A Fistful of Sky (18 page)

I waggled my eyebrows at her. “You could wait and see. Or you could take a chance.”

She sighed. “Well, I finished my makeup history test, and I’m officially on Christmas Break now. So I guess—” She grabbed a brownie and bit into it. “Oh, my, God. This is the best brownie I ever ate.”

I glanced at Jasper. He smiled and shook his head.

Beryl finished her brownie, licked her lips and then her fingers, and eyed the tower. “It’s not like we’re going to run out.” She grabbed another one. “Oh, God. There’s— caramel in here?”

“That worked?”

She offered me a bite.

Yes. Somehow, little nuggets of caramel in the midst of the chocolate. Strange mix of texture and flavor.

“I’ll be right back.” I followed Flint into the kitchen.

We ran out of cookie tins long before we ran out of brownies. Jasper boxed up the rest of them and took them to the Mission, where they served meals to the homeless, after he was sure that Flint and Beryl and I weren’t suffering from having eaten some.

“Tomorrow,” Flint said, “creampuffs.”

dad came home while I was pan-frying flank steak. Beryl was in the dining room, setting the table. “Smells wonderful,” he said. “Say. You got a haircut. Looks good. So how was your day? Looks like you survived it.”

“It was interesting.” I flipped the steak and got a cookie tin down from the cupboard. “Flint and I figured out how to make dessert together.

Look.”

“Good grief.” He sniffed. “Smells divine. This is a curse thing?”

“Flint’s power modifies it so it’s safe. We could go into business, maybe.” I was joking, but then I thought, hey. Really. We could do some business this way if it worked every time. Sell cookies from a stand in the street? Not enough traffic. Sell them at the Farmer’s Market, of at Sabado y Domingo, the weekend open-air market down by the beach? I wasn’t sure what kind of pennies you needed or how much you had to pay, but we might be able to do that. Or sell to area bakeries or outlets?

It would involve research either way. Might be too labor-intensive for Flint.

“So you don’t eat these and turn into a troll.”

“Not so far.”

“Good. I’ll save room.”

“How was your day?”

He smiled. “Normal.”

I felt a tiny tug at my heart. I used to have days like that. J didn’t think I ever would again. Then I cheered up. I’d been waiting all my life not to be normal. Now, finally … I smiled back.

“The kitchen survived the killer grapefruit, huh.”

“We fixed it.” I pointed to the grapefruit in the middle of the butcher-block table. “Look. It went back to normal.”

He shook his head, still smiling, “You’d never know.”

“I’m not sure we should eat it.”

“It did have personality.”

I put the steak on a carving board and covered it with a towel, then turned the heat down, melted some more butter in the pan and added vermouth and mustard, Worcestershire sauce and capers. “] wonder where Mama is. This is almost ready.”

Just then she breezed in. “Hello, darlings!” She waved a red hand at me. “Did you watch my broadcast? I wore my gloves the whole time.”

“I’m sorry, Mama. I missed it. Can you take them off yet?”

“Oh, yes. They’re wonderful. Miles! Look what Gyp made for me!” She brushed gloved fingertips down his cheeks, then kissed him.

“You’re making lots of things,” Dad said to me when he had finished

kissing Mama.

“Yeah. It’s surprising.” I carved the flank steak into thin slices, set it on a platter, and poured the sauce over it. Beryl came in from the dining room and took the salad out of the fridge. “Dad, could you grab the vegetables and the rolls?” I asked. I had poured a steamed vegetable medley into a bowl while I was frying the steak, and the warm rolls were wrapped in a towel in a basket on the counter.

“Sure.”

I followed Beryl, and Dad followed me, with Mama trailing after. She paused at the entrance to the dining room and rang the dinner bell. We set the food on the buffet. I went back to the kitchen to grab the serving spoons and forks and a couple of pitchers of milk for the table. By the time I returned to the dining room, everybody was there.

Jasper touched flame to the candles at either end of the table, and we all sat in the places where Beryl had set our cloth napkins—really guest towels—with our names inked on clothespins. Mama had started using clothespins on napkins as place cards years before, when I was too young to read my own name.

