ONCE UPON ANOTHER TIME

by McQuestion, Rosary

  When he didn’t show, doubts began to creep into my thoughts, like was I just reading into the messages what I wanted to hear like an excuse to move forward and find love without guilt? I wasn’t sure but I did know one thing. I was powerless to control what is predestined and powerless to control the spiritual world and precognitive dreams. This was the work of someone all-powerful and of greatness beyond what a simple human mind could comprehend.

  Gavin sounded surprised when I called him back after I’d had a couple days to think about the enormity of the chance I’d been given to change loneliness into a possible world of happiness--something I’d shut myself off from for years.

  It took all the courage I had to pick up the phone and dial. I wasn’t even sure what I’d first said to Gavin, but once we started talking, it felt as if time had rewound itself. Talking to him made me feel as if I were back in my teenage years of when I’d lay on my white canopy bed amidst a boatload of stuffed animals, talking for hours while playfully twisting my finger around the coiled cord of my pink replica 1970s princess phone. My father used to say that with a little fertilizer he’d be able to get the phone to grow out of my ear.

  Gavin and I talked for almost two hours and I learned, among other things, that he had put himself through college by bartending at a male strip club. Said his uniform consisted of black dress pants and a tuxedo bowtie. I concluded the only thing he wore on his chest must have been a tan. He told me he hated working there, and that it was the worst job he’d ever had, but that he’d do it again to put himself through college.

  Slacker came to mind as I thought of my own carefree college days. The only worry I had was whether I was going to wear the big, bold Hollywood sunglasses or the small, chic round ones to walk across campus to my next class.

  He enjoyed his job at J&J Crew, and had worked there for five years. He also came from a large family of not less than one hundred aunts, uncles, and cousins and he had just turned thirty-two. Walking barefoot over hot coals would have been easier than admitting I was three years older than he was. His response was that age was just a state of mind. We talked about Nicholas and the subject of Matt came up a few times. Gavin seemed interested in knowing about him.

  As Mother skimmed the knife across the cutting board, dropping the onions into a bowl filled with boiled redskin potato slices, celery, and green pepper, she peered across the island at me through a dark tassel of bangs. I felt compelled to discuss Matt, my mind reading and the less than conventional way Matt and I had been communicating. After all, my parents had an unyielding belief in the existence of spirits and parallel universes, although, I didn’t know what their thoughts would be on mind reading.

  I wasn’t sure where to begin. It wasn’t something I’d ever discussed with my parents. More to the point, I’d always had difficulties discussing any part of my life with my mother.

  As she performed her signature “Cher” style snapping of the head from side-to-side to flip her silky long black hair off her shoulders, I thought I’d try to speak to her. After all, she was practically an expert on ghosts.

  “I was thinking,” I said breezily, picking up a celery stick and waving it facetiously in the air. “Maybe we should talk.”

  “Oh, you want to talk about your date tomorrow?” She scraped one last dollop of mayo from the jar, the spoon tinkled against the sides of the glass.

  I lowered my eyes to stare vacantly at the circular pattern of bananas Nicholas was placing on the bottom of the piecrust. “Well, not exactly.”

  Mother’s eyebrows rose with curiosity, as she folded the mayo into the salad. “So, does not talking about it mean you’re not excited about your date?”

  “No--I mean yes, I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Hey, Aubrey,” my father called from outside on the deck, as he pulled his long silver hair into a neat ponytail. His black T-shirt, tucked into a pair of faded blue jeans, showed off the start of a slight paunch. “What happened to the cushions that used to be on the wicker furniture?”

  “Buster sprayed them,” Nicholas called back.

  Buster was obsessed with leaving his mark on everything like the cushions, the wicker furniture, the laundry basket, and the coffee table. I looked over my shoulder and saw him perched on the living room sofa. I imagined him as a mini Doctor Evil scanning his empire wringing his little paws together, his meows coming out in fiendish chuckles. It’s mine, all mine to do with what I wish!

