The Aunt Who Moved In

The Woman Who Wore My Mother’s Perfume

Bertha arrived on a Friday with two suitcases, a hatbox, and a smell of gardenia that I would later realize she had started wearing sometime in the last eleven months, a scent close enough to my mother’s old one that it stopped me cold the first time she hugged me in the driveway.

“Look at you,” she said, holding on a beat longer than felt natural. “You’re the spitting image of your mother at your age.”

She was, on the surface of things, a pleasant woman. She brought a coconut cake to the church potluck her second Sunday in town and had three different women from the quilting circle asking for the recipe by the time the paper plates ran out. She complimented my father’s shirts. She laughed at the right places in other people’s stories. Sourwood Gap is not a big town, and word got around fast that Linwood’s sister-in-law was a real sweetheart, helping him through the hardest year of his life.

She was a different woman entirely once my father’s truck cleared the end of our gravel drive.

The first time I saw it happen, I almost convinced myself I had imagined it. She had been telling my father goodbye at the door, all warmth, her hand resting on his arm the way you’d rest it on something you intended to keep. The second the truck’s taillights disappeared past the mailbox, her whole face just closed, the way a barn door swings shut on its own weight once nothing is propping it open anymore.

She turned, saw me standing in the kitchen doorway, and for one unguarded second there was nothing on her face at all. No warmth. No performance. Just a flat, appraising look, the kind you’d give a piece of furniture you were deciding whether to keep.

Then it passed, and she asked if I’d started the coffee, and I told myself I had imagined the whole thing.

I had not imagined it. I would spend the next few months learning exactly how real it was.