Midlife Curses

by Christine Zane Thomas

  For a second, it I thought she was going to elaborate, but she stopped, her attention drawn by Hal.

  He was standing in the aisle in front of my register.

  “It’s eerie, isn’t it?” He smiled broadly. His teeth were yellowish and gray. I tried not to stare. Our co-workers, Trish included, called him Halitosis Hal behind his back.

  I added lack of proper hygiene to his list of bad habits. Other than bad breath and constantly asking me out on dates, he seemed nice enough.

  “It is eerie,” I agreed. “But why is it like this every day? Is it just in the spring?”

  “It’s not every day,” Hal objected. “Just most days. It’s called valley fog. There’s a scientific reason for it and everything. I have a book on it, if you’d like to—”

  “She’ll pass,” Trish interrupted.

  “I think she can decide for herself.” There was a level of animosity there I hadn’t seen in him before.

  “That’s okay, Hal,” I told him. “She isn’t big on reading nonfiction.” I turned to Trish and said, again in the third person, “And she can handle things herself.”

  “Noted,” Trish said. Maybe she had been doing me a favor, coming to my aid.

  If I didn’t know better, I might think Trish was starting to like me. Our impromptu gathering was broken up by Mr. Caulfield appearing behind Hal.

  “Am I paying you three to talk?” he asked.

  He did this sometimes, appearing from nowhere. His footsteps were all but silent, and he was somehow able to evade the large bowl mirrors on aisles one and ten, the store’s blind spots.

  “No, sir, you aren’t,” Hal answered.

  “Thank you, Hal. We’ll call this your smoke break then. Now, please get back to stocking.”

  “Sir,” I protested. I didn’t know if Hal smoked, but given his teeth I thought there was a high likelihood. “Don’t take his break away. He was just telling me about the fog. It’s my fault—I asked about it.”

  “He was?” Mr. Caulfield tilted his head contemplatively. “And what did Hal say about the fog?”

  “He said there’s a book on it,” I shrugged. “He said it’s something called, did you say valley fog?”

  “It’s a natural occurring phenomenon,” Trish added helpfully.

  Mr. Caulfield pursed his lips like that settled matters. “That it is,” he said. “That’ll be all, Hal. And you two,” he leveled his gaze on Trish and me, “isn’t there something you can do to occupy your time other than yapping?”

  “There sure is.” Trish smiled.

  I nodded along with her, wondering exactly what she meant. I’d already read through the weekly sales. There wasn’t much left to do aside from ring up customers.

  It was like Mr. Caulfield read my mind.

  “Constance,” he said, “I want you to study the produce chart. I like my cashiers to know each code, not have to look it up every time a customer brings them a butternut squash.”

  “Oh six eight one,” Trish blurted.

  Mr. Caulfield grinned. He did an about face, took about two steps, then turned back. He stared into my eyes—so hard, I wanted to look away. But I couldn’t. It was like I was trapped by his eyes. “And you’re not going to make this a regular thing, are you?”

  Perplexed, I cocked my head to the side, still unable to look away.

  Again, it was like he read my thoughts. He spoke before I could ask.

  “You were late this morning. I know salaried jobs allow a certain amount of flexibility. You’re probably used to coming in anytime you want. But it’s not like that here. You clock in on time, and you leave on time.”

  Not like you, I thought derisively. His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t say anything.

  “No, it’s not going to be a habit,” I said meekly.

  “That’s what I like to hear.” He glided away.

  Either he’d checked my timecard or, more likely, he’d watched the surveillance camera footage of me dashing through the parking lot fifteen minutes late. He was probably headed back to his office to do more of the same. Watching the store cameras was like his hobby.

  Frustrated, I opened the binder beside the register.

  Bananas, four-zero-one-one.

  My shift ended early in the afternoon. I was returning my vest to its cubby when raised voices from Mr. Caulfield’s office pricked my ears.

  I tried not to be nosy. I tried to look the other way. But it wasn’t my fault I could hear almost every word.

