“Lillie mentioned this earlier, but I think it would do us all a world of good to be volunteers,” Elise said. “I’ve become a Lunch Buddy at my grandson’s school and I really look forward to my time with Malcolm.”
“Lunch Buddy? What’s that?”
“A program for children at risk,” Elise explained. “Once a week I visit the school and have lunch with a little boy in third grade. Malcolm is a sweet-natured child, and he’s flourished under my attention. The minute I walk into the school, he races toward me as if he’s been waiting for my visit all week.”
“So the two of you have lunch?”
“Well, yes, but he also likes to show me his schoolwork. He’s struggling with reading. However, he’s trying hard, and every once in a while he’ll read to me or I’ll read to him. I’ve introduced him to the Lemony Snicket books and he’s loving those.”
“You tutor him, then?”
“No, no, he has a reading tutor. It’s not that kind of program. I’m his friend. Or more like an extra grandmother.”
The idea appealed to Anne Marie, but she didn’t know if this was the right program for her. She’d consider it. Her day off was Wednesday and every other Saturday when Theresa came into the store. She had to admit that volunteering at an elementary school would give her something to do other than feel sorry for herself.
It wasn’t a wish, exactly. Still, Elise claimed she felt better because of it. Helping someone else—perhaps that was the key.
The party broke up around nine-thirty, and after she’d waved everyone off, Anne Marie locked the front door. Then she climbed the stairs to her tiny apartment above the bookstore. Her ever-faithful Baxter was waiting for her, running circles around her legs until she bent down and lifted him up and lavished him with the attention he craved. After taking him out for a brief walk, she returned to the apartment, still thinking about the widows’ new project.
She made a cup of tea and grabbed a notepad, sitting on the couch with Baxter curled up beside her. At the top of the page she wrote:
Twenty Wishes
It took her a long time to write down the first item.
1. Find one good thing about life
She felt almost embarrassed that all she could come up with was such a plaintive, pathetic desire, one that betrayed the sorry state of her mental health. Sitting back, she closed her eyes and tried to remember what she used to dream about, the half-expressed wishes of her younger years.
She added a second item, silly though it was.
2. Buy myself a pair of red cowboy boots
In her twenties, long before she married Robert, Anne Marie had seen a pair in a display window and they’d stopped her cold. She absolutely had to have those boots. When she’d gone into the store and tried them on, they were a perfect fit. Perfect. Unfortunately the price tag wasn’t. No way could she afford $1500 for a pair of cowboy boots! With reluctance she’d walked out of the store, abandoning that small dream.
She couldn’t have afforded such an extravagance working part-time at the university bookstore. But she still thought about those boots. She still wanted them, and the price no longer daunted her as it had all those years ago. Somehow, she’d find herself a pair of decadent cowboy boots. Red ones.
Chewing on the end of her pen, she contemplated other wishes. Really, this shouldn’t be so difficult.…
It occurred to her that if she was going to buy red cowboy boots, she should think of something to do in them.
3. Learn how to line dance
She suspected line dancing might be a bit passé in Seattle—as opposed to, say, Dallas—but the good thing was that it didn’t require a partner. She could show up and just have fun without worrying about being part of a couple. She wasn’t ready for another relationship; perhaps in time, but definitely not yet. After a few minutes she crossed out the line-dancing wish. She didn’t have the energy to be sociable. She read over her first wish and scratched that out, too. She didn’t know how to gauge whether she’d actually found something good about life. It wasn’t specific enough.
A host of possibilities bounced around in her head but she didn’t bother to write any of them on her list.
Lillie was right; she needed to get her finances in order. She wrote that down on a second sheet of paper, along with getting her annual physical and—maybe—signing up for the gym. The only thing on the first sheet, her wish list, was those boots.
So now she had two separate lists—one for wishes and the second for the more practical aspects of life. Not that each wish wouldn’t ultimately require its own to-do list, but that was a concern for another day. She closed her eyes and tried to figure out what she wanted most, what wish she hoped to fulfill. The next few ideas were all sensible ones, like scheduling appointments she’d postponed for months. It was a sad commentary that her one wish, the lone desire of her heart, was an outrageously priced pair of boots.
That was the problem; she no longer knew what she wanted. Shrouded in grief and lost dreams, her joy had vanished, the same way laughter and singing had.
So far, her second list outnumbered the wish list. It included booking appointments with an accountant, an attorney, the vet and a couple of doctors. Sad, sad, sad. She could well imagine what Lillie and Barbie’s lists looked like. They’d have wonderful ideas. Places to go, experiences to savor, people to meet.
Anne Marie stared at her wish list with its one ridiculous statement, tempted to crumple it up.
She didn’t. For reasons she couldn’t explain, she left it sitting on her kitchen counter. Lists were important; she knew that. Over the years she’d read enough about goal-setting to realize the value of writing things down. In fact, the store carried a number of bestselling titles on that very topic.
Okay, this was a start. She wasn’t going to abandon the idea. And at least she’d taken control of some immediate needs. She’d identified what she had to do.
Sometime later, she’d list what she wanted to do.
She ran her finger over the word boots. Foolish, impractical, ridiculous—but she didn’t care. She was determined to have the things.
Already the thought of listing her wishes was making a difference; already she felt a tiny bit of hope, a whisper of excitement. The thawing had begun.
Eventually other desires, other wishes, would come to her. She had nineteen left. She felt as if the genie had finally escaped the lamp and was waiting to hear her greatest desires. All she had to do was listen to her own heart and as soon as she did, her wildest dreams would come true.
If only life could be that simple.
It wasn’t, of course, but Anne Marie decided she was willing to pretend.
Chapter 2
All that next week Anne Marie continued to look at her list. The sheet of paper with TWENTY WISHES written across the top became a patchwork of scribbles and scratched-out lines. She wrote I want to sing again, then changed her mind, deciding it was unnecessary to waste a wish on something she was convinced would return in its own time.
Eventually she transferred her list, such as it was, to a yellow legal pad, which somehow made her wishes seem more official. Then on Wednesday, her day off, she walked past a craft store on her way back from the accountant’s and noticed the scrapbooking supplies in the window. She stared at the beautifully embellished pages displayed in the showcase. She used to possess a certain decorative flair. She wasn’t sure she did anymore, but the idea of creating pages like that for her meager list of wishes appealed to her. A scrapbook to compile her wishes, make her plans and document her efforts.