  “Aubrey, what is it you wanted to talk to me about?”

  I turned back to look at Mother. “Oh, nothing,” I said, as I poured a can of blueberry pie filling over the banana-lined graham cracker crust. Ghost expert or not, I just couldn’t get up the courage to say anything. I’d spent my teenage years laughing at my parents’ ridiculous notions of ghosts roaming the earth. The last thing I wanted to hear was I told you so.

  “Mom, this is yummy,” Nicholas said, as he licked a puff of whipped cream off his finger.

  “Honey, please don’t poke your finger into the topping.”

  “But Mom,” he said, as his lower lip curled over.

  “How about if you go outside and pick some of your home-grown juicy tomatoes for dinner?” I coaxed.

  He smiled broadly, his front upper tooth missing, surrendered to the tooth fairy for two new, crisp one-dollar bills. “They’re the best, aren’t they Mom?”

  The last weeks of school, Mr. Stevens, Nicholas’s first grade teacher, had brought packets of seeds to class so the children could experience growing and caring for their own vegetables over the summer. He was great with kids and reminded me of a music teacher I had in junior high, Mr. Murray.

  I’d guess he must have been in his thirties. He was handsome with a thick black mustache and long sideburns. His tweed jacket always had the faint smell of cherry pipe tobacco. Being the offspring of parents I could never relate to, I was desperate to be normal and find answers to why my parents’ lives were like social trials and endless spiritual journeys. Much to my surprise, Mr. Murray convinced me that although my parents weren’t part of society’s stereotypical mold, they contributed much to the world.

  He was a wise and wonderful individual, a man who wore his compassion on his sleeve and unfortunately--sometimes his wig. A vigorous head banging to Aerosmith while demonstrating the electric guitar would flip the wig to one side. Nevertheless, he was my hero.

  “So, what does your date look like? You said he was around Dad’s height, right?”

  “Yes, Gavin’s around six foot five.”

  “Is he average looking or a dreamboat from heaven?”

  As I helped place the slices of hardboiled eggs on top of the potato salad, the word heaven brought Matt to mind. I decided then that if I had to eat crow so be it. I just had to talk to her about Matt.

  “So, have you been reading that book Love Spirit?” she asked. Her blue eyes seemed electrified against her bronze skin.

  My eyebrow automatically shot up. “Why would you ask me that?”

  She smiled sheepishly. “Hmm, I saw it sitting on the coffee table.”

  I suddenly felt as if my world had just crashed down around me. Could it possibly be that…no she wouldn’t have. It had to be Matt. But what if this was her trick of all times!

  My mother had duped me many times before, but this I didn’t want to believe. My mind spun in a pool of endless thoughts. She was at my house every day, either dropping Nicholas off or picking him up. Seeing Matt’s ghost was one thing, I knew that was real, but the book! Why didn’t I see this before? She’d always gone to extreme lengths to meddle in my life, but this time she’d gone too far.

  “Mother, why are you corresponding with me via a book?”

  “What?” She did her best to disguise her surprised look with one of confusion. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, don’t even try to pretend you don’t know. I’d seen that bogus face of confusion before.”

  “Before?”

  “The anonymous notes
you placed around my office from a so-called secret admirer, in an attempt to try and ease my breakup with Rick?”

  “Well I--”

  “Setting me up on that blind date and leading me to believe the man was a doctor, when all along he was a medicine man trying to perform soul retrieval on me?”

  “Actually, he was a Shaman, but--”

  “Listen, the point is you can’t keep pulling these tricks on me. I have enough going on with Matt’s ghost popping up every now and then, but to pretend he’s teaching me about fate, destiny and second chances, and--”

  “Excuse me!” Mother stared at me in quizzical horror.

  I had suddenly realized what I’d just blurted out about Matt.

  “Aubrey, I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about. And what was that you said about Matt?”

  Good God! By the wan look on her face, I sensed she really didn’t know what I was talking about, but why did she ask me about the book? My mind flashed back to the day at the mall when I crashed into the book display, and that particular book lay open on the floor before me. She certainly had nothing to do with that.