Mama sat at one end of the table, and Dad at the other. When we were younger, there were rules about who sat where; whoever had the worst manners had to sit next to Dad, so he could instruct them in etiquette such as knife-wielding and keeping one’s elbows off the table. Whoever set the table usually set themselves as far from Mama as possible. She had seemed even more powerful and overwhelming when we were small; we feared her attention.

Sometimes she noticed good things about you, but sometimes she took note of bad things, things that “needed fixing,” and that was always scary. Some of her fixes hurt and didn’t work very well.

Aunt Hermina, who lived in the guest house, rarely joined us for meals. She was working on several projects and liked her isolation. She was there if we needed special help, like when Flint screwed up so much it took three grownups to fix the problem, and every once in a while, she got lonely and came in for dinner. Once in a while when I had a restless night and came downstairs to heat some milk and honey, I’d find her in the kitchen drinking tea and sneaking cookies. She wasn’t at dinner tonight.

Uncle Tobias’s place shifted around the table at the whim of whoever set it. Beryl had put him beside Mama tonight, with Flint across from him. Beryl and I sat across from each other next to Dad, and Jasper sat between me and Uncle Tobias. Beryl had left the empty seat between Flint

and herself.

Once we were seated, we reached out to clasp hands with people to either side of us, and lowered our heads. I glanced at Mama. She would choose grace for tonight, but which one? Usually these days we had silent grace, where we were supposed to be saying our own versions of thanks. We had a couple of singing graces from when we were little kids, but we were feeling more and more snotty about these kinds of family events now that we were supposed to be grownups, even though Mama could pick up on sarcasm and get you back for it.

Mama chose the oldest grace. “For all that is good, for all that is ours,” she sang. We all chimed in on the second line: “Thanks to the Spirits, thanks to the Powers.” We squeezed each other’s hands and let go.

There were rules about the order in which we went up to the buffet for our food, too: Women first, Mama very first unless Hermina was present, then Opal if she was home, then me, then Beryl. The men went up from oldest to youngest, too: Tobias first, on down to Flint. Flint hated this system. He always got last pick of everything except on his birthday, when he got to go first. I tried to fix enough of everything so that there would still be plenty for him by the time he got to the buffet, but he was the hungriest person in the family.

If people complained about the line order, Mama just said this was the way it had always been done, and Tobias agreed. Some family traditions were just unbudgeable. This one didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, but it worked in my favor, so I liked it.

I had sampled several different brownies while we were packing them up, to see which thought-recipes had worked best; but that had been three hours earlier, and I was hungry. I took only one serving of each thing so there would be enough for the others. We were allowed seconds, but we weren’t supposed to take anything we weren’t going to eat. Mama was strict about that too. One of the benefits of cooking was that I always fixed things I liked. Sometimes I found something I really liked that nobody else liked. More for me,

Three hours since Flint and I had made the brownies, I thought as I sat down. I had forgotten about timekeeping. While I waited for everyone else to serve themselves—that was another rule, nobody got to start before everybody sat down after getting their food—I tested my shoulders.

Tense again.

Maybe I should excuse myself from dinner? Sure, that would go over well. “Pardon me. I have to go curse something.”

Better than staying here and cursing something or someone in the room.

On the other hand, dinner was in front of me, and Flint had finally finished dishing food onto his plate and sat down. I could get tenser than this before I had to use my power.

“So,” said Mama, “what did everyone do with their days?”

This, too, was part of our dinner ritual. I had never had so much to tell before, or felt so reluctant to tell it. J was used to telling Tobias things. He didn’t take them personally; he analyzed, repackaged the information I gave him, and handed it back to me so I could take another look and maybe see something in it I hadn’t known I knew.

Mama, on the other hand, looked at everything we said in light of how it pertained to her. Sometimes Dad could moderate her response to things, talk her down; mostly, we’d learned to edit what we said.

“Somebody better say something before I toss a little truth-tell around the room,” Mama said, and smiled at us. “Gypsum? Don’t tell me making a pair of gloves was the most exciting thing that happened to you today.” “Not really.”

“The chalk drawings happened last night, I’m guessing, since they were there when I woke you up on the lawn this morning.” “Yeah.”

