Aunt Doro greeted Doug and Kelly in the front room. "Welcome back, Kelly," she said. "I've made some fruit salad if the two of you would like some dessert before you disappear upstairs."
Doug was used to the mischievous gleam in the old woman's eyes, but Kelly was taken aback. "Oh, Aunt Doro, I wasn't – sorry, I guess I shouldn't call you that, but –"
"Nonsense, darling, any friend of Doug's is welcome to call me Aunt Doro," she reassured Kelly. "In any event, I certainly didn't wish to make you uncomfortable. I hope Doug has let you know that you are welcome to stay the night here if you wish. I shouldn't want him to get lonely here now that all his friends from high school have gone."
"I hadn't told her yet, Aunt Doro," Doug said. "It hadn't come up."
"Always the gentleman, that's my Doug," Aunt Doro said to Kelly with an approving nod at Doug.
"I'm coming to appreciate that," Kelly admitted. "Thank you, Aunt Doro. And I'd love some of that fruit cocktail if it's okay with Doug?"
Doug had no objection, and they were soon seated at the kitchen table while Aunt Doro ladled out the diced fruit. "So how has your week been at the restaurant, Kelly?" she asked as she worked.
"Had today off, thank heavens," Kelly said. "I got to spend the day on the beach instead of just looking at it, that was great. Yesterday was rough, though. Doug, have you told her?"
"No," Doug said. "We had a really nasty altercation with Mr. Sanborn," he told Aunt Doro.
"No surprise there," Aunt Doro said. "Guess I've told you both already, that man never had any respect for anyone. Always very self-important, even when he was screaming about peace and love all the time." A pause, and then she looked at Kelly. "I always used him as an example when Doug got to pining for the sixties and feeling like he missed out on the age of love. It wasn't always like what you young kids hear."
"I get that, Aunt Doro, I promise," Doug said.
"Do you really?" she asked him.
"I think he's learning, Aunt Doro," Kelly piped up. "We've been talking about some...things, and I think he's learned a lot."
"Good for you, then," Aunt Doro replied, now sitting down with her share of the dessert.
"And he went to bat for me with Mr. Sanborn yesterday, too," Kelly continued. "He ordered Doug to write me up for a comment I made that he really deserved, and Doug handled it perfectly."
"Good for you, Doug!" Aunt Doro exclaimed. "His heart usually is in the right place," she told Kelly. "Always has been. Living with his grandmother and me, he never did want for strong women in his life, after all. It's just that he had some very unrealistic ideas of what life was like in the past. Honestly, Kelly, you probably do too. I doubt any girl your age really knows what it was like for women back then."
"I'm trying to learn too," Kelly said, flashing a knowing grin at Doug.
"Now, your friend Mr. Sanborn," Aunt Doro continued. "I don't suppose I even want to know what he said. But whatever it was, dear, I know exactly why he felt entitled to say it. So many years back in the day he was surrounded by women who put up with him because that's what they'd been taught to do, and it certainly went to his head. Back when he was a student here, class of sixty-one, you remember, that was before the boys wore their hair long, and he was clean cut and all but he had a big mouth even then. Always taking charge in the classroom like he owned the place, talking about the downtrodden and disenfranchised and about going down South to do his part. The girls loved it of course, and they used to follow him around like puppies even then. His wife, Meg, she was the most enamored of all, naturally. Hung on his every word."
"And I'm sure by the hippie days he was practically a cult leader," Kelly said.
"It looked that way sometimes," Aunt Doro said. "He and Meg were married by then, and they'd had their adventures out in California – Meg still won't talk much about what happened out there – and they lived in the old Templeton mansion up at the far end of the beach. It's a bunch of condos now. Back then the place was a wreck and they lived like a bunch of pigs. Doug's grandmother and I used to see Meg on the street and she just looked dead inside from living in that hovel, but Jimmy was always on about how they were living like the kings of the disenfranchised, finding the one true answer and all that hippie garbage. He even used to harangue people about it on the beach, especially the young ladies."
"Even though he was married?" Doug said. "I mean, that doesn't surprise me much, but..."
"Yes, Doug, even though he was married," Aunt Doro confirmed. "Mary Aston, class of sixty-four, she lived with them for a time, and she told me once how Jimmy would sweet-talk the naïve young college girls here for the summer that they were selling out to the oppressive imperialist government if they didn't sleep with him."
"And that worked?!" Kelly said.
"More often than you might think," Aunt Doro told her. "You can't know, because you weren't around back then, just how backwards a lot of men still were. Freedom and equality was all great for men, but the women were still expected to do the cooking and cleaning. And Meg did, at the Templeton place. Mary as well, she told me. The whole lot of them waited on their men hand and foot even as the men talked about the coming revolution and setting people free, if you can imagine that."
"Geez," grumbled Doug.
"I told you feminism started later than you think," Kelly said.
"She's right, Doug, it did," Aunt Doro confirmed. "Mary and some of the other women there, they did see the light after a while, and most of the other hippies went off to find other things to do with their lives after a few years. But not Jimmy and Meg. He stuck with his long hair and beard and his larger than life attitude for years, and he never left town and she never worked up the courage to leave him."
"Didn't you say she wanted to go off and see the world?" Doug asked.
"I did, and she did want to," Aunt Doro confirmed. "But Doug, I think she was so used to being under his thumb, she never really tried to make her own way. Jimmy was perfectly content to hang around the beach for most of his life, tossing off his opinions to anyone who would listen, and there's always an impressionable young woman somewhere who will listen, and I think Meg was afraid to go off on her own because then she would lose him for good, and even sharing him was better than being on her own, that's what she thought. They've been together since she was fifteen, after all."
"That's so sad," Kelly said.
"Well, Kelly," Aunt Doro said with a twinkle in her eye, "Now you see why I'm more than happy to have you here. You and Doug are good for one another in a world that can really mess up a young person who ends up in the wrong crowd."
Kelly blushed. "Aunt Doro! I..."
"Oh, Kelly, it's none of my business, of course," Aunt Doro reassured her. "You and Doug don't owe me an explanation. I just want you to understand I approve of whatever might develop, and you're welcome in our home."
Kelly blushed but allowed a smile all the same, and Doug took it upon himself to change the subject while she finished her fruit cocktail in silence.
"Has she pulled that one on any of your other girlfriends?" Kelly demanded of Doug once they had made their escape upstairs.
"My
other
