A Snicker of Magic (5 page)

The one stipulation Aunt Cleo had given us when we showed up at the Sandcut Apartments complex with a dog and three grocery bags full of dirty clothes was this: We had to go to church with her.

I could see in Mama’s eyes that she wanted to take our hands and holler for Biscuit and stomp right back to the Pickled Jalapeño, but something convinced her otherwise. I saw the words
French fry
floating through the hallway, and it’s not because we craved them but because we’d been eating French fries and service-station nachos for weeks. The Pickled Jalapeño needed a rest and so did we.

So Mama said, “Fine.” I’m sure she hoped God and Aunt Cleo would forget about our arrangement. But neither of them did.

Cleo shuffled toward the Pickled Jalapeño that Sunday morning wearing a silky dress in a bold print of blue flowers and hummingbirds. The hummingbird wings looked like they were fluttering when the warm wind blew around us.
But Cleo’s hair didn’t budge. Her hair was poufed up high onto her head, into a stiff gray-blond haystack heap.

“The way you wear your hair makes you look old, Cleo,” Mama said. And she added, “It ages you.” Because I guess she figured Cleo didn’t understand what
old
meant. Cleo didn’t seem to care. Maybe because she
was
older than Mama. Cleo was almost twenty years older than Mama.

Mama’s hair was golden blond, the way Cleo’s probably used to be, but Mama still wore her hair long and wavy. Before we lived in Kentucky, Mama braided feathers into her hair. She always had paint in her hair, too, and she kept paintbrushes in the pockets of her jeans. She painted the ocean. She painted people’s faces. But she hadn’t painted anything in a long time.

Mama’s pretty blue dress tried to cling to the frame of her body but couldn’t find anything much to hold. Frannie Jo was better at clinging. Mama kept Frannie perched high up on her bony hip.

“Hey, Cleo.” Mama shifted Frannie Jo to her other side. “Why don’t we wait and go next week?”

“If you could walk as fast as you talk, we’d be at the van by now,” Cleo wheezed. She lit a cigarette and took a deep drawl. “Toss me the keys. I’m driving.”

“Why’re we taking my van?” Mama asked. “Church was your idea, remember? Because you think I’m a wayward soul.”

“All of us can fit in your van!” Cleo hollered. “We won’t
fit inside the Beast of Burden.” The Beast of Burden is what Aunt Cleo called her Nissan sedan.

I didn’t much think we fit anywhere: us Pickles or my aunt Cleo, who tied a leopard-print scarf around her neck before we pulled out of the complex.

Cleo swerved the Pickled Jalapeño into the parking lot of the Friendship Community Church and turned off the ignition. She was already standing in the parking lot when she realized she forgot to put the van in park, so she had to open the door again, and hop backward through the parking lot on one leg, trying to jump back in the driver’s seat. We stood there and watched while the van rolled backward and Cleo hollered, “Stop! Stop! Stop! STOP!”

The Pickled Jalapeño finally did as it was told. Aunt Cleo left the van where it stopped, right in the middle of the lot. She slammed the door, yelled out an unsavory word, and leaned over, clutching both knees to steady her breathing.

“You just gonna leave it parked there?” Mama asked.

“They know me here,” Cleo heaved. She threw down her cigarette, which she’d kept clutched firmly between her teeth the entire time. “They don’t care where I park.”

“Hope they don’t mind how we look, either,” said Mama. She brushed my bangs out of my face and said she’d get them cut next time she got paid, and she fussed over Frannie’s yellow tutu, which Frannie’d insisted on wearing over her dress.

“Nobody cares how you look,” Cleo said, heaving as she climbed the stairs. “And I said you had a
wandering heart
, Holly. Not a wayward soul.”

There were hundreds of words spinning through the church house, but they were so clear that I didn’t see them at first. Then the light streamed golden and blue and red through the stained-glass windows and I saw the words plain: They shimmered like water. We had an entire ocean of words above us. Old words from the hymnals spun closest to me:

Yonder

Wayfarer

Everlasting

Everlasting
had a sound to it, ocean water splashing over rocks. I whispered the word. I shivered because I liked the sound of it so much.

“Shhh,” Mama said. But she smiled down at me even then. She liked the way I cherished words.

When the woman sitting in front of us tucked her gray hair behind her ear, I saw a single word escape from her ear:

T i r e d

So small I nearly missed it. Bold letters, though. The preacher at the pulpit wiped his forehead, and I saw a word leave his mouth that he never said out loud:

Lonely

“… if only we could be more like the Beedle,” the preacher was saying.

I sat up straighter in my seat. It’s not that I’d forgotten Jonah’s pumpernickel secret, but hearing the word
beedle
come out of somebody else’s mouth made me realize how special that secret was. And anyhow, I only knew the Beedle’s identity, not exactly what he did or why he called himself the Beedle.

The preacher said, “We need to follow the Beedle’s example, do good things for people without expecting anything in return.”