  “I told you,” a woman’s voice said, “I couldn’t work tonight. I have something else planned. It’s why I came in early. We talked about this.”

  “We did,” Mr. Caulfield’s voice wasn’t loud, but his baritone cut through closed door anyway. “And I told you, I’d think about changing the schedule.”

  “You know that typically means yes.”

  “But this time it meant no. I need you back here tonight. Only for a few hours.”

  “Well, I can’t,” she said. “I have something to personal to do.”

  “And that is?”

  “It’s personal. Hence, I’m telling you.”

  Jade, the butcher, stormed out of his office.

  “I’m not asking,” Mr. Caulfield said. “You’ll be here tonight.” But she was already out of earshot.

  4

  Yer a Witch, Constance

  My grandmother lived on the outskirts of Creel Creek in a subdivision just past a cemetery. Her house was small and cramped and a perfect candidate for the show Hoarders. Unmaintained for several decades, clutter and spent cardboard boxes were piled up all around the place.

  So, for the majority of my non-work hours, I tended to projects around her house—recycling the boxes, fixing a leaky faucet or two, unclogging the disposal, and dozens of minor but worthwhile tasks to right the neglect.

  I even weeded her garden, which at the outset had been populated solely by weeds. If I was going to live here, I wanted to grow my own herbs, cook my own food, and pay my own way.

  Gran liked my initiative and my spunk. Unfortunately, those were about the only things. She had criticism for everything else—my hair, my complexion, and even my cooking. This from a woman who could barely heat up a Stouffer’s Mac and Cheese.

  As if the new job and the new town weren’t enough, my grandmother might just chase me back to California.

  Like me, Gran was tall. We were both in the middle between thin and curvy. Gran’s gray hair curled just past her ears. When she was younger, it had been strawberry blonde, and there were still some reddish highlights of red sprinkled in.

  I’d only visited Gran once in my life—the summer before I turned thirteen. Three years after my mother’s passing.

  Gran, my mother’s mother, never ventured to California. Not even for the funeral.

  I have vague memories of my mother. Most of what I know was secondhand, things my father told me in passing. He was still kicking around in San Diego, enjoying the retired life. We FaceTimed a lot.

  I probably would’ve left Gran and gone home to Dad had I not seen this place with my own eyes. It wasn’t just the house that needed tending, Gran needed someone too. And that someone might as well be me, her only living relative.

  We’d reconnected when she got “the Facebook.” Her words, not mine. It was probably around that same time she’d learned to order things online. There was another stack of boxes on the patio waiting when I got home from work.

  I brought them inside and left them in the hall. Eight hours on my feet had me ready to kick them up.

  Gran lounged in her La-Z-Boy. Despite the temperature outside hovering around eighty and the inside air only a smidgen below that, she had a quilt wrapped around her feet.

  Her chair was situated about five feet from her television, the old tube kind. Her eyes were glued to it.

  I fell onto, not into, the hard couch on the other side of the den.

  The familiar Harry Potter movie theme music trumpeted from the stereo speakers attach
ed to the TV. Gran had rummaged through my DVD collection again.

  “I don’t care what these movies say,” she complained. “You don’t become a witch until you turn forty. And there’re no schools for it. No magic banks either, I don’t think. There’s just, well, there’s…” She struggled a moment. “There’s just magic,” she ended with a whimper, not a bang.

  Unprepared for one of her tirades, I tried to figure out what she was getting at. Of course there were no wizarding schools. No Gringotts, either. I’d spent the better part of my college years hoping to get my letter from Hogwarts.

  My brain leapt, rejecting her claim about magic for the other thing she’d said. Something about turning forty. An odd coincidence. My own fortieth circle around the sun was a few days away from its completion—a fact I was trying to forget.

  Oddly enough, I did share a birthday with someone from Hogwarts—the same exact date, June 5th, 1980. It was my secret shame. Yes, Draco Malfoy and I were turning forty. Although I’m a Ravenpuff—that’s a Ravenclaw with Hufflepuff tendencies—I’m certainly no Slytherin.

