LITMIR.BIZ

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that I missed everything about Aunt Rose, not just the good bits. How happy I would have been to spend another hour with her, even if she were to spend that hour ranting. Now that she was gone, it was hard to believe she could ever have made me slam doors and stomp upstairs, and hard to accept that I had wasted so many precious hours in stubborn silence, locked in my room.

      I angrily wiped a tear rolling down my cheek with the flimsy airline napkin and told myself that regrets were a waste of time. Yes, I should have written more letters to her, and yes, I should have called more often and told her I loved her, but that was all too late now; I could not undo the sins of the past.

      On top of my grief there was also another sensation gnawing at my spine. Was it foreboding? Not necessarily. Foreboding implies that something bad will happen; my problem was that I didn’t know if anything would happen at all. It was entirely possible that the whole trip would end in disappointment. But I also knew that there was only one person I could rightfully blame for the squeeze I was in, and that person was me.

      I had grown up believing I would inherit half of Aunt Rose’s fortune, and therefore had not even tried to make one of my own. While other girls my age had climbed up the slippery career pole with carefully manicured nails, I had only worked in jobs I liked – such as teaching at Shakespeare camps – knowing that sooner or later, my inheritance from Aunt Rose would take care of my growing credit-card debt. As a result, I had little to fall back on now but an elusive heirloom left behind in a faraway land by a mother I could barely remember.

      Ever since dropping out of grad school I had lived nowhere in particular, couch-surfing with friends from the antiwar movement, and moving out whenever I got a Shakespeare teaching gig. For some reason, the Bard’s plays were all that had ever stuck in my head, and no matter how hard I tried, I could never get tired of Romeo and Juliet.

      I occasionally taught adults, but much preferred kids – maybe because I was fairly sure they liked me. My first clue was that they would always refer to the grown-ups as if I weren’t one of them. It made me happy that they accepted me as one of their own, although I knew it was not actually a compliment. It simply meant that they suspected I had never really grown up either, and that, even at twenty-five, I still came across as an awkward tween struggling to articulate – or, more often, conceal – the poetry raging in my soul.

      It didn’t help my career path that I was at a complete loss to imagine my future. When people asked me what I would like to do with my life, I had no idea what to say, and when I tried to visualize myself five years down the road, all I saw was a big, black pothole. In gloomy moments I interpreted this impending darkness as a sign that I would die young, and concluded that the reason I could not envision my future was that I had none. My mother had died young, and so had my grandmother, Aunt Rose’s younger sister. For some reason, fate was on our case, and whenever I found myself contemplating a long-term commitment, whether it was work or housing, I always bowed out at the last minute, haunted by the idea that I would not be around to see it to completion.

      Every time I came home for Christmas or a summer holiday, Aunt Rose would discreetly beg me to stay with her rather than continuing my aimless existence. ‘You know, Julie,’ she would say, while picking dead leaves off a houseplant or decorating the Christmas tree one angel at a time, ‘you could always come back here for a while, and think about what you would like to do with yourself.’

      But even if I was tempted, I knew I couldn’t do that. Janice was out there on her own, making money by matchmaking and renting a two-bedroom apartment with a view over a fake lake; for me to move back home would be to acknowledge that she had won.

      Now, of course, everything had changed. Moving back in with Aunt Rose was no longer an option. The world as I knew it belonged to Janice, and I was left with nothing more than the contents of a manila envelope. As I sat there on the plane, rereading Aunt Rose’s letter over a plastic cup of sour wine, it suddenly occurred to me how thoroughly alone I was now, with her gone and only Umberto left in the world.

      Growing up, I had never been good at making friends. In contrast, Janice would have had a hard time squeezing her closest and dearest into a double-decker bus. Whenever she went out with her giggling throng at night, Aunt Rose would circle around me nervously for a while, pretending to look for the magnifying glass or her dedicated crossword pencil. Eventually, she would sit down next to me on the sofa, seemingly interested in the book I was reading. But I knew she wasn’t.

      ‘You know, Julie,’ she would say, picking specks of lint from my pyjama bottoms, ‘I can easily entertain myself. If you want to go out with your friends…’

      The suggestion would hang in the air for a while, until I had concocted a suitable reply. The truth was that I did not stay at home because I felt sorry for Aunt Rose, but because I had no interest in going out. Whenever I let people drag me along to some bar I always ended up surrounded by meatheads and geeks, who all seemed to think we were acting out a fairy tale in which I would have to choose one of them before the night was over.

      The memory of Aunt Rose sitting next to me and in her own sweet way telling me to get a life sent another pang through my heart. Staring glumly through the greasy little aeroplane window into the void outside, I found myself wondering if perhaps this whole trip was meant as some kind of punishment for how I had treated her. Perhaps God was going to make the plane crash, just to show me. Or perhaps he would allow me to actually get to Siena, and then let me discover that someone else had already snagged the family treasure.

      In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I began to suspect that the real reason Aunt Rose had never broached the issue while she was still alive was that it was all rubbish. Perhaps she had simply lost it in the end, in which case the alleged treasure might well turn out to be nothing but wishful thinking. And even if, against all odds, there really had been something of value still kicking around in Siena after we left some twenty-plus years ago, what were the chances it was still there? Considering the population density of Europe, and the ingenuity of mankind in general, I would be very surprised if there was any cheese left in the centre of the maze once – and if – I ever got there.

      The only thought that was to cheer me through the long sleepless flight was that every miniature drink handed out by the smiling flight attendants took me further away from Janice. There she was, dancing around in a house that was all hers, laughing at my misfortune. She had no idea I was going to Italy, no idea that poor old Aunt Rose had sent me on a golden goose chase, and at least I could be glad about that. For if my trip failed to result in the recovery of something meaningful, I would rather she was not around to crow.

      

      We landed in Frankfurt in something resembling sunshine, and I shuffled off the plane in my flip-flops, puffy-eyed and with a chunk of apple strudel still stuck in my throat. My connecting flight to Florence was more than two hours away, and as soon as I arrived at the gate, I stretched out across three chairs and closed my eyes, head on my macramé handbag, too tired to care if anyone ran away with the rest.

      Somewhere between asleep and awake I felt a hand stroking my arm.

      ‘Ahi, ahi,’ said a voice that was a blend of coffee and smoke, ‘mi scusi!’

      I opened my eyes to see the woman sitting next to me frantically brushing crumbs off my sleeve. While I had been napping, the gate had filled up around me, and people were glancing at me the way you glance at a homeless person – with a mix of disdain and sympathy.

      ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, sitting up, ‘I’m a mess anyway.’

      ‘Here!’ She offered me half her croissant, perhaps as some kind of compensation. ‘You must be hungry.’

      I looked at her, surprised at her kindness. ‘Thanks.’

      Calling the woman elegant would be a gross understatement. Everything about her was perfectly matched; not just the colour of her lipstick and nail polish, but also the golden beetles adorning her shoes, her handbag, and on the perky little hat on her immaculately dyed hair. I strongly suspected – and her teasing smile more than confirmed – that this woman had every reason to be content with herself. Probably worth a fortune, or at least married to one,

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