So Jonah’s know-how was anonymous. He did a bunch of good for people, but he didn’t want them to know who did it. That sounded ten different kinds of ridiculous to me. My heart was right about my first friend: He was weirdly wonderful.

“Let’s close in prayer,” the preacher said. I wondered if he knew how many prayer words had been circling through the room the whole time, even before he told us to pray:

Help me

Hold me

Hear me

Please

I looked down at my blue book, hoping from far off it might look like my eyes were shut. I wrote down some of the words I’d seen. I didn’t hear much of what the preacher prayed until he said, “I pray that you know today how
deeply you are loved. And I hope you take the time to pray for the ones you love. Tell them how much they mean to you this week. Your words don’t have to be fancy, just sincere.”

So I gave my words to God without closing my eyes and without speaking a single one of them. Silent words, the kind a person’s heart speaks. Turns out my heart had a bunch to say. I prayed for the Beedle first. Then I prayed Mama might get inspired to paint something again. Next up was Aunt Cleo. I nudged her with my elbow and whispered, “What do you pray to God for?”

“A man,” she whispered. But then her whisper turned into a snort, and then a snicker. And then she got so tickled at her own joke that the pew vibrated with the laughter she was trying to hold back. I didn’t understand what was so funny.

“You two,” Mama whispered. “Hush. You’re supposed to be praying.”

So I prayed for a man for Aunt Cleo, since that’s what she said she wanted.

I prayed for Frannie Jo and for Biscuit. I prayed we could make a home here in Midnight Gulch. That Mama would settle into this place instead of driving us back out.

I prayed for Roger Pickle. I prayed he’d write a song about me, maybe sing my name tonight when he sang down the stars. Maybe I would see my name spelled in galaxy dust and I would know he remembered me.

And then the pastor said:

“Felicity …”

I gasped and my mama glared at me, nostrils flared, thinking I was causing some silent ruckus, no doubt. But the pastor wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were still closed tightly. His hands clutched the podium so hard his knuckles were pale.

“Felicity,” he said, “means ‘intense happiness.’ The world is a sorrowful place. And we know there are kinds of happiness that don’t last, that fade off, that leave us feeling wrung out and fickle —”

“Pickle!” Frannie Jo gasped. “They’re kicking us out!”

Mama clamped her hand over Frannie’s mouth and pulled her into her lap.

“But there are true, intense kinds of happiness,” the preacher continued. “Felicity is a particular kind of joy … a wondrous joy. This week, I dare you to choose joy.”

And then the preacher said, “
Amen
.”

“
Amen
.” Cleo nodded.

“Amen!” Frannie echoed. And then she nudged me with her elbow and said, “Will you watch me do a backflip off the pew?”

“No way,” Mama answered for me. She grabbed our hands and hauled us toward the door, smiling sweetly at folks. The only thing Mama disliked more than church was pointless small talk. But we’d barely even stepped out of the pew when somebody reached for her arm.

“Holly? Is that you?”

Mama nodded curtly and didn’t object when the woman threw her arms around her and squeezed tight, like they
were long-lost best friends. I thought she might scoop me and Frannie up into a hug, too, but she didn’t. She just smiled down at us. I liked the way her red lipstick hugged her gap-toothed grin.

Made from scratch

Ready to rise

Those were her words.

“Girls.” Mama rested her hands on my shoulder. “This is Ponder Waller. She owns the pie shop on Main Street. We went to school together —”

Before Frannie or I could say hello, Ponder spoke up again. “I never met an artist more talented than your mama. I always said she was a star — I knew Holly Harness was gonna go places. Cleo’s told us all about some of the murals you painted —”

“Cleo exaggerates.” Mama grinned, and prodded us on ahead of her out the door. “But thank you for the compliment. We gotta get going.”

“You and the girls come by for some pie one day!” Ponder said as we bumped our way through the crowd. “My treat!”

Mama never looked back. But I did. As she hauled us out the door, I saw my name,
Felicity
, shimmering across the stained-glass window. I’d never seen my own name before. I’d never thought about how pretty it would look with the light shining through it.

“Tell you who’s found their wondrous joy,” said Aunt Cleo. The Pickled Jalapeño rocked us down the road while we dined on French fries and chicken nuggets.

“The Beedle!” she hollered, when none of us said anything.

I stopped mid-chew. “What about the Beedle?”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, June Bug,” Mama said.

Aunt Cleo took an extra-big bite and said, with her mouth especially full, “The Beedle is a local hero, a do-gooder. He or She or It leaves notes on people’s doors, flowers in mailboxes, extra change in that one space downtown that has the meter. The Beedle is always watching. Always doing what needs to be done. Has been for fifty years now.”

“Fifty years!” I nearly choked on my French fry. “That’s impossible!”

“That’s magic!” Cleo reached for some of Mama’s French fries, but Mama slapped her hand away.

And now I was more confused than I’d ever been. Because I knew the Beedle wasn’t magic. The Beedle was that spikey-haired Jonah Pickett. And I couldn’t figure out how the hayseed a twelve-year-old spikey-haired do-gooder had been in business for fifty years….