Garden Spells (12 page)

Claire couldn’t believe what she saw. Sydney had taken off at least twelve inches of length. The cut angled down so that it was longer in the front, but high and full in the back. The thin bangs made Claire’s eyes look beautiful and sparkling, not flat and judgmental. There in the mirror was someone who looked like Claire had always wanted to be.

Sydney didn’t ask her if she liked it. There was no question. It was a transformation performed by a master. Everyone was looking at Sydney with such awe, and Sydney was shining like polished silver.

Claire felt tears come to her eyes, a joy of birth, of redemption. Somewhere deep inside her, Claire had always known. It had been the source of all her jealousy when they were kids. Sydney had been born here. That was a gift, and this had always been inside Sydney, just waiting for her to embrace it.

“You can’t deny it anymore,” Claire said.

“Deny what?” Sydney asked.

“
This
is your Waverley magic.”

CHAPTER

7

L
ester Hopkins sat in an aluminum lawn chair under the chestnut tree in his front yard. A ribbon of dust followed a car in the distance, coming up the long driveway to the house next to the dairy.

Lester had come back from his stroke last year with a limp and a corner of his mouth that wouldn’t quite turn up, so he kept a handkerchief handy to wipe away the spittle that collected there. Didn’t want to offend the ladies. He spent a lot of time sitting these days, which he didn’t mind so much. It gave him time to think. Truth be told, he had always looked forward to this time in his life. When he was a boy, his grandfather lived the life of Reilly, his days full of big breakfasts, hunting when he felt like it, sleeping in the afternoons, and picking the banjo in the evenings. That, Lester thought, was the way to live. You even got money in the mail every month, like clockwork. So Lester decided early on that he wanted to grow up and be retired.

But there were a few glitches along the way. He had to work harder than he imagined after his father died when Lester was seventeen, which left him to run the dairy by himself. And he and his wife were blessed with only one son. But his son married a hardworking woman and they all lived there in the house, and his son had a son and everything was all right. But then Lester’s wife got the cancer and his son died in a car accident two years later. Lost and grieving, his daughter-in-law wanted to move to Tuscaloosa, where her sister lived. But Henry, Lester’s grandson, then eleven years old, wanted to stay.

So Lester had known only two things of constant faith: his farm, and Henry.

As the car came closer, Lester heard the screen door bang shut. He turned to see that Henry had come out of the front of the house to see who it was. It was too late for business. The sun was nearly set.

Henry called out, “Are you expecting something, Pap?”

“My ship to come in. But that ain’t it.”

Henry walked down to the chestnut tree and stood beside Lester. Lester looked over at him. He was a handsome boy, but like all Hopkins men, he was born old and would spend his whole life waiting for his body to catch up. This was the reason all Hopkins men married older women. Henry was taking his time, though, and Lester had taken to helping him along a little. Lester would tell Henry to lead the elementary-school tours of the dairy if the teachers were the right age and unmarried. And the decorating committee at church consisted of mostly divorced women, so Lester let them come out to collect hay in the fall and holly in the winter, and he always made Henry go out to help them. But nothing ever took. Solid and sure of himself, hardworking and kindhearted, Henry was quite a catch, if only he wasn’t so happy with himself.

But that’s what happens when you’re born old.

The car came to a stop. Lester didn’t recognize the driver, but he did recognize the woman getting out of the passenger seat.

He cackled. He always liked for Evanelle Franklin to come by. It was like finding a robin in the winter. “Looks like Evanelle needs to give us something.”

The man stayed in the car as Evanelle crossed the yard. “Lester,” she said, stopping in front of him and putting her hands on her hips, “you look better every time I see you.”

“They have a cure for cataracts now, you know,” he teased.

She smiled. “Devil man.”

“What brings you out this way?”

“I needed to give you this.” She reached into her bag of goodies and handed him a jar of maraschino cherries.

Lester looked over to Henry, who was trying to hide his smile. “Well, I haven’t had these in a long time. Thank you, Evanelle.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Say, who’s that who brought you?”

“That’s Fred, from the grocery store. He’s been staying with me. It’s been real nice.”

“Would you two like to stay for dinner?” Henry asked. “Yvonne made potato cakes.”

Yvonne was their housekeeper. Henry had hired her after Lester’s stroke last year. She was married, of course. Lester would have hired someone single.

“No, thank you, I have to get along,” Evanelle said. “I’ll see you at the Fourth of July celebration?”

“We’ll be there,” Lester said, and he and Henry watched her walk away.

“She gave me a ball of yarn once,” Henry said. “I was probably fourteen and we were on a school field trip downtown. I was so embarrassed. I threw it away. But the very next week I needed it when I was working on a school project.”

“Men in this town learn their lesson young when it comes to Waverley women,” Lester said, reaching for the cane he’d rested against the tree. He slowly stood. “Whenever there’s one around, sit up and pay attention.”

The next afternoon Claire heard Sydney’s voice upstairs. “Where is everyone?”

“I’m down here,” Claire called to her.

Soon she heard the creak of the dusty stairs as Sydney walked down to the basement. It was cool and dry, and sometimes grown men who had too much to do would knock on the front door and ask to go sit in the Waverley basement for a while because it cleared their thoughts and brought back their equilibrium.

Sydney’s footsteps drew closer as she followed the racks deeper into the basement, toward the shine of Claire’s flashlight. The lightbulbs in the basement had all burned out in 1939, and what had started out as someone too tired to replace them had turned into a family tradition of keeping the basement in the dark. No one knew why they did it now, just that this was the way it had always been done.

“Where is Bay?” Sydney asked. “Isn’t she down here with you?”

“No, she likes to stay in the garden most of the time. She’s okay. The tree stopped tossing apples at her when she started throwing them back at it.” Claire handed Sydney the flashlight. “Help me with this, will you? Shine here.”

