I parked the Ford Taurus in the empty parking lot of Lone Pine High School, the place where I spent the last four years dodging boys and dreaming of what would come after graduation. It had only been two and a half weeks since I walked across the temporary stage built on the bottle-green, plastic field of the football stadium.

By the time I graduated, what was left of my mother was a sick woman I only recognized because I spent my entire life loving her. The nurses at Yarborough played her a live broadcast of my ceremony, but when I arrived later that night in my long black robe and cap, her dark brown eyes turned shiny from shame.

"Couldn't even see my girl walk," she whispered hoarsely. For a long time, her words sounded cracked, like they were dumped into a blender and melded together by sharp, twirling blades.

I shut off my car engine and threw the keys across the dashboard. In the middle console, a glass pipe, a Bic lighter, and a gram of marijuana were buried beneath car insurance papers, miscellaneous mail and overdue bills. My mom and I liked to pretend neither one of us had the habit of getting high. She hid her stash in her car, and on hot summer days like this, the earthy scent rose up from beneath the hard plastic and blue seat fabric.

I tapped out the black ash into a half-empty Styrofoam cup and pressed the tiny, grinded herb into the bowl. This is, admittedly, not how I imagined my senior summer to begin—still clothed in the stiff, black dress my mother bought me three years ago for a school dance. Back then, I thought it made me edgy to have a dark cloud perpetually floating over my head. Now, I wanted nothing more than to strip off my dress and light it on fire.

My lips wrapped around the rim of the pipe and I fixed the lighter's flame over the green bowl. I was just a handful of inhales away from pushing down my climbing anxiety when a sharp ring echoed through the cab.

I froze, lungs half full of smoke.

Ring, ring, ring.

With each second, the volume climbed higher, forcing me into motion. My hands flew to my back pocket, to my smartphone. A blank screen stared back at me.

Ring, ring, ring.

"Where the hell—" My frustration manifested itself in my words until my searching fingers found the surface of my mother's cardboard box—her things from her hospital. Her cellphone.

I didn't bother to look at the caller I.D., I just slid my thumb over the screen and breathlessly said, "Hello?"

"Susanne!" My mother's sweet, city-fast voice rushed out.

My heart stopped. "M-Momma?" I could barely wrap my lips around the name.

"No, no I'm sorry, fuck," my mother said. "It's Leonora. I apologize, I forget—we sound identical over the phone."

"Oh," I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice. "Sorry. That was... stupid of me." She's dead, idiot. "What—what do you want?"

"I want to have a conversation with my niece," she said. I moved my thumb to end the call. "I can only do that if you don't hang up the phone."

I stared out the window shield, past the parking lot to the two glass doors that served as the entrance and exit to my high school career. If I was anyone else, the orange setting sun and the hazy blue-pink afternoon sky would have seemed straight out of a movie— the feel-good kind, that always had a happy ending no matter what.

"Why shouldn't I hang up?" I kept the conversation going, only because I wanted to hear my mother's voice again.

Leonora sighed from other side of the phone. "I'm not in Lone Pine to take anything from you, I'm here to take you with me."

"A field trip?" I huffed out. I leaned my head against the window on the driver's side. "I don't feel like goin' anywhere. I already have plans for tonight."

"Doing what exactly?" Leonora asked in a tone that sounded disgustingly motherly. Perhaps I not only inherited an aunt, but also a niece or nephew. "Are you smoking a joint somewhere or are you drowning in some cheap beer on someone's couch?"

"I—" My gaze shifted to the pipe. "The first one."

"Your mom was right," her laugh cut through the static on the line. Signal was always shitty, no matter where you were in Lone Pine. "You are just like her."

"What do you want? I mean, really want from me?"

"I want you to meet me at your place in ten," she said. "You can come now, or I can camp out in your lawn until you decide to show up."

A stark cut to the line caused the call to abruptly go silent. She hung up. I pulled the phone from my ear and set it back into the cardboard box with a tender touch, careful not to allow anything to hurt or jostle from my movement.

My attention moved back to my little bowl of green. I curled my fingers around the glass neck of the pipe and instead of bringing it back to my lips, I placed back into its hiding spot and turned on the engine of my car.

***

Like most houses in Lone Pine, our home bent to the will of the land instead of the other way around. The jagged curves and spontaneous green hills forced the original builders to push it up into the last foothill before elevation steadily increased. Down the coiling, gravel driveway, a piece of land sturdy and flat enough for our home's foundation allowed room for four parking spaces, a hobby garden and an old, rusting iron fence for our decent-sized yard.

