“Lola,” I say quietly. “You get that I didn’t really know Blix, right? I’ve had maybe three conversations with her in my whole life. And then she goes and does this. I don’t know what to think. Noah was positive the place should go to him and his family, and I can’t say I disagree with him.”
Her face darkens, and she picks up a knife and waves it around in the air. “No! Blix would not want to hear anything about that! She calls Noah an unevolved scoundrel—and trust me on this, she did not want him to end up with this place—and I’ve gotta tell you, somewhere, in whatever realm she’s in, she knows you’re letting him stay here now, and she’ll probably be all up in things trying to get you to change your mind. If there’s any way she can reach you from the afterlife, that is, and I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“Wait,” I say. “Is it because he wanted a divorce? Because—”
“No. It was all long-ago stuff—her entire family has always been so condescending, ever since her father died. He was her champion,” she says. “Blix was pure love, and they couldn’t see that. They treated her with such disrespect, and finally she got fed up with it. No way was she going to leave them her house!”
She hands me a knife. “Are you good at this? I’ve never done it without Blix, so I’m just faking it. But the main thing is, Blix says she knows you. She’s unexplainable, always doing the thing you’d least expect. I say to her, ‘Blix, nobody’s going to benefit when you go around trying to remake somebody’s whole life for them without their permission,’ and then she says, ‘I have my reasons for what I do.’ I feel like my whole thirty-something years with her has been and still is one big argument. In between the fun, of course.”
“Do you know you always talk about Blix in the present tense?”
“That’s because she’s right here with us. I know you feel it, too.”
I slice into one of the pumpkins, take off the stem, and lay it on the table. I haven’t done this since I was a kid, but I used to love cutting designs into the pumpkins. My mother was always telling me to cut out triangle eyes and mouths, but I liked doing spirals and curlicues.
“Know what I’m going to miss?” Lola says after a while. “It sounds crazy, but it’s the dinner parties. Blix and Houndy gave the best—”
“Houndy, the lobsterman? What happened to him?”
“He was her true love. They were together for over twenty years, but then in the summer, she was giving a party to say good-bye to everybody because she knew she was going to die soon, and Houndy died right at the party. Dropped dead just like that.” She takes off her glasses and wipes at her eyes with a napkin.
“Oh!”
“Yeah, it was quite a shock to her. To all of us. I think he just couldn’t face the idea of life without her, so he went first. They were something together. Only people I ever knew whose priority was just to be happy, no matter what. Most people don’t have the knack for that day in and day out, you know. But they did. They danced. They gave dinner parties. Oh my goodness, those parties! Blix was a marvelous cook, but she was even better at knowing who needed to be there to share it with her. She’d just meet people on the street and become fast friends. They had musicians and poets and homeless people and shopkeepers. People would come again and again.” Her eyes are shining with tears. She gets up to pour the tea into the cups and brings them over to the table.
“And they’d do just about anything,” she says. “That was the thing that struck me the most. Never thought of how old they were, or if they were sick. They had all the usual aches and pains, and Blix, as it turned out, had that tumor. And yet she’s out there in the ocean, skinny-dipping, even in her eighties! Traveling all over. Then there was the year she taught herself the harmonica and she’d go to bars and play it. To bars! Right there with the young people, the hipsters, like she was one of them. And it wasn’t like she was just pulling some cute old-lady routine. She fixed them up with their partners and gave them advice and dragged them home with her. Bought them presents. And Houndy—oh, that Houndy—he gave out lobsters like they were nothing more than old rocks he’d happened to find on the beach.”
“I’d love to be like that.”
She puts her hands in her lap and looks wistfully at me. “You know, when you watch people like that live, you start to realize that the rest of us are just counting off the days until we die. They were the experts at life.”
I slice a paisley shape into the center of my pumpkin. “She rescued me at Noah’s parents’ house at Christmas. I made kind of an idiot of myself, and she just swooped in and made everything all right for me. Got me laughing. Telling me outrageous stories, making me laugh.”
Lola’s face scrunches up while she works on the eyes for her pumpkin. She does standard-issue jack-o’-lantern triangle eyes. “Oh, yes! I heard all about that. She was so excited when she came back. She was just stunned to find you. She told me how you reminded her so much of herself at your age.” She tilts her head at me like she’s trying to see if I’m anything like Blix, which I know I’m not. “I think she came home full of ideas about you.”
“But look at me, Lola! You can see that I am nothing like her! Nothing! She got it all wrong about me. I’m the least . . . able person that I know. I’m not even brave. Not the tiniest bit brave.” I fling my arm out and knock over my cup of tea, and have to run to the sink for a sponge to wipe it all up.
Lola moves the newspapers aside and says, “None of that matters to Blix. I’m her best friend, but she’s miles ahead of me. For God’s sake, I was a secretary for the board of education for forty-two years, a place Blix wouldn’t have put up with for one red-hot minute. And”—she lowers her voice and leans toward me—“you know how many men I’ve slept with in my life? Exactly one! The man I was married to for forty-seven years—a trustee for the railroad. I didn’t dance in the streets. I didn’t go skinny-dipping, and if I had, believe me, the cops would have showed up and hauled me away. We just have to trust what Blix sees in us, maybe.” Then her expression changes. “Also, aren’t you a matchmaker? She told me you’re a matchmaker.”
“I don’t know. Am I? I mean, sometimes I do sort of see when people should be together. But it’s not—I don’t really know how to make it happen, you know. I just know that it should happen.”
Lola is smiling. “I think one of the things you might want to be prepared for is that you’re not going to get to stay ordinary. She said you have a big life ahead of you.”
I grimace. “Yeah, she told me that, too. But I’m afraid there are things she didn’t know about me. I mean, I’m appreciative and all about getting the house, but I can’t stay here,” I say to her. “I’ve gotten involved with my old high school boyfriend. I’m actually scheduled to get married when I go back home. He’s a physical therapist with a practice in Florida, and we’ve got this whole life that we’re planning on. Blix didn’t know that was happening, you see . . .”
Lola is still smiling her unwavering smile and nodding up and down like nothing I’m saying makes one bit of difference.