  Gran glared at me, trying to goad me to say something in response.

  I tried, “You know, Gran, these are books too, not just movies. Good books. I have them upstairs if you’d like to borrow one.”

  “That’s it!” Gran slapped her knee as if I’d won the Showcase Showdown on The Price is Right—her favorite show.

  “Books,” she said. “That’s where you learn to be a witch. Spell books and potion books. Books of curses. Well, that and me—you’ll have me, of course, to guide you.”

  “To guide me?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

  This was exactly why I’d stayed in Creel Creek. I’d begun to notice Gran often became confused. I thought it might be the onset of dementia, but I couldn’t strongarm her into visiting a doctor. Not yet. That was on my list of things to do, along with the housework.

  “Did you have tea this afternoon?” I asked her. “You’re not yourself until you’ve had your tea and a little snack.”

  Gran wasn’t like anyone else, tea or no tea. She was tough to pin down, always jabbering away about something. The problem being something changed like the wind—more often than the wind.

  She liked to slurp Earl Grey in the afternoon while I preferred black tea, no matter the time of day. Or wine. I’d have killed for a decent glass of wine. Only Gran didn’t drink, and I’d never been one to leave a bottle half full. A bottle a day habit was just what I needed to turn this minor bout of depression into something more severe.

  I wanted to get Gran off this tangent. Make us some tea, then maybe a midafternoon nap would do her—would do both of us—some good.

  I turned off the television. No more Harry Potter for her.

  Gran scowled. “I’m talking about you being a witch.”

  “A witch?”

  “You’re a witch, Constance.” She said it as matter-of-factly as she’d told me about this season’s cast of Big Brother. In fact, she’d been more excited about Big Brother.

  “Okay, Gran.” Maybe it’s low blood sugar. I really needed to get her to see that doctor.

  I hurried to put the kettle on, and to my utter surprise, she followed me and sat down at the kitchen table, cluttered with mail, condiments, and artificial sweetener packets.

  I wasn’t getting away from this conversation, at least, not that easily.

  The house had both a breakfast nook and a dining room. Except Gran wasn’t the type of lady to own two tables. The dining room housed an assortment of cat trees, cat towers, scratching posts, and other furniture unsuitable for human rear ends. This little nook in the kitchen was where we ate our meals. And now, I thought, it’s where Gran goes crazy.

  She tapped her pointer finger waiting for my reply making the oversized ruby on her ring bounce. I wondered, not for the first time, if it was real.

  “I’m not a witch,” I said flatly. “I think the word you’re looking for starts with a B. And honestly, it’s a not a nice thing to call anyone, let alone your granddaughter.”

  Gran had made an occasional odd statement about witches or spells or curses. She told to make a salt line beside my window to prevent bad dreams. When I’d arrived, she’d smelled me for curses, then chalked it off to me smelling of two days’ travel.

  But those were more easily swept aside. This current bout of madness was proving more difficult.

  “I know what I said, and I said what I mean. You’re a witch, sweetheart. I thought you knew.”

  There she went again. Twice in as many minutes, calling me a witch. Or possibly the b-word.

  The kettle whistled.

  “Two sugars, and a squeeze of lemon, right?”

  “Too right, dear.”

  I switched off the gas and set out our mugs.

  “You are a witch,” Gran said as I sat down, “like me and like your mother. Here, I’ll prove it to you.”

  “And just how are you going to do that?” I was getting tired of this—and when I get tired, I get sarcastic. “Are you going to show me your wand? Or no, wait! I know. You’ll twitch your little nose and make the table disappear. That’s it! That’ll show me! Go on then. Make the table disappear.”

  “Heavens no,” Gran scoffed. “Why would I want the table to disappear? This lack of magical knowledge, or surplus of fictional, only goes to show how much you’ve got to learn.”

  I sighed. “Okay. Then how are you going to prove it?”

  “Stevie,” Gran called. “Stevie, get in here. I need you.”