At the gate stood Leonora, whose resemblance to my mother stopped after looks and voice. She was dressed in a pair of black cigarette pants, a black blouse with a peter-pan collar and a tall, dangerous-looking pair of pointy black heels. Mourning clothes. On her mouth, a dark plum shade of lipstick. Her pretty face was perfected by a smooth layer of foundation, blush and gold-colored eyeshadow. But I could see, just beneath her lashes a blue-green tinge of tiredness. She held a thin vape in her hand, it resembled a cheap little USB hard drive. Every few seconds, she wrapped her lips around the mouthpiece and inhaled.

In front of where she stood, a white sports car with sleek contrasts and curves in the metal sat in park. All of it together—the woman, the cloud of white-gray smoke, and the car—looked right. Just not here, in front of the home I once shared with my mother.

"Thank God," Leonora murmured. "I was just about to take my tent out of my rental."

"It's not even dark yet," I replied. I pocketed my keys without locking my car. I never did. There wasn't any need to in a place like this. "Come on in." I pushed past her and ran up to the wrap-around porch.

From the outside, the house was charming. Big bay windows, wooden exposed beams to add character, and a gray-stone chimney to bring it back down to its roots of a humble design. When I pushed open the front door, painted a deep emerald green by mother a few seasons ago, I revealed the first common room.

It was a standard den, painted in a bright spring yellow that contrasted harshly against my own sullen expression. The furniture—all secondhand and mostly made of wicker or real wood—was neatly scattered across the room, untouched since my mother's last visit to the home two months ago. The original wooden floors were covered by some artisanal Persian rug she thrifted. It was always her favorite piece to show off to guests. That's probably why I pointed it out to Leonora, completely out of habit.

"My mom's favorite rug," I murmured. "Bought for a deal."

"I know," she replied through a fog of vapor smoke. "I was there when she purchased it. Only twenty-five for a piece this nice."

"Wow, I'm surprised she would have even given twenty bucks for it." I walked awkwardly to the other side of the room, unsure of what to do in the presence of my aunt. "She was kind of really cheap when it came to antiquing."

"Oh honey, no." I glanced up from where I fiddled with the cheap silver ring on my finger to find Leonora watching me with an amused glimmer in her dark eyes. "Twenty-five thousand. That rug is a hand-knotted, one-of-a-kind piece from the seventeenth century. If we put this back on the market, it would immediately catch... perhaps three million."

"T-Three million?" I thought back to the time I barfed for a week straight as a nine-year-old, each time plastering a new stain on the burnt-orange woolen yarn.

"You're right," Leonora tutted. "Six million if we find the right art dealer."

"S-six million?" Once I spilled spaghetti and meat sauce on a corner. I didn't even clean it up, I just dragged my mother's edge table over the mess.

"Alright, maybe even nine—but that's it. Sentimental value or not, it still has to be a realistic price for people to even consider buying it."

"Are you—" I paused to jump away from surface of the rug, and simultaneously regretted every time I dragged mud from the garden inside. My mother had a strict no-shoes household rule, but I was known for running in and out with nothing covering the soles of my feet. "Are you trying to make a joke, Leonora?"

"Aunt Leonora," she corrected me around the mouthpiece of her vape. "And no. Although I have many pleasures, I don't find any satisfaction in joking about our family's money."

"O-our family's money?" I whispered. What kind of people had access to the kind of money that could be wasted on a $25,000 living room rug?

"Yes," she slid off her heels and walked to the wooden mantel. It was still completely original to the century-old house. On its flat shelf, pictures of my mother, me and her favorite past tenants of the house grinned. Most of them were college students looking for cheap rent. "It's your family, too."

She picked up a metal-framed picture of my mother and I, taken minutes after I was born. I was bald, ugly and still covered in thick, white film. My mother's long, golden hair was stuffed into a bun on top of her head. Although she smiled so brilliantly in the picture, no wrinkles creased her young face. She was hardly nineteen when she had me. Only 36-years-old when she died.

I plucked the frame from Leonora. I didn't like that she had access to this tiny, perfect, private moment of my mother and me. "Leonora—Aunt Leonora—I'm sorry, but I don't think I'm following anything you're saying."

Leonora raised a thick eyebrow up and huffed. "Do you really want me to come out and say it? Fine." She took a deep inhale from her vape and I watched as its white smoke climbed higher and higher into the air until the ceiling fan dissipated it completely. "You, my precious little Arkansas plum, are an heiress to the Bradshaw family fortune and company: Bradshaw Publishing, inc." 

AN

Please like and vote! Share your thoughts! Do you guys like Leonora so far? 

Things are about to shake up for our little butterfly! <3 

(I apologize for my day-lateness on this chapter. Was strangely sick for a couple days!)