The Aunt Who Moved In
Too Young to Understand
It did not take long for the coconut-cake version of Bertha to become the version reserved strictly for company, church, and my father.
I came in one night off a double shift at Pruitt’s Diner, my feet aching, my apron still smelling like fry oil, and dropped straight onto the couch without taking my shoes off. There was a basket of clean laundry sitting on the cushion beside me, folded, waiting to be carried upstairs. Bertha walked through, looked at the basket, looked at me, and something in her voice went cold and flat in a way I had not heard from her before.
“You’re every bit as useless as your mother was,” she said.
I thought I had misheard her. “What did you say?”
“Your mother was sweet,” she said, like she was doing me a favor by clarifying. “But she was hopeless with anything practical. Bills. Schedules. Keeping a house in order. All heart, no discipline. Looks like you came by that honest.”
My whole body went hot in a way that had nothing to do with the fry oil. “Don’t talk about her like that.”
She only shrugged, already walking toward the stairs. “Then stop giving me reasons to compare you.”
I told my father that same week. I sat down across from him at the kitchen table, the same table my mother used to roll out pie crust on, and I told him what Bertha said when he was not in the room.
He frowned at me like I had criticized his cooking. “Bertha’s been trying so hard with you, Myrtle. She’s the one who suggested we do something nice for your birthday next month.”
“I’m serious. She calls me useless. She talks about Mom like she was a burden somebody had to manage.”
The front door opened right on cue, and Bertha floated in from the church rummage sale with a box of somebody else’s donated linens, asking brightly if everything was all right in here.
My father looked at me the way you look at a kid who has just embarrassed you in front of company. “We’re fine,” he told her, and then, quieter, to me, “You’re too young to understand what it’s like to be this lonely, Myrtle. Give her a chance.”
I gave up trying to make him see it that same afternoon, and I did not try again for a long time after that, which is a decision I have had plenty of hours since to sit with.
The Engagement
They got engaged a month later, at the county fair of all places, my father down on one knee by the fried pie stand while half of Sourwood Gap looked on and clapped. I clapped too. What else was there to do.
“We want something small,” Bertha told me that same week, sitting at the kitchen table with a binder already three inches thick. “Intimate. Elegant. Nothing overdone.”
What she meant, it turned out over the following weeks, was that she wanted me to build it and her to be photographed standing in the middle of it.
The wedding budget landed somewhere around thirty-eight thousand dollars, which is a number that still does not sit easy with me in a town where most folks get married in the church fellowship hall with a sheet cake from the grocery store. My father had some money left from selling forty acres of my grandfather’s ground a few years back, money he had always talked about putting toward my schooling or a truck when I turned twenty-five. Bertha had opinions about how it should be spent, and none of those opinions involved my future.