Afternoon sunshine makes the garden glow by the time I drop my bike in our courtyard. The light catches the droplets from our water misters and turns them into fireworks. I shuffle into the kitchen, where Aunt Bryony’s dropping vegetables into a pot of heating water.
She smiles at me. “You’re back just in time. Sit down.”
I pour myself onto a chair.
“What possessed her to paint all the cupboards blue? It’s damn depressing.”
“They’ve always been blue.” Like her clothes. Like her.
“Not always. They used to be buttercup yellow.” She plucks the seven spices from the cabinet used to make Seven-Spice Soup. I watch her moving about the kitchen with ease. She knows where everything is.
“Your mother still keeps them all separate, I see. She could save a lot of time by putting all seven in the same bottle, but no shortcuts for your mother.” She taps one of the containers with her fingernail. “Still even using the same rusty tins.”
A bubble of defensiveness rises up, even though I know she means no offense. “We need to live frugally.”
She hooks an eyebrow. “Please. She could sell these for a hundred times what we bought them for. The vintage look is very popular right now. The more banged up, the better.”
“Maybe she doesn’t know.”
She shakes her head. “Dahli did always have trouble letting things go.”
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 cameback?” 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.”
