Aunt Dimity's Good Deed by Nancy Atherton
For
Mark G. McMenamin,
Patron of the Arts
1.
They say that three wishes are never enough, and maybe what they say is true. There’d been a time when, given a genie and a lamp, I’d have wished for nothing more than a job I didn’t hate and a rent-controlled apartment in the part of Boston that reminded me of England, a country I’d loved since childhood.
My third wish—the result, no doubt, of a dreary first marriage and an even drearier divorce—would have been for a more or less stable relationship with a guy who wasn’t a total creep, who would tell me the truth at least as often as he picked up his socks. Back then no one could have accused me of having great expectations. In those days my wildest dreams were so tame they’d eat out of your hand.
But when Aunt Dimity died, all of my wishes came true in ways I’d never dreamt possible. Aunt Dimity left me a honey-colored cottage that actually was in England, and enough money to ensure that I’d never have to work again. She also saw to it that her will was administered by a guy who was not only honest and scrupulously considerate about his socks, but head over heels in love with me.
Thanks to Aunt Dimity, I’d had a fairy-tale courtship, complete with a Handsome Prince—for so Bill Willis appeared to me, though he was neither handsome nor a prince—and a cozy, honey-colored castle in which he had finally popped the question. It all happened so quickly, so effortlessly, that I’d fallen deeply in love with Bill before I knew who he really was. And maybe that’s where I made my mistake.
Because the trouble with a fairy-tale romance is everything that comes after. I’d been married before, so I wasn’t naive—I knew we’d run into rough seas on occasion—but I never suspected that my own sweet Bill would try to sink the boat.
I thought I knew all there was to know about him. During our time together in Aunt Dimity’s cottage, I watched expectantly for a fatal character flaw to surface, but it never did. Despite his slightly warped sense of humor, Bill Willis had been a comfortable, easygoing companion, a genuinely decent guy, and he remained that way—as long as we were in the cottage.
The problem was that I’d never observed Bill in his natural environment. I’d never seen him sitting behind his desk during regular working hours. He’d been on a vacation of sorts when I’d met him, a long leave of absence from his family’s law firm—a condition of Aunt Dimity’s will—and our courtship had taken place in strange and romantic surroundings. It had been a wonderful idyll, but it had in no way prepared me for life back in the States, where my relaxed and carefree fiance became a work-obsessed, absentee husband.
Even our honeymoon had been interrupted by a flurry of faxes from the firm. It had seemed amusing at the time, but in retrospect I saw it as an early sign of less amusing things to come.
Bill’s native habitat wasn’t a cozy cottage, after all. He’d grown up in the Willis mansion, a national historic landmark occupying some of the priciest real estate in downtown Boston. We lived with Bill’s father, William Willis, Sr., in the mansion’s west wing and central block, but the east wing was devoted to the offices of Willis & Willis, one of the oldest and most prestigious law firms in New England. Willis & Willis could trace its roots back to before the Revolution, and so could most of its clientele, a fusty lot of old Bostonians whose litigious habits had made the Willis family rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Bill had been born to serve a demanding bunch of blue-bloods, and the moment we got back to Boston, he vaulted into an endless round of phone calls, meetings, luncheons, banquets, and paperwork. Up before dawn and in bed after midnight, Bill ran like a rat in a cage, losing weight and adding lines of worry to a brow I seldom had the opportunity to smooth.