“Honeysuckle wine?”

“The Fourth of July celebration is next week. I’m counting the bottles to see how many we have to bring.”

“I saw a bottle on the kitchen table when I came in,” Sydney said as Claire counted.

“That’s the rose geranium wine Fred gave back to me. He wouldn’t let me return his money. I think it might be a bribe to keep quiet,” Claire said, then clapped her hands together to get rid of the dust. “Thirty-four bottles. I thought I made forty last year. No matter. This should be enough.”

“Are you going to give it to Tyler?”

Claire took back the flashlight. “Am I going to give what to Tyler?”

“The rose geranium wine.”

“Oh,” Claire said, walking away. Sydney was soon on her heels. “Actually, I was sort of hoping you would take it to him for me.”

“He’s teaching his summer-session classes,” Sydney said. “He won’t be around much.”

“Oh.” Claire was glad Sydney couldn’t see her, see her confusion. She sometimes thought she was going crazy. Her first thought when she woke up was always how to get him out of her thoughts. And she would keep watch, hoping to see him next door, while plotting ways to never have to see him again. It made no sense.

They reached the kitchen, and Claire closed and locked the basement door behind them. “He’s a good guy, Claire,” Sydney said. “I know. Surprised the hell out of me too. Imagine that. Men can be good. Who would’ve thought?”

Claire took the flashlight back to the storeroom and put it on the shelf where she kept candles and battery-powered lanterns. The electricity from her frustration caused the portable radio on the shelf to crackle to life as she passed it, and she jumped in surprise. She immediately turned it off, then leaned against the wall. This couldn’t go on. “He’s not a constant,” Claire said from the storeroom. “The apple tree is a constant. Honeysuckle wine is a constant. This house is a constant. Tyler Hughes is not a constant.”

“I’m not a constant, am I?” Sydney asked, but Claire didn’t answer. Was Sydney a constant? Had she really found her niche in Bascom, or would she leave again, maybe when Bay was grown or if she fell in love? Claire didn’t want to think about it. The only thing Claire could control was not being the reason Sydney left, giving her reasons to stay. She would focus only on that.

Claire took a deep breath and walked back out to the kitchen. “So how’s work?” she asked brightly.

“Oh, my God, so busy. Thanks to you.”

“I didn’t do anything. You did.”

Sydney shook her head. “People look at me now like I’m a teacher or something. I don’t understand it.”

“You’ve just learned the secret to my success,” Claire said. “When people believe you have something to give, something no one else has, they’ll go to great lengths and pay a lot of money for it.”

Sydney laughed. “So you’re saying, if we’re going to be strange anyway, we might as well get paid for it?”

“We’re not strange.” Claire paused. “But exactly.”

“You have cobwebs in your hair from the basement,” Sydney said, walking over to her and sweeping them away with her fingertips. Territorial about Claire’s hair now, Sydney had taken to simply walking up to her and tucking some strands behind Claire’s ear, finger-combing the bangs across her forehead, or fluffing up the back. It was nice, like she was playing, like something they would have done as girls, if they’d been close.

“Where did you cut hair before?” Claire asked, watching Sydney’s face close up as she smoothed out Claire’s hair. She’d grown up so much while she was away.

Sydney stepped back and tried to get the cobwebs off her fingertips, where they were sticking like tape. “It’s been a few years. But in Boise, for a while.” She gave up on the cobwebs and turned away. She grabbed the rose geranium wine off the table and hurried out the back door, a curious smell of men’s cologne trailing after her. “I’m going to say hi to Bay, then I’ll just take this over to Tyler.”

Ever since that day Sydney mentally returned to the town house in Seattle when she remembered she’d left the photos of her mother there, the scent of David’s cologne would appear around her without warning. Ceiling fans downstairs would turn on by themselves when the scent was particularly strong, as if to chase it away. When it hovered in the upstairs hallway at night, away from fans and night breezes, it paced, hot with anger. Those nights Bay would crawl into bed with Sydney and they would whisper about what they’d left behind. They’d talk in code, saying how happy they were to be away from there, how nice it was to be free. When they said this, they would cross their thumbs and make butterfly shadow puppets on the wall in the purple light coming through the window from Tyler’s yard.

Claire still wanted to know about where Sydney had been and what she’d done while she was away. Sydney knew she should tell her now, especially since sometimes even Claire would smell cologne in the house and wonder aloud where it had come from. But the cologne made Sydney realize what kind of danger she’d put her sister in by coming here, and she was doubly ashamed to admit her mistakes. Claire was doing so much for her.

When Sydney walked outside, the scent of cologne faded in the garden, pummeled by the fragrance of apples and sage and earth. Sydney sat with Bay under the tree and they talked about her day and about the Fourth of July celebration and about how one day they were going to walk over to the elementary school so Bay could see where it was. Ever since Claire had said it was okay for Bay to go into the garden, Bay spent several hours every day lying on the grass by the apple tree. When Sydney asked her why, she said she was just trying to figure something out. Sydney didn’t press, and so much had happened that it was natural that Bay needed time to figure it out.

After talking to Bay, Sydney walked over to Tyler’s. She found him in his backyard, bringing a lawn mower out of his small shed.

“I don’t know, Tyler, are you emotionally ready for all that cut grass again?” she called to him.

He turned and laughed. “If I don’t cut it soon, small neighborhood dogs are going to get lost in it. Even now, when Mrs. Kranowski can’t find Edward, she comes over and beats the grass with a stick, looking for him.”

“I come bearing a gift from Claire.” She held up the wine bottle.

Tyler hesitated, as if silently squelching the first thing he wanted to say. “You know, I’m having no luck figuring out your sister. She gives me gifts when she clearly doesn’t like me. Is this a Southern thing?”