My gaze travels from the old spice tins to the chipped bowl we use for guacamole. Mother should’ve thrown that ugly thing out after she cut her thumb on the broken edge, but somehow, there it still squats in its usual spot on the counter. I never thought of Mother as sentimental, but I’m beginning to realize there’s a lot I didn’t know about her.
Aunt Bryony positions a bell pepper on the cutting board, then starts chopping with a few slow strokes. The chopping increases in tempo until the very last slice, which she pops into her mouth.
“Mother chops the exact same way.”
She smiles at me, lost in a thought she doesn’t share. After adding the pepper to the soup pot, she rejoins me at the table and places her still-damp hand over mine. “So, are you ready to tell me why you called?”
For a split second, I forget. Then the ugly truth pours down on me. I needed advice on how to fall out of love. But now it’s too late.
I tap my nose, a nose whose only purpose now is to generate stuff for me to wipe. “I lost my nose.”
Her eyebrows go crooked. “I figured. You smell like boiled beets.”
My knee knocks into the table leg. Boiled beets—the telltale sign of desperation. “H-how? You can smell?”
“Didn’t your mother tell you? It came back.”
“Your smell came back?” I press my hands on the table to keep me steady.
She nods. “The salt killed off all the old nose receptors and it took about four years to grow them back, but now they’re stronger than ever, just like how agapanthus becomes more hardy when you cut them down to their crowns. Aromateurs have always been good at adaptation.”
“But sometimes, if you cut the agapanthus down too severely, it just dies.”
“No, no. You can still smell this soup, can’t you?” I nod. “Your agapanthus didn’t die. And you’ll be able to go into the ocean whenever you want now.”
“The ocean?”
She looks at the wagon-wheel lamp that hangs from the ceiling. “What exactly did your mother tell you about me?”
“She said you almost drowned. And then you lost your nose because you fell in love.”
She leans her forearms against the table ledge. “You do know what a lie smells like, don’t you?”
“Of course. She wasn’t lying.”
“But I made it very clear in my letter.”
Letter? Mother mentioned that Aunt Bryony had written her a letter, but she threw it away. If it was something important, she could have told me in person. She never came, of course. “I don’t think she read it.”
A gasp rattles my aunt’s throat and she’s back to staring at the wagon-wheel lamp. “Someone yelled ‘Whales!’ and Dahli wouldn’t hand over the damn binoculars. So there I was, craning my neck to see the sights, and the next thing I know, I am the sights. I must have drunk half the sea by the time Michael hauled me out.”
I press my finger to a throbbing point on my temple as the coincidences line up. We both nearly drowned. We both lost our nose. “So the ocean—?”
“It’s all the salt in it. The seawater literally shocks the nasal passages out of commission. That’s why aromateurs are not supposed to swim.”
“Then it’s not because I kissed Court Sawyer.”
She smiles. “Nope. Michael and I will soon be celebrating twenty years of marriage, and my nose works better than ever, probably even better than Dahli’s. She was always the better nose growing up. I can even eat salty foods now.”
“But Larkspur’s Last Word says not to fall in love.”
“Larkspur was a bit of a drama queen. How can anyone prohibit an act that is as natural as breathing? She just wanted us to watch out for conflicts of interest.”
“So there’s no jinx.”
“Nope. Besides, if she was going to jinx us, don’t you think she would’ve mentioned it?”
It all sounds so reasonable, the way she explains it. A knocking starts up between my ears, like the beginning of a headache. I grip the edge of my seat and feel the soft wood give under my fingernails. So I could have had a relationship with Court, assuming I hadn’t botched it up so royally by lying to him.
“Did you try to contact Mother again after the letter?”
Aunt Bryony snorts and sets an elbow on the table. “I called her, but she never picked up. I figured she was still mad, and so I left her alone.”
“How long ago was the phone call?”
“Seventeen years.”
My tea goes down the wrong pipe.
She sniffs. “The ball was in her court.” She sucks in her bottom lip, the way Mother does when she’s brooding. “Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself. Obviously, she didn’t want the gift.”
So if Mother had just read the letter, I might have grown up with an aunt. Why had Mother never reached out to her sister in the years following? Wasn’t she concerned, or at least curious? Perhaps there are some injuries for which even the greatest aromateurs cannot self-heal. My heart sags in my chest, and for the first time since Mother left for Oman, I miss her.
Not long after eating Aunt Bryony’s soup, I go limp as an unwatered Gerbera daisy and can’t stop yawning. Aunt Bryony follows me into my bedroom. The bright colors of the quilt kaleidoscope together in my tired mind. She regards the quilt a moment, then pulls it back.
I drop down into bed. “Thanks for letting me borrow it.”
“It’s yours, Mimsy. I have no one to pass it down to. Just think, you might have twins one day.”