Made and Meant for Each Other (an Anne of Green Gables fanfiction)

Aunt Jamesina

"Shoo! Out of here at once, you cat, you!"

Rusty sat in the middle of the pantry floor, blinking at her, pretending with all the limited artifice he owned that he hadn't been trying to climb up to get the butter she had imprudently left out.

"You don't fool me any, Rusty-coat," Jamesina told him.

He blinked again, got to his feet, and sauntered away, for all the world as though he had simply decided to go on his own, and not at all because she was holding the business end of a broom out to shoo him forcefully if necessary. Watching him, she shook her head with a fond smile. To think that once upon a time she had shared her home with only the Sarah-cat, stately and dignified, and now she had Joseph the lazy and Rusty the scapegrace to liven up the place. It was enough to keep a woman single, Jamesina thought with a certain amount of relief.

Before she had gone to live with the girls at Patty's Place, she had been very close to yielding to the pleas of one or another of the widowers who liked to drop in and call on Sunday afternoons. Never, ever would she have admitted it to that flightly Philippa, but Jamesina had managed to charm her widowers just as thoroughly as if they too had been named Alec and Alonso, and had been as decidedly unable to choose between them—or not to choose them, as the case might be.

Now she kept them entertained and charmed, but she was far less likely to give up the freedom of her life on their behalf, or on any man's. Those four lovely girls had given her a new lease on life, and she intended to enjoy it to the fullest.

She missed them, now that she was back at home. Her own dear house was lovely, and her friends and neighbors and their lives as interesting as they had been before, but it was awfully quiet at night, without whispers and giggles and late night feasts and the scratch of a pen from someone sitting up late to study. As she cleaned up Rusty's mess, Jamesina tried to imagine what they must all be doing. Priscilla and Stella were both on their way to new adventures, and she worried about them, just as she did her daughter far away doing her missionary work. Philippa was in the slums with her Reverend Jonas. Knowing Philippa, she was making a go of it. Jamesina would never have said as much to her, but she had a lot of faith in Philippa's gumption and her stick-to-itiveness once her mind was made up. She had grown so much during her college years, and Jamesina was proud of her. Although that, again, was something she would never tell her—Philippa thought too much of her own gumption as it was; it wouldn't do to let her know she had been right all along. And Anne was back in her beloved Avonlea, and finally sensibly engaged to that fine young man. Jamesina had watched that sad tale unfold with a certain amount of concern for Anne's well-being, but she had held her peace, believing that girls needed to make their own mistakes. Goodness knew she had, she mused, smiling to herself as she stood in the pantry leaning on her broom. And been better for them, all things considered. A life without mistakes sounded good, but how very dull! No, Anne's life had been her own to live as she saw fit, and certainly there had never been anything wrong with Roy Gardiner that bit of livening up couldn't have fixed. He would have been a fine catch for any girl. Perhaps not as suited to bring Anne out of her dreamy ways into real life as Gilbert, but she would have been happy with Roy if she'd chosen him, Jamesina believed. Nonetheless, Gilbert was the better choice, and Jamesina was glad Anne had finally awakened to that. She would rest easier about her now.

A crash from another room brought her back to the present, and Jamesina whirled around, crying, "You cats get down from there right now!", even though she knew they wouldn't listen. Nothing like surrounding yourself with creatures who had minds of their own to liven up old age and keep the creeping dullness from settling in, she thought, feeling young as any of her girls as she hurried to see what Rusty and Joseph had done now. Who needed widowers when you had cats?