felt tears springing to my eyes at the respectfulness of the question. Especially because she said if instead of when.

I would welcome the haunting if it meant I could see her again.

The epitome of do as I say, not as I do.

Because you only get this one chance. That was something that Ada understood better than anyone. She did exactly what she wanted. She should have been miserable. A meddling spinster with a bad attitude. But she wasn’t. She was happy and free and lived and loved exactly how she was meant to. And I don’t think there’s much more that anyone can wish for.

I also saw my mother more clearly. She had surprised me in Avalon with her admission that she read because cooking was boring, not because her life was. Maybe she really was just a terrible cook. Which would mean I came by my lack of culinary skills quite honestly. A giggle rose up in my throat at that disloyal thought, but I swallowed it down.