and motivation—and a list might just do that. She was a list-maker anyway, but this would be different. It wouldn’t be the usual catalog of appointments and everyday obligations.
“Personally I don’t need another to-do list,” Lillie murmured, echoing Anne Marie’s thought. “I have enough of those already.”
“This wouldn’t be like that,” Anne Marie responded, glancing at Elise for verification. “This would be a…an inventory of wishes,” she said, thinking out loud. She recognized that there were plenty of shoulds involved in widowhood; her friends were right about that. She did need to get her financial affairs in order and pay attention to her health.
“Twenty wishes,” she said suddenly.
“Why twenty?” Elise asked, leaning forward, her interest obvious.
“I’m not sure. It sounds right.” Anne Marie shrugged lightly. The number had leaped into her head, and she didn’t know quite why. Twenty. Twenty wishes that would help her recapture her excitement about life. Twenty dreams written down. Twenty possibilities that would give her a reason to look toward the future instead of staying mired in her grief. She couldn’t continue to drag from one day to the next, lost in pain and heartache because Robert was dead. She needed a new sense of purpose. She owed that to herself—and to him.
“Twenty wishes,” Barbie repeated slowly. “I think that works. Twenty’s a manageable number. Not like a hundred, say.”
“And it’s not too few—like two or three,” her mother said.
Anne Marie could tell that her friends were taking the idea seriously, which only strengthened her own certainty about it. “Wishes and hopes for the future.”
“Let’s do it!” Lillie proclaimed.
Barbie sat up straighter in her chair. “You should learn French,” she said, smiling at Anne Marie.
“French?”
“For when you’re in Paris.”
“I had two years of French in high school.” However, about all she remembered was how to conjugate the verbs être and avoir.
“Take a refresher course.” Barbie slid onto the edge of her cushion.
“Maybe I will.”
“I might learn how to belly dance,” Barbie said next.
The others looked at her with expressions of surprise; Anne Marie grinned in approval.
“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
