Chapter 6

Chapter 6 of 56 · 10-minute read

Back at my mom’s house, all I really want is a nap, but I’m positive that would make me a bad daughter. Even though my jaw still aches from drilling and patching one of my upper molars, I’m certain my mom will want to chat about a hundred things that have been on her mind.

I have a few things I’d like to talk to her about as well. What’s this crap people in town are saying about a stroke? I see no evidence whatsoever. No drooping face or weakness in one side. Or is she hiding something from me?

Like my dad, she has a long-standing habit of making mountains out of health mole hills. They both always liked to keep Shelby and me standing at attention, worrying over whether they’d survive something that was minor or even imaginary. The difference in my parents was that my mom would exaggerate the insignificant health issues and hide the serious ones that we really needed to know about so we could support her. Is she doing that again?

I’ve been accustomed to people in my hometown talking shit about me since I was an awkward kid in a dysfunctional family I thought was normal, but I’ve never before had to wonder if there’s any truth in rumors about me.

Am I a bad daughter? Have I missed something?

My out-of-body experience, courtesy of nitrous oxide in the dental chair, could have been excused as a dream or even one of the psychic visions I get occasionally, except for three things. First, the prolonged memory of what happened in the swamp with Uncle Bobby during his wicked plans disguised as a camping trip. That night took place around forty years ago, yet I’ve never remembered it as clearly. Second, I’d had a clear psychic vision of something that has not yet happened and in a place I don’t recognize. And third, when I stopped at the front desk to pay on my way out, the red pen with the feed-and-seed store logo that Chelsie had used in what might have been a fear-induced dream was in her grip as she chewed on the cap and glared at me.

Many of us with psychic abilities find that we cannot control the gift if we’re impaired. My longtime best friend, Jan Duley, had endured disjointed visions as an after-effect of anesthesia during multiple surgeries. Her gift of sight skipped ahead to the end of relationships, mistaking years into the future as an upcoming heartache to be expected within days. Some of her anxiety medications had been just as bad. Anything that caused her to relax also prompted her to lower her psychic shields. She lost control over her gift, often experiencing it in a way so different, she jumbled her advice. In the end, the rollercoaster of emotions her untimely prophecies sent me on caused a rift that she didn’t survive. Ultimately, she’d been right that my marriage to Jesse wouldn’t last, but the heartbreak she’d seen had been many years later. If I’d listened to her, Jesse and I would have missed so much beauty.

I know other psychics who lose control when they drink too much or when they’re under the influence of any type of drug. For me, I avoid alcohol and anything that might plunge me down the rabbit hole. If I, like some witches I know, practiced salves that were “flying ointments,” I’m sure I’d enjoy the sensation of flight and hallucinate all sorts of things, but my biggest fear is of walking outside of space and time and losing myself.

And that’s exactly what had happened at the dentist’s office.

Neil-Junior’s assistant had gone into a mad panic when my pulse soared inexplicably to 140 and wouldn’t come down. She’d removed the nose piece and called my name frantically as I hovered near the ceiling above her, and Neil-Junior gently slapped my cheek.

“Go to the fountain!” the assistant finally yelled.

I saw it in my wanderings. The fountain in the middle of my enchanted forest meditation space. The moment I reached out to touch it, I opened my eyes.

After that, I suffered through four apologies from the assistant for not believing me earlier. I got my bearings and assured her I was fine.

I’m not fine, though. The grocery store was no better than the dentist’s office—another dozen people squinting or staring at me. My hometown sees so few visitors that word spreads quickly about strangers, and even before I was a witch, people here considered me strange. I would have fared better as a tourist, even an unwelcome one. Every last one of them was judging me for something to do with my mom.

It’s not my imagination. It’s not paranoia.

“Lauren?” My mom meets me at the top step of the back porch with a pan of reddening tomatoes in her two-fisted grip. She’s been to the garden, and from the looks of the perspiration stains on her blouse, she’s spent too much time in the sun. “What took you so long?”

Some things don’t change. I’d made two stops and had taken too long, even with rushing. Even with an expectedly long dental appointment. My dad had been even worse.

“I was gone only three hours, Mom. Dentist’s office and then the grocery store. I came straight home.”

I scoop up the bags of groceries in my arms, then feel my way across the yard to the steps without being able to see my bare feet and instantly regret leaving my shoes in the car. I leave the groceries on the kitchen table and make two more trips to the car before I’m done. My mom holds the door open for me each time, and in between, she digs through the grocery bags to see what I’ve brought home.

“You didn’t have to go to all this trouble,” she tells me, even though she absolutely knows I had to go to all this trouble. “Here, let me get you some money.”

We go through the usual ritual. She insists on playing host to my visit and offers me a fifty-dollar bill she carries in the side pocket of her purse. I refuse. She slips it into my purse when I’m not looking. I take it out when she’s not looking and slip it back into her purse. We do the same several times on every visit home. I always try to treat her by taking her out to dinner a few times, usually at the only pizza place in town or the slightly fancier restaurant where she can enjoy all-you-can-eat fried fish or alligator kebobs that may or may not be legal. She’ll insist on paying for my meal and I’ll insist on paying for hers and we’ll agree that next time, she’ll pay for mine.