“Have you cleaned them off the back walk yet?” Oh, man. I had forgotten that one of Mama’s many aims in life was to keep the house and environs in fine condition. Messes could exist, as long as they disappeared after a specified time. Six or eight hours, max. “I, uh, I’ve been kind of busy today. And that chalk is a special case. It’s hard to get out of things. Though, come to think of it, the curse came off it this morning, so maybe I can hose off the walk after dinner.”

“Busy with what?”

“I’m trying to learn how to curse.”

She smiled her most glowing smile at me. As always when I saw that smile, I was struck by how beautiful she was, and I wondered why I hadn’t inherited any of it. Opal got. some great features from Mama—lush lips, large, sparkling violet eyes, slender nose—and what she didn’t get, she could assume any time she pleased. Or she could look like anyone else she saw or could imagine. Beryl had Mama’s eyes. I didn’t look like either of my parents— although Flint and I had gotten Dad’s hazel eye-color. Mama thought I had chosen my body shape. Nobody in her family was fat. We hadn’t met Dad’s family. I wondered if I looked like them. Dad was thin,

but that didn’t mean the rest of his family was.

I wondered what my Great-Aunt Meta had looked like. Maybe there was a power-of-curses body type that would explain me.

“How’s it going?” Mama asked.

“I found out one thing that’s going to be handy around the house.”

She nodded, encouraging me.

I fished a Kleenex out of my pocket and held it up. I focused on it, narrowed my concentration. I didn’t want to burn my fingers this time. “Damn,” I whispered, and the Kleenex flashed into nothing. This time my fingers were fine.

Mama blinked and sat back.

“Thought I could take care of the trash,” I said.

“Honey,” said Dad, his voice a little hoarse.

“Hey, that’s my job,” Flint said. We all had work jobs. I did a lot of cooking, which left weeding, setting the table, watering the houseplants, laundry, dishes, trash collection, and other things for the others to sort out. We had a gardener, Esteban Rivera, who mowed the back lawn and trimmed the bushes out front and planted whatever Mama asked him to plant, but left the orchard alone; and a housekeeper, Luz Herrera, who came in once a week to sweep, vacuum, dust, and clean the bathrooms—Tuesday, a day when everybody was encouraged to stay away from home so Luz could work undisturbed. I had spent some time with her, since in the past I wasn’t a danger to myself or others.

“You can have it, though,” Flint said after a minute’s thought.

“And Flint and I made brownies together, and they’re really good. When we combine our powers, he takes the curse off. So we have dessert.”

Her smile broadened. “Excellent. Is there anything I can help you with?”

“J don’t know, Mama. Did you know Aunt Meta?”

Her face smoothed. “I met her a few times when I was a little girl. She was so unhappy and sick. I didn’t know why until I was much older, and she was gone.”

“I just thought if you’d ever seen her work… .”

Mama glanced at Tobias. Her eyes darkened. “Only once.” She returned her gaze to me. Candle flame reflected in her eyes. “Her mother, my great-aunt Lynx, made her curse a house. It was a little old shack that nobody lived in—used to be in the jungle out back—and they wanted it off

the property. Meta wouldn’t do anything, you know. She lived twisted inside herself and spent most of her time in her room. Her power was eating away at her insides. Aunt Lynx knew that was wrong, and tried to get her to work, but most of the time—oh, baby, I’m so glad you’re practicing and doing. Don’t stop. Don’t stop,”

I couldn’t look away from her.

She took a breath. “Anyway, Lynx convinced Meta chat it was all right to curse the shack. So Meta said: ‘You before me, be eaten up by the powers inside you.’ So creepy. Like she was talking to herself. I didn’t know that till later, though. The shack shook. Dust flew as the boards kind of—it was like fast-acting termites. They shrank down on themselves, fell apart. The glass in the windows ran like water. But worst were these little cries, something dying.”

Mama shook her head. “It frightened me so badly I didn’t want to go through transition. I had nightmares. What could be crying and dying in an old abandoned shack? Nobody ever told me. Meta’s face—”

TOBIAS coughed into his hand. Startled, Mama glanced at him, then shook herself free of the story she was telling. Sometimes she put dazzle in the words so you heard them better than you did normal speech. Sometimes she didn’t even know she was doing it.

“So it’s exciting that you’re finding positive ways to channel your power, Gyp.” She smiled again.