Aunt Dimity Goes West Read Online Free Page A

then slipped
    quietly out of the bedroom and went downstairs to
    the study. It would have been pointless for me to stay
    in bed. I wouldn’t have been able to close my eyes if I’d missed my nightly private chat with Aunt Dimity.
    A private chat was the only kind of chat I could
    have with Aunt Dimity. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t
    ashamed to be seen with her. She was the most intelli-
    gent, compassionate, and courageous woman I knew,
    but there was simply no getting around the fact that
    she wasn’t, strictly speaking, alive.
    To complicate matters further, Aunt Dimity wasn’t
    my aunt. She was an Englishwoman named Dimity
    Westwood, and she’d been my late mother’s closest
    friend. The two women had met in London while
    serving their respective countries during the Second
    World War. When the war ended and my mother
    Aunt Dimity Goes West
    19
    returned to the States, they continued their friendship
    by sending hundreds of letters back and forth across
    the Atlantic.
    Those letters meant the world to my mother. After
    my father’s early death, she’d raised me on her own
    while working full time as a schoolteacher. She hadn’t
    had an easy life, but the hard times had been softened
    by her correspondence with Dimity. The letters my
    mother sent and received became a refuge for her, a
    place where she could go when the twin burdens of
    widowhood and single motherhood became too heavy
    for her to bear.
    My mother kept her refuge a closely held secret,
    even from her only child. She never whispered a word
    to me about her old friend or the letters that meant so
    much to her. As a child I knew Dimity Westwood only
    as Aunt Dimity, the redoubtable heroine of a series of
    bedtime stories invented by my mother.
    I didn’t learn the truth about Dimity Westwood
    until after she and my mother had died, when Dimity
    bequeathed to me a considerable fortune, the honey-
    colored cottage in which she’d grown up, the precious
    letters she and my mother had exchanged, and a curi-
    ous blue leather-bound journal with blank pages. It
    was through the blue journal that I’d come to know
    Dimity not as a fictional heroine, but as a very real—
    some would say surreal—friend.
    Whenever I opened the journal, Dimity’s hand-
    writing would appear, an old-fashioned copperplate
    taught in the village school at a time when little girls
    20
    Nancy Atherton
    still dressed in pinafores. I’d nearly come unglued the
    first time Dimity greeted me from beyond the grave,
    but one mention of my mother’s name had been
    enough to reassure me that her intentions toward me
    were kindly. I’d long since come to regard her as my
    most cherished confidante, and I hoped the day would
    never come when the pages of the journal remained
    blank.
    The study was a bit messier than usual, strewn with
    papers that should have been filed at Bill’s office. I tidied them into neat piles and placed them beside his
    laptop on the old oak desk beneath the ivy-covered
    window. Once the room was in order, I turned to say
    hello to a small, pink flannel rabbit named Reginald,
    who spent most of his time perched in a special niche
    on the study’s bookshelves.
    The sight of a grown woman conversing with a pink
    flannel rabbit might strike some people as odd, but to
    me it was as natural as breathing. Reginald had been
    at my side for as long as I could remember. I’d shared
    moments of triumph, woe, and everything in between
    with him for nearly forty years, and I wasn’t about to
    stop now.
    “Hey, Reg,” I said, touching the faded grape-juice
    stain on his snout. “Ever picture yourself in a cow-
    boy hat?”
    Reginald’s black button eyes glimmered in a way
    that seemed to say, if only to me, that he’d never in his life imagined himself wearing anything as silly as a
    cowboy hat, but that, if I insisted, he’d put up with it.
    Aunt Dimity Goes West
    21
    “Don’t worry,” I said. “I don’t think they make them
    in your size.”
    Reginald