  “Aubrey, what’s going on?”

  “Ha! Um, ah.” My eyes gazed over the smooth granite countertop.

  She sighed and shook her head. “I think I know what’s going on.”

  I lifted my eyes to look her. “You do?”

  She nodded. “Finally, after all these years, you’re having a spiritual awareness. Finding your soul, thinking about destiny and second chances--it all makes sense now.”

  “It does?”

  “Of course. The past few of weeks you’ve seemed happier, more tuned into your feelings. You know how I’ve always stressed the benefits of earnest meditation. I don’t know what the book has to do with any of this, but I now understand your rejuvenated outlook on life.”

  “I seem different to you?”

  “It’s difficult to explain, but you seem to have a bounce in your step, you’re more at ease, more content, not so controlling.”

  I really hadn’t thought about it, but I really was beginning to see the world differently. I did feel happier and less obsessed with things, like a little dust on the furniture, and the cans in the cupboard were a little jumbled lately, but it didn’t bother me.

  “But what was that you said about Matt?” asked Mother.

  I stuffed a hardboiled egg into my mouth and motioned to my mother that I was stepping outside to light the grill. Well that went well. I walked down the deck stairs to the flagstone patio.

  As I struck a match, Sallie, my next-door neighbor kept an eye on me. She was playing fetch with her miniature poodle. The woman could have been a trophy winner on Dancing with the Stars had they added horizontal samba to the category. Wearing white anklets, a mini skirt, and her blonde hair in two long braids, she looked like a kinky Swiss Miss. I wondered where she had stashed her toy boy.

  She got nervous every time I’d light the grill, claiming I’d almost set her house on fire in fall of the year before. It wasn’t my fault that when I threw the match that ignited the lighter fluid soaked coals, which spiked the brittle lilac bush, that a thin, fiery branch fell and ignited a path of dried leaves, which led straight to her house. It wasn’t that big a deal. I had extinguished the flames with a garden hose long before the fire department arrived.

  The screech of worn wheels on the sliding screen door drew my attention, as Mother stepped out onto the deck. The silver beads on the outside leg of her customized BeDazzled bellbottom jeans sparkled in the sunlight, while her red peasant blouse exposed one bare shoulder. She balanced a plate of uncooked seasoned chicken as she walked down the steps.

  “Aubrey,” my father said, as he tossed a Frisbee across the lawn to Nicholas, while Sallie’s yappy little dog darted after it. “What do you think about us selling the gift shop and starting a new business?”

  “Sell the gift shop? Why would you start something new at your age?”

  “We’ve decided the shop is too much to handle, and we’d never trust anyone to manage it full-time, so selling is the only option.”

  “What are you thinking about doing?”

  “We’d go in a totally new direction,” Mother said, as she passed me the plate of chicken. “We want to open a kiosk at the mall and sell what we believe in. Like fresh salads made from organic homegrown fruits and veggies. Fresh juices and smoothies, some made with yogurt. It’d be great tasting healthy foods. And the business would be small enough so it wouldn’t take up but a quarter of the time and effort we currently put into the gift shop.”

  “But you’d have to start over.”

  “Oh, it’d be fine,” said my father. “It’s been years, but we did start over once before.”

  “When?”

  “Don’t you remember the move?” my father asked.

  “How do you expect her to remember that?” Mother shook her head and picked up the garden hose to spray the dirt off Nicholas’s handpicked tomatoes. “She was only a little older than Nicholas.”

  “Are you saying the gift shop wasn’t always downtown?”

  Mother set the tomatoes in a bowl and shook the water from her hands.

  “Back in the seventies, your father and I had a tiny one-room storefront in a neighborhood lined with hundred-year-old oaks. There were several quaint storefronts, all neatly tucked between beautiful old turn-of-the-century houses. The neighborhood was beautiful and multicultural, made up of artists, writers, poets, and musicians.”

