Brett's life list

Brett's life list is the recovered scrap of paper that turns Elizabeth Bohlinger's memory of her daughter's younger self into a present-day challenge. Written when Brett was fourteen and later rescued from the trash, the list links unfinished childhood ambitions to the terms of Brett's inheritance. Its importance lies not only in what it asks her to do, but in the way its deadlines expose how far her adult life has moved from what she once wanted.

A discarded page preserved by Elizabeth

The list first appears in a manila file that Brad Midar brings out of a leather portfolio. The sheet is yellowed, creased into a mosaic of folds, and had once been wadded into a tight ball. Brett recognizes the handwriting as her own, though she has no memory of writing it: it is her flowery handwriting from age fourteen. The heading, MY LIFE GOALS, makes the page feel less like a plan she remembers making than a message from a younger self she has forgotten.

Elizabeth's handwritten additions make the document a record of two people at once. Alongside the goals are her mother's comments, including a congratulatory note beside the French-learning goal after Elizabeth crossed it off. The annotations show that Elizabeth did not simply retain the page as a keepsake. She followed Brett's progress over the years, striking through goals when her daughter accomplished them and marking those achievements with approval. The paper thus carries both Brett's youthful wishes and Elizabeth's continuing attention to them.

One surviving entry is the wish to have a baby, maybe two. Another, numbered six, is to get a dog. The contrast between these hopes and Brett's adult skepticism is immediate: she objects that she has no time even for a fish, let alone a dog. Her reaction makes the list's distance from her current priorities plain, while the numbered goals give the challenge a concrete shape rather than leaving it as a general appeal to rediscover herself.

The inheritance mechanism and its clock

The list is part of a carefully structured inheritance arrangement. Elizabeth had recovered it years earlier, and Brad explains that ten goals remain unaccomplished. For each goal Brett completes, she must return to him to receive one of the pink envelopes Elizabeth left behind, bound together with a rubber band. A separate envelope marked FULFILLMENT contains Brett's inheritance, but she can claim it only after finishing all ten goals. The page is therefore at once a personal record and the key to a financial condition.

The schedule intensifies that condition. Brett must complete at least one goal by the end of the month, and the entire list must be finished by September 13 of the following year. When she questions the deadline, Brad hands the list back to her in case she changes her mind and reminds her that the clock is ticking. The exact date turns the challenge into a finite interval: Brett cannot indefinitely postpone deciding whether these old wishes still deserve a place in her life.

Goals against the life Brett has chosen

The list's challenge gains force because Brett recognizes that she has suppressed parts of herself. At thirty-four, she admits that fear of being alone has helped keep her with Andrew, even as she wonders why she has abandoned her dreams. She compares leaving a steady relationship to risking her life savings on an uncertain investment. The list does not erase that fear; instead, it gives her a visible standard against which to measure the compromises she has made and the reasons she has made them.

Its demand also unsettles Andrew. After their decision to try for a family, he becomes cold toward Brett, and she acknowledges that both of them were blindsided by the list and need time to adjust to a different way of living. Her renewed attention to the possibility of having a child therefore does not produce uncomplicated agreement. The old goal brings an intimate conflict into view: Brett's wishes and Andrew's response to them may not align, and her hope for a family cannot be separated from the question of whose aspirations have shaped their relationship.

The list also gives Brett a way to interpret difficult choices as attempts rather than as proof of failure. When Mrs. Porter goes into labor three weeks early and the school asks whether Brett can take over for six weeks, she sees the substitute position as a chance to fulfill goal number twenty. The prospect terrifies her; she notices the EXIT sign and considers fleeing. Remembering the list helps her say yes. In this moment, its function is not to guarantee success but to make a frightening opportunity legible as part of a goal she has chosen to attempt.

Progress, pressure, and an evolving meaning

By the time March approaches, Brett has completed five of the ten goals, leaving her nearly halfway to the September deadline. The unfinished half feels daunting: she hopes to establish a relationship with her father, but believes she must also fall in love, have a baby, buy a horse, and get a beautiful house within the remaining six and a half months. She recognizes that, apart from the horse, these aims are largely outside her control. That imbalance exposes a limit in the list's design: it treats relational and material outcomes as items to complete on a timetable, even when they depend on other people and uncertain circumstances.

The goals nonetheless continue to meet Brett in changing forms. Her effort to have a child eventually becomes connected to Austin, whose premature arrival leads Brett to promise to raise her. When Austin comes home to Brett's apartment in Pilsen, the baby is small enough that blankets must be propped around her in the car seat. This concrete new responsibility gives the childhood wish for a baby an urgent present-tense consequence, though the available account does not establish that Brett completes every goal or claims the inheritance.

The list's influence reaches beyond Brett's own choices. Shelley leaves her job, partly because Elizabeth's inheritance means her family no longer needs the extra income; later, after discovering that staying home is not the role she wants, she decides to return to work. These changes underline the difference between having the means to choose and knowing which life one wants. As a physical object, Brett's life list cannot decide that question for her. Its crossed-out goals, maternal notes, numbered ambitions, and approaching deadline instead keep the question in front of her, joining the fourteen-year-old's hopes to the adult's difficult work of acting on them.