Always by Amy Richie Page B

should be happy today. Maybe I would have never been exactly happy marrying Edmund, but excited to start a new life.
    A single tear seeped from the corner of my eye and slid off my nose down to the bed. What kind of a situation had I gotten myself into?
    I had always been a respectable young woman–hadn’t Uncle Philip and Aunt Dora always said that? Were they disappointed in me now? What would they say if Edmund called off the wedding?
    I closed my eyes, trying to rid myself of my disturbing self-loathing. As soon as my eyes closed, I could see Marcus so clearly in my head that it made my heart ache.
    I remembered the way he had looked yesterday by the river, the way he had smiled and teased me. I had never before felt so comfortable with someone else. I knew I would never feel like that with Edmund. The most I could hope for was a comfortable sort of friendship.
    Maybe it would be better if Edmund refused to have me. I would live my life alone, but maybe that would be better. I sniffed several times, trying to stop the now steady flow of tears.
    I suddenly wished, more than anything else, that my mother were there. I closed my eyes briefly to remember how she’d looked the last day I’d seen her before the sickness got her. She had been standing just outside the front door of our house in her bare feet, her hand resting firmly on her hip. The sun glared perfectly off her wild mane of hair, so much like my own, showing off the red highlights perfectly. She’d smiled as me and papa approached hand in hand.
    I opened my eyes and puffed out my cheeks. Aunt Dora had been wonderful to me, but I really missed my mother in that moment. I sluggishly rolled myself off the bed. When my feet hit the floor, I had to use all my strength not to let my body follow.
    In my vanity drawer, shoved all the way into a forgotten corner, was my mother’s locket. I hadn’t looked at the locket in so many years. I released the latch and it swung open to reveal two tiny images. My mother smiled at me from the right side. It was so real that I could almost hear her laughter again.
    My father didn’t smile in his image. He tried to look serious and strong. In real life, father smiled and laughed often. Our times around the dinner table were some of my fondest memories.
    I lightly traced around the metal edges of the locket with my finger. What advice would Mama give to me?
    She had married my father for love. She had been happy in her life, I was sure of it. Even though her life had been cut short by a cruel illness, Mama had not regretted the decision to follow Father on his adventure.
    She would have wanted the same for me, her daughter. What would my life have been like if I had grown up in the States with my parents? Would I have already found someone to marry? Would I have been more like my mother?
    My mother had been willful to a fault. Aunt Dora had told me hours worth of stories from her childhood with Mama. As a child, I loved to curl up beside Aunt Dora and let her words paint pictures in my head of the mother I was desperate not to forget. As I got older though, Aunt Dora took her place in my heart. Instead of always thinking of my mother, I began to try to please Aunt Dora. The things she enjoyed, I also took pleasure in.
    My Aunt Dora was the opposite of what my mother had been. She never took her shoes off and waded through the creek; she held Mama’s shoes for her, and she never felt the wind through her wild hair on the bare back of a horse; she watched through half squinted eyes as Mama did.
    Aunt Dora was respectable and proper–and so was I. I sat up straighter in my seat. With a last look at the smile that was too much like my own, I shut the locket and slid it back in its place at the back of my drawer.
    I was not like my mother, I was like my Aunt Dora, and I would be content with a marriage to Edmund Harris, I told myself firmly.
    At least all that had been true three days ago, before I met Marcus Letrell.

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