Read Online Remembering Me by Diane Chamberlain - Free Book Online

liked to go out to dinner or the theater. Not Aunt Jane, who would not even set foot in the backyard. She didn’t care about being married, she said, and what did she need her own children for when she had Sarah? But the truth was, ever since Aunt Jane had been a teenagerherself, she had flown into a panic each time she ventured outside the house. It would certainly be hard to meet a man, and harder still to date, when you couldn’t go out your own front door.
    Sarah liked that her aunt was always stuck at home, even though she knew she was selfish for feeling that way. Aunt Jane had been the one constant, loving person in her life. Always home, always ready with a hug and a loving word. But as Sarah grew older, she began to feel sorry for her aunt. People called her crazy, but Sarah knew that, like herself, Aunt Jane had a very thick skin.
    Aunt Jane had wanted to be a nurse, but mental illness struck while she was in nursing school and she never got to complete the program. She took pleasure, though, in passing on all she’d learned to her niece. She taught Sarah to make beds with hospital corners, take a pulse and temperature, and give sponge baths. Sarah loved her lessons, and she grew to love the idea of being a nurse herself. She’d have to study hard in high school, Aunt Jane warned her, to be able to go to nursing school.
    It was good that Sarah had her studies to attend to because she had little in the way of a social life. She had plenty of girlfriends, but the boys were studious in their avoidance of her. She’d be walking down the street, and a boy walking toward her would seem interested in her, but as he’d get nearer, he would quickly avert his eyes. And if there were two boys, she’d see them talking and snickering about her. It wasn’t that she was disfigured in any way. She was simply, unequivocally, homely, with a long, pointed nose and too little chin. New hairstyles, new makeup—nothing seemed to make much of a difference.
    “You don’t need a man in your life to be happy,” Aunt Jane told her once. “But you do need work, and it should be workthat involves you with people. Why, I’d go mad without you and your parents to look after.”
    That was the first time Sarah realized her aunt didn’t know that most people considered her quite mad already. But those people didn’t know her the way Sarah did. If Aunt Jane was crazy, then all the world should be crazy. Everyone would be much better off.
    So, Sarah decided she would be a nurse. She felt half trained as one, anyway, by her senior year of high school. Just before graduation, she learned that she’d earned the highest grades of anyone in her class and would be making the speech at the commencement ceremony.
    She begged Aunt Jane to come to her graduation. “You’ve helped me so much to get where I am,” she told her aunt one night when she was helping her iron the squares of fabric. “I want you to be there,” she said. “It would mean so much to me.”
    Aunt Jane put the iron down and studied her niece. “You’re closer to me than anyone in the world,” she said softly, “and yet even you don’t understand. I can’t do it, Sarah. I simply can’t.”
    “Please,” Sarah pleaded. “Please try, for me?”
    In the end, Aunt Jane agreed to try, but her effort turned out to be a terrible mistake. She, Sarah and Sarah’s parents had to take the trolley to a street a few blocks from the school. From there, they would walk the rest of the way. But by the time the four of them stepped off the streetcar, Aunt Jane was crying. She sat down on a bench and said, “Take me home, take me home,” over and over again. Her body trembled. There was no way to comfort her and no way to cajole her into continuing. Her panic frightened Sarah. She had never seen it before, because as long as she’d known her, Aunt Jane had stayed within the safe confines of the house.
    “I knew this was a mistake,” Sarah’s father muttered.
    Sarah finally