As we put away groceries, she regales me with local gossip and old family stories. I have to wonder how she can remember all that and still forget that Quent and I have been divorced for almost a decade or that Jesse and I split after he lost his mind. Maybe it’s a product of being alone out here in the country. Who knows where her mind is since Daddy died? We talk on the phone every day—every single day—and she’s fine.

Has Mama been saying things around town to get attention?

“Oh! I almost forgot!” She glances up at me from her pan of tomatoes as she polishes the largest one with a dishcloth. “You need to call Dixxie.”

“Why? Is everything okay?”

“Oh! Yes. It’s all fine. More than fine.”

She points at the old phone on the wall. I kept my landline longer than anyone else I know except for my mom. Hers still works, and she still prefers it, even though I bought her a mobile phone with oversized buttons two Christmases ago, in case she fell in the garden and needed help. I pay the monthly bill for her mobile phone, but to my knowledge, she’s never used it.

“He didn’t have your phone number, so I gave it to him. He’s picking you up for a date tomorrow night at seven. You’re to wear something pretty so he can take you to the restaurant down at the lake.”

I squirm. A lot of years have passed since Dix and I got caught sucking face on his front porch while his little brother slept inside. We hadn’t had much in common back then, other than raging hormones. I’m not sure much has changed.

Except that we’re both a lot older, and our hormones are less rage-y.

I’ve seen this before. I’d finally, at my student Christabel’s urging, started dating two years ago, but only half-heartedly. Too many of the men in the town where I’d lived for decades and raised two daughters were aware of the gossip surrounding my last two marriages or the fact that I was the witch who ran the Center of Light with its healing circles and public Solstice rituals. They were either wary of my magickal abilities, curious, demanding I give them up if we dated, or all of the above. I figured that if I wanted to partner up with a man again hoping to have the kind of joy I’d had with Jesse, I’d have to sell my house and move, but I wasn’t in any hurry.

The men who were actually interested in getting to know me better were the ones who wanted to get to know me again. Usually, they sought me out through social media to see if I was single after thirty years of their absence. Men who had thought I was too different back in our high school and college days and had settled for the sorority president or someone who seemed to be the better fit for the life they had planned. Over the years, as their marriages fell apart, they would seek me out to answer their questions of “What if?”

Scott, my first real boyfriend, had fallen into that category. Men like that remember me as gentle and attentive and a little different if not downright weird, and they wonder what life might have been like with me by their side. If they never showed any real interest in my first blush of youth—or worse, if like Scott they dumped me publicly to pursue a more popular woman—I’ve found that I no longer have any interest in them.

I’m over fifty now and done with that shit.

I had had a years-long crush on Dix and heard about his successes over the decades from my mom and relatives back home, but Scott had been the first guy to break my heart. He’d cheated on me and rationalized that his incredibly strong—nearly superhuman, he’d said—sex drive wouldn’t allow him to be monogamous. He reappeared in my life twice during my marriage to Quent and, upon realizing I’d never leave my husband for him, had quickly left without a second thought.

Claiming he’d grown up in the intervening decades, he’d come back into my life last year. His timing had been troubling. I’d been deep in legalities after Jesse’s disappearance and it looked like my divorce would be finalized within a few months. Scott had thought he had a real chance with me now that he’d squandered his multi-million-dollar company and ruined his health with alcohol. I’d already seen what substance abuse had done to my sweet Jesse, so my instinct with Scott had been to run like hell.

He’d pursued me for months, telling me it was better for me to be with someone than alone and he could make me happy, even though he never asked what made me happy. I’d given him a fair shot and spent several dinners with him while he rented a studio apartment nearby. Ultimately, it became clear that he wasn’t retired so much as he had burned all his bridges professionally and was desperate for someone to pay his bills and maintain his lifestyle as long as possible. I’m not wealthy, but I had everything to offer him that he wanted—a nice house to live in, a better-than-average pension, a 401k account, passive income, a health insurance plan. He had nothing positive to offer me.

I’d sat at dinner with him in the nicest and most crowded restaurant in town on a Saturday night when he’d repeatedly cut me off every time I said something and blew glycol into my face as he vaped and told me his big plans for a new career as a—no kidding—relationship coach. I’d decided then and there that I was done with Scott, but before I could tell him so, he proposed to me. No ring, no knee. Just a proposal that we marry as soon as possible. And this time, he promised, he wouldn’t cheat on me because his sex drive was dead and he could be monogamous. According to Scott, at our age, I was supposed to be grateful.

I’d laughed. I couldn’t help it. It took me a while, but I know my worth.

But if men fear that women will laugh at them and women fear that men will kill them, I should’ve known. He’d stormed out angrily, yelling every insult he could think of while I sat in quiet gratitude that he was my past and not my future and that I knew my worth. Since I was paying for our dinners in his absence, I stayed a while and ordered dessert.

I haven’t been on a date since, and I’m not sure when I’ll⁠—

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