  Stevie, one of Gran’s three housecats, rounded the corner into the kitchen. He leapt onto the table, purring madly in hopes Gran would stroke his back.

  “Oh, you can stop that nonsense,” she scolded him. “I’ve just told her.”

  The black shorthaired cat stopped purring. He chose instead to lick his paws. Then he gave his forehead a wash.

  “Well, how did she take it?” The deep throaty voice of a man seemed to be coming from the area around the cat. To say it came from the cat’s mouth would not be accurate. The voice was like a shadow without an owner.

  I was shaken. Scared. I fell, then backed away on the unswept kitchen floor. Grains of dirt dug into my palms as I scooted backward.

  “That well.” Gran pointed a gnarled finger in my direction.

  I only made it a few feet when my skull found a cabinet to bump against. “Ow!”

  “And whose fault is that?” Gran asked. “Did either of us force you into the cabinet? For heaven’s sake, Constance, I thought you’d take this better. You had to know something about you was different than everyone else.”

  “You thought I would take what better? Having a nervous breakdown?”

  “You’re not having a nervous breakdown.”

  “I beg to differ. I just heard a cat speak.”

  “Not exactly true,” the cat’s voice said.

  “You see how well those movies prepared her,” Gran said to the cat, to Stevie. “She can’t even fathom a talking cat. Honestly, how good can they be?”

  “I thought they were decent,” Stevie replied. “Although it did get rather unbelievable toward the end.”

  “The magic?” Gran asked.

  “No,” he shook his cat head, “to believe those actors were only seventeen.”

  Stevie dropped onto the floor and padded toward me. There was nowhere for me to go. Nowhere to run. He found my lap, placed his front paws on top of me, and stretched. His claws extended, piercing gently into my shirt.

  “What do we have to do convince you?” his voice asked.

  “To convince me, what, that I’m a witch?”

  “No,” Stevie answered, “to convince you that this isn’t a psychotic break. I know what you’re thinking. And you’re not crazy.”

  Gran leaned my direction. “That’s what you thought before, isn’t it? When you stopped time. That you were crazy.”

  “How do you… I, yeah, I feel a bit crazy.”

&nb
sp; Crazy and out of breath. The room was spinning. It was much easier to stay on the ground. Much, much easier.

  Eventually I’ll wake up, I thought, and this will all have been a dream. A vivid and crazy dream.

  But I wasn’t waking up. And those claws of his hurt.

  “Okay,” I said slowly, taking a breath. “Let’s say I do believe you. I’m a witch. You’re a witch. You have a talking cat.”

  “A familiar.”

  “Right.” I nodded. “I knew that.” I knew what witches called their pets.

  I got up shakily and returned to my seat. The tables had turned. Now it was me in need of that tea.

  “My mom was a witch.” The words stung leaving my lips. Since my mom died when I was so young, I was always learning new things about her, slowly building a picture of her in my mind. But this information made it like I’d been building a puzzle with half the pieces lost.

  Gran pursed her lips, contemplative. “Constance, I’ve never gotten confirmation from the spirits that your mother actually did die. But being a witch is how she ended up wherever she is now. She took a job, a special assignment, and she never returned.”

  “But she had a job.”

  “No, no. She wasn’t a whatever you think she was.” Gran shook her head.

  “A studio location scout,” I said. “Her plane went down in the Pacific. Dad told me this story a thousand…”

  Gran took a sip of tea, unwilling to look me in the eyes.

  “They never found the plane,” I continued my spiel. And Gran continued to silently tell me it was wrong.

  “So, there wasn’t a plane crash?”

  “It sounds like a convenient story to tell a gullible man.”

  I’d normally protest any word spoken against my father, but for now I held my tongue. A million questions buzzed around my head. Finding the right one to ask proved difficult.

  “I thought maybe you’d have a few more questions,” Gran said.

  She was right. I had a ton, mostly to do with my mother and the circumstances around her—around her disappearance.

  “Not about your mother,” Gran said. “That’s a subject for another time. Questions about being a witch, I’d assumed you might have a few.”