“I don’t know. I’m still thinking about your earlier question. Is the curse defined by the one casting it, or the one it’s cast on? If you think something is a curse and the person you cast it on thinks it’s a blessing—you could have steady work without feeling too bad about it. You just need to find someone who wants the curses you can give.”
“Mama wanted those gloves. I wonder if they’ve turned into regular gloves yet.”
“Gloves,” repeated Tobias.
“My first curse this morning.” I told him about Mama’s red gloves, then checked the clock. I’d cursed Mama up a pair of gloves at around six A.M., and now it was—almost four in the afternoon? More than enough time had passed for the gloves to have turned normal, if the eight-hour duration of the curses was the right amount of time. I had been asleep when the earlier curses had worn off; I couldn’t really be sure it was eight hours. Maybe less, maybe more.
Four in the afternoon. Mama would have already left for the TV station to do News at Five. I hoped the gloves had behaved. Maybe we should check the news when it was five, and see if she was wearing them.
Four in the afternoon? “Wait a sec. It’s my night to cook, and I haven’t even cleaned up the kitchen from the grapefruit yet, let alone planned a menu. I have to go check our supplies and see what I can make or if I need to go buy something.”
“Gyp, strive for perspective. Learning to control yourself is more important than cooking,” Tobias said. “We can always order pizza.”
“You guys had pizza last night.” They hadn’t left me any slices, but I had seen the boxes this morning.
“We love pizza. We could have it for a week and not get tired of it,” Flint said.
“I’d get tired of it. But I’ll cook tonight if you like, Gyp,” said Beryl.
“No, I want to cook.” Maybe cooking would make me feel normal. I cooked three nights out of seven; three other nights a week, I worked the evening shift at the Center and ate brown bag suppers or fast food from the campus vendors and the rest of the family scrounged; and on Sunday nights, everybody who wanted to went out to dinner in a bunch. We had various favorite places around town we went to, and for variety, when new restaurants opened, we descended on them. “I need some help with the kitchen cleanup, though. There was structural damage, and I don’t know how to fix that.” I looked at Jasper, pressed my hands palm to palm in prayer.
He shrugged, then laughed. “Sure. Add some pfeffernüsse to Saturday’s cookies?