  “Hey, remember that fortuneteller two storefronts down from us?” my father said, as the Frisbee zoomed by, coming within an inch of hitting him in the head.

  “Gramps, you gotta pay attention!” Nicholas yelled, while the poodle playfully jumped at him, trying to get his attention. I glanced over my shoulder at Sallie who was busy talking on her cell phone, no doubt trying to schedule a nooner.

  My father bent over to retrieve the Frisbee that was stuck inside the bottom branches of the lilac bush. “That fortuneteller woman,” he said while peering up at me, “was real spooky. Your Aunt Mille, God rest her soul, used to hang around with her. They made quite a pair back then.”

  “I can barely remember Aunt Millie,” I said, as I clamped the tongs around pieces of chicken and tossed them on the grill. “She died young, right?”

  “Yep, only twenty-two.”

  “So why did this woman and Aunt Mille make a good pair?”

  A branch caught on my father’s ponytail as he tried to stand. Mother rescued him by yanking it out.

  “Ouch!” my father yelped.

  Mother straightened and turned toward me doing the Cher flip, while folding her arms across her chest. “Your Aunt Millie pretended to be a spiritualist. She wasn’t even part of the revolution, but she pretended to be, saying she had ‘powers.’ She claimed to be a mind reader. Of course, coming from your father’s side of the family, that didn’t surprise me.”

  With one plump chicken thigh suspended in mid air, my heart dropped to my stomach. “Mind reader?” The chicken slipped from the tongs, ricocheted off the side of the grill, and plopped onto the patio stones.

  My father groaned. “She wasn’t a mind reader. It was more like thoughts from other people would somehow pop into her head. Nothing she could control.”

  “Um, do you know if that was preempted with a bump to her head?” I asked, as Little Swiss Miss’s yappy poodle charged across the lawn toward my foot, retrieved the raw piece of chicken and took off running toward the beach.

  My father gave me a quizzical look. “At first, we thought Millie was a little touched,” he said, tapping a finger to his temple. “But once she started blurting out things that people were actually thinking, we knew she had a special gift.”

  “Gift? It’d be more like a curse!”

  As I watched Sallie wrestling the raw chicken thigh from the dog’s mouth, suddenly everything made sense.

  “Aubrey?”

  I looked at my father an
d tried to read the expression on his face. “Yes?”

  “It’s nothing to get worked up over,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously.

  “Me worked up? Nah. By the way, is that kind of thing hereditary? Not that I believe in that sort of stuff.”

  My father stared pensively at the hot white charcoals lining the bottom of the grill. “Hmm, I never thought about it.”

  “Everyone speculated that was why she threw herself off the Brooklyn Bridge,” said Mother under her breath.

  “Aunt Millie committed suicide?”

  “We were devastated,” my father said. “We kept it a secret how she died. But I don’t think it had anything to do with hearing people’s thoughts. Fact is she had lots of problems before that ever happened. She ran off and lived in a commune for a while and never felt secure in who she was, never felt accepted or appreciated. Never fit in with the rules of the establishment. Not that your mother and I fit in,” he added quickly, while glancing at my mother. “But it seemed to have affected her more.”

  “Too much pressure from society?” I asked, while wondering if my Aunt Millie’s gift so to speak was temporary or permanent.

  “Yep. In a way, the hippy movement even affected you. My father motioned for Nicholas to help him set the table with napkins and glasses. “There were times when you could be quite rebellious.”

  I had a flashback of those days. I resented having flower children for parents, and I’d get angry watching people point and make fun of them behind their backs. Sometimes my anger would build and I’d do things that would get me in trouble. Like the time I threw a rock for no reason at all through the window of the old geezer’s house next door. At times, I considered running away; thinking being on the lam wouldn’t be so bad. I’d had enough of the vegan life. I wanted to feast on greasy burgers, fries, and chocolate Easter bunnies--lots of them!

  “Aubrey? Aubrey! The chicken is flaming up,” my father bellowed, as he snatched the tongs from my hand to rescue our meal.