Page 35 of Later Bloom

“I find you interesting no matter what, sweetheart. Being your aunt’ll do that to me.” For a moment she seems to weigh her words a little more heavily. She sighs. “I just want you to live, and enjoy your time here, and I guess I didn’t think about that when I invited you over, that there would have to be more to it than this place. I should’ve thought about that before. I think I was just excited to have someone here with me.”

“I’m not a ten-year-old, Lou.”

“I’d argue against that.”

They laugh. Aubrey says, “I mean, I get it, but I’m a grown woman. I think maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do. I actually like staying in, believe it or not. I know people seem a little more intriguing when you know less about them. But let me spoil it for you, I didn’t do much back home, either. I’ve always found it a little exhausting to come up with things I enjoy doing. Like it’s a chore. I’m not sure who decided watching TV isn’t good enough.”

Louise snorts. She looks happy like this. “That’s fine,” she says. “I just want you happy, ridiculous as it sounds.”

“Well, don’t we all.”

They share identical smiles. Louise looks her over. “You’re not dating much.” It’s an observation, a fact, and Aubrey isn’t sure how she’s meant to take it. Louise is quick to add, “Sorry, I guess I just thought you did a bit more. You used to tell me often about the guys you met. It was nice, reading about it.”

“Right. I haven’t been going out much, no. I don’t know, it comes and goes.” Aubrey folds her knee up to her chest on the chair and rests her chin on her leg. “Do you sometimes worry we talk too much about men?”

“Well, not lately.”

Their laughter echoes at the exact same time their guests laugh from the dining room. Soon they should go check on them, but Aubrey can’t bring herself to get up. “Maggie keeps saying I should get a hobby, or laid. She told me I need to mess up more with men. That I’m too careful.”

“I want to say you can’t be too careful in love, but I don’t think that’s true. Maybe you’re too careful with your heart. I think—well, what do I know, really. I always told myself I’d prefer spending too much time by myself, if there’s such a thing at all, than in company I’ll end up regretting. But it’s hard, isn’t it? It’s like fighting a current, feeling like you’re not living right. And what if you’re not allowing yourself to have fun, and what if you’re not giving things a real chance?”

Aubrey watches the creases at the corner of Louise’s eyes when she smiles. She asks, “So it doesn’t go away then, with time?”

“It gets better. It also gets more specific. The more time you spend living, the more unique the experience gets to you personally, doesn’t it? So you relate less, but you also compare less, you care less. You get used to the idea, sure. But you don’t get so used to everyone else poking at you with their questions and worries and concerns. I think you learn to say ’I’m happy’ faster, like a reflex. I still care some. It comes and goes, like you said. I tell myself I shouldn’t. But I care very much for you, for your future. More than I thought I would.” Louise picks up Aubrey’s empty plate and sets it over hers, then stacks the cutlery on top of that. “God, anyway. Being a person’s just not linear, that’s what it is.”

It’s no promise that things will be okay, but it’s something. Probably the best Aubrey will get out of Louise. It’s dark in the kitchen now. The days are so much shorter in October. “I guess there’s no figuring it out,” she says.

Louise scoots over to stroke her hair. “What we’re missing is experience, baby. It’s what eats away at doubt and replaces it with the confidence to try. When you’ve got experience, you learn you’ll be fine no matter what. But you’ve got to mess up first to get there.”

“Mm. I’m not so good at that.”

“So Maggie might be onto something, then. Maybe messing up is what’s missing.”

“Well, I’ve tried.” When Aubrey says that, she thinks of the last few months, but she thinks of years ago, too. She thinks of bonfires and the forest. Louise squeezes the side of her shoulder.

“Try some more, let me know how it goes. Now’s a good time, too. Get a few mistakes in before the cold sets in. There’s never a better season to stay in and mope than winter.”

They clean up the dishes. The air is a little lighter now, but in the days that follow the silence would still linger.

That night, Aubrey lays in bed and pulls up old pictures from her laptop—grainy digitals from the last summer she worked at camp and tried, more desperately than she ever had, to gain experience.

Chapter Eleven

Nine years earlier

She’s freshly nineteen and it’s just past 11:00 p.m. on a humid summer night. When the sun is up, her name is Ladybug—the theme this year is bugs. Maggie is Jitterbug, Amanda is Bumblebee. But at night they make bonfires behind the small lodge cabins where the kids sleep, and they laugh and smoke weak joints and forget what their bug names are. It’s irresponsible, like it’s meant to be. The air smells so specifically like summer, like dirt and sunblock and wet grass, and crickets fill a silence that never quite settles.

They’re a group of about twenty counselors, but right now only half of them are gathered in a mess of a circle, the others sleeping or hanging out in pairs a little further away, by the lake. They’ve yet to blow out all the torches, so the pebble path weaving through the cabins is still lit by dancing flames. Aubrey wears an old sweatshirt that used to be her dad’s. She sits by herself on a mossy log, her fingers sticky from eating marshmallows.

“We just used to be so dumb,” this guy Sam is saying from across the circle, laughing at something one of his kids said today. His hair is on the longer side and flips up at the back of his head, and he’s got a ridiculous jawline. All the girls talk about him and squeal, and Aubrey laughs at them, but secretly she agrees. She’s always trying to catch his eye.

She calls back at him, “You do realize you’ll probably say this about yourself now when you’re thirty-five, yeah?”

He laughs and dips his head to the side, which Aubrey assumes means he agrees.

“Two of my kids are already telling everyone they’re a couple.” Justin, a redhead who shaved his head on a dare two weeks into the summer, sits with his knees drawn to his chest and his fingers tapping rhythmically against his shins. “Gotta start them young, am I right?”

Everyone laughs. Justin’s got a group of thirteen and fourteen-year-olds this week. Aubrey smiles and says nothing.