Chapter Two
Six months earlier
It’s an unusually snowy Christmas. The world beyond the windows of Aubrey’s childhood home is a blur of snowflakes falling relentlessly in a perfect diagonal.
Snowbanks rise so high they nearly swallow up the neighbours.
A line of cars is parked down the length of the street.
The air is a warm hue, turned orange by the glow of the streetlights.
“So, Aubrey, when are you bringing someone along to one of these things, huh?” Her uncle Jeffrey winks at her from the couch. He rubs his hands together very fast. “About time we get some new blood around here!”
Laughter rings out from Aubrey’s dad, brother, and cousins as they toss away torn wrapping paper and gather shiny bows.
The Christmas tree sparkles different colours in a rhythmic loop in the corner of the room.
By the window, Aubrey smiles down at the crispy leaves she’s been carefully picking off the Ficus for the past ten minutes, a glass of red wine in hand. “I think you’d like that too much.”
It’s a kind of game now. How often can they ask her this question, how long can it go on before it stops being funny.
Aubrey seldom wins. The one time she fell into their trap and tried to voice her annoyance a couple years earlier, it sparked an intoxicated debate on her “snowflake generation” and how “no one can joke about anything anymore.” She learned quickly it’s easier to humour them.
It’s fine. She finds it easier the older she gets. She’s more mature now, less prone to bouts of teenage anger. The jokes take on a more concerned air, but she grows a thicker skin. At least that’s what she tells herself, her lips tinted a deep shade of purple as she takes another sip of wine.
“What about you, Jeff?” a voice calls from the other end of the room. “When are you dragging your next victim over so we can warn her off?”
Louise’s head pokes through the archway connecting the living room to the kitchen. Her smile is devious enough to suggest she actually means it. Jeffrey huffs and leans over to tuck away the unwrapped presents at his feet.
Louise has always fascinated Aubrey. There’s an almost juvenile quality to someone perceived by the world as still searching for a safe place to root, someone still navigating waters without a partner or a family or conventional home—if only one that fits a scenario people have elected as normal, acceptable.
In watching her aunt over the years, Aubrey has noticed how Louise seems younger than the people around her, not just in the way she looks but in the way she smiles, and laughs, and generally exists in a space.
Maybe Aubrey would notice it in herself, too. She can’t really tell. In the mirror she always looks the same. She’s wondered often what she looks like through another’s eyes. Who she reminds people of, the thoughts she elicits.
With a silly grimace at her six-year-old niece, Aubrey zigzags her way through the mess and enters the kitchen, where her aunt and her mother are busy piping green icing onto a red velvet cake.
“Ignore him,” Louise says without looking up.
“I usually do.”
Aubrey’s mother, Marie, rests a hand on her sister’s shoulder and says, “Louise was just telling me all about an inn she’ll be opening up in Lunenburg this summer. Isn’t that exciting?”
There’s a hint of sarcasm there that Louise brushes off with a smile.
She likes it when the conversation falls back on her.
“I’ll show you pictures of the house if you’d like.
It’s been a decade in the making, getting my hands on this beauty.
A real piece of work, but the charm, ugh. Off the charts. Kind of like us, huh?”
Louise is a tall, stunning woman, drawn in curves and strong features and dark hair she doesn’t even pretend to have control over. It sits high on her head, with long, wispy tendrils grazing her cheeks when she moves. Aubrey looks more like her than she does her mom.
Marie is shorter, more delicate. Her hair is dyed blonde and cut in a short bob.
One would hardly guess they’re sisters. They contrast in the way they dress—Marie in cluttered patterns, Louise in plain, deep earth tones—and in most of the decisions they make.
It’s almost comical, like watching two characters designed to piss off the other.
But the way they speak, the fluctuation in their tone, is identical, copy-pasted from Aubrey’s grandfather.
“I’m sure it’s stunning,” Aubrey says. Though she’s never been, she’s seen tons of photos of Lunenburg since her aunt moved to the colourful Nova Scotia coastal town nearly twenty years earlier.
She was younger than Aubrey is now when she left.
Her world there has always seemed like a surreal faraway land, where things seem a little too neat and saturated to be real.
Louise leans over the cake and sets a plastic set of reindeer figurines in its centre. “What do you have planned these next few months?” she asks the cake, and what a terrible question that is.
