When I looked at what I had written, I realized I had mentioned Garland or something about him on almost every page. What, I wondered, would my rendezvous with him at Foxworth Hall have been like if I hadn’t drunk much or almost none of that limoncello? Would I have been more coy, fought harder to preserve my innocence? Would he have had more respect for me at the end of the evening? Wouldn’t he surely have appeared the following day to continue his courting? Now I felt like nothing more than another one of his romantic castaways adrift on a sea of her own regrets. And look at the future my parents were spreading before me.

I closed my diary and put it in the bottom drawer of my dresser. Why, I wondered, was I bothering with it? Was it because I had no one to confide in but myself? Somehow, as was maybe true for most young women my age, a diary did become the ears of someone else. After a while, it was no longer like talking to yourself. The one thing I remembered my paternal grandfather telling me before he died was “If you talk to yourself, you’ll never be lonely.”

It was true. The diary took on a life of its own. Every night when I thought about it or looked at the drawer, I imagined it was pondering my words, my confessions, and my dreams. One day I would take it out and there would be pages and pages automatically filled in, all with advice and wisdom. It would tell me things my mother never had and never would. It would be my magic mother.

It would eventually answer the biggest question I had: how do you separate the fantasy wishes of a young girl from the realistic and possible plans of a young woman? Night after night, I tossed and turned, struggling with the answer. I hated the way I looked in the morning. I hated the windows into a troubled mind that my eyes had become. Neither my father nor my mother appeared to notice any difference, however. My father thought I was worried about starting this new job in his bank, and my mother surely thought I was hating the thought of it. She looked so satisfied, which made me feel sicker.