“The usual,” Aubrey offers through a tightly pinched smile. She hopes it’ll be enough. It rarely is.
“Oh, you must have things coming up. Job stuff, spring in the city, that sort of thing.” She says it like a fact, not a question. At least Louise never brings up men.
“I’m sure, yeah. I’ve got a couple interviews lined up the week after the holidays.” Aubrey pauses as she fails to think of anything else she might have coming up before the summer. Defeated, she adds, “School reunion’s coming early June. Maggie’s putting it together.”
Marie’s eyes raise to the ceiling then. “Oh, god. Don’t remind me it’s been ten years already.”
“I’ll try a little harder.”
Louise snorts out a laugh and Aubrey smiles.
It’s always been like this with her aunt—they’re more in sync than Aubrey’s ever been with her mother, even though Louise lives hours away and hardly manages to come in for the holidays.
They send each other long emails at least once a month about how things are going, what sorts of comments about singlehood they’ve heard lately.
Aubrey loves sitting down to write them, sharpening skills she grew fond of after one particularly inspiring college creative writing class.
She may not talk that much, but in writing, she has a hard time shutting up.
“Cake!” Marie announces as she heads off to the dining room, leaving Aubrey alone with her aunt.
“Good luck with the inn,” Aubrey offers quietly. She’s always found Louise intimidating in the way wise older women can be—untouchable, effortless, impossibly cool. In their shared isolation from romantic relationships, Aubrey finds the confidence she struggles to muster for herself.
Louise eyes her up and down a little too intently. “You know, I could use a hand.”
Aubrey hums. “Oh, yeah?” She’s unsure what else to say, where this is heading.
“What sort of jobs are you interviewing for?”
“Ah, mostly glamorized listings for receptionist positions. Office manager, administrative assistant, that sort of thing.”
“Why haven’t you found something as a translator?”
“I’m not a translator.”
“Right, sorry.” Louise sucks her teeth. “It’s classical languages, isn’t it? Surely there’s something there.”
“I’m sure there is.” Aubrey can feel the corners of her eyes crinkle when she smiles. It’s a tight and polite sort of expression, like all she knows to do when she’s uncomfortable is stretch her lips in an upward curve. “I’m still looking, really.”
“Mm. So you’d get something as a receptionist. What then? You settle into a nice comfortable job, yeah?”
“That’d be it.”
Louise gives a resolute nod, as if she’s just agreed with herself. “Right. You should come up and work for me, then.”
“Ah! Okay.”
“I do mean it. If you’re going to go generic, go generic for this. Me. I need someone for the inn. Making the rooms, checking guests in, things like that.”
“I’ve never done any of that.”
“I probably can’t afford someone on a full salary, is the thing. But you’d get free housing and food. And I’d pay you something, for sure.” When Louise meets Aubrey’s eye, it’s to challenge her gaze. “Get away for a bit. Let’s say a year. It’ll do you some good, trust me. That’s what I did.”
“You stayed away,” Aubrey points out gently. She toys with the sleeve of her cardigan. The radiator hums on the wall next to her.
“Just think about it. You don’t have to make a decision until, ah, maybe late May, early June. I’ll be back in town for your mom’s sixtieth, and then heading back to set everything up for the opening. I’ll email you some pictures.”
Aubrey wants to decline, to insist it’s not necessary, because it feels like the polite thing to do. Surely this is a ridiculous offer. Surely there’s no way she could get a job with her aunt in Lunenburg. It hardly even sounds like a real place.
“I’d have to sublet my place,” she observes aloud, mostly to herself.
Louise shrugs, seemingly unfazed. “Offer’s on the table. I’ll send you a few more details so you can decide. It’s fine if you don’t want to come, there are plenty up there who’ll lend a hand. I just happen to have a soft spot for you.”
“The luck I have.”
Behind them, the cake is set up on the dining table, the family gathered around with paper plates to marvel at the red-and-green masterpiece.
Holiday music mingles quietly in the background with everyone’s hushed, tired voices.
Aubrey looks at Louise, at this person she so easily recognizes herself in.
She wonders what they both look like standing there, from their family’s point of view.
Two women who can’t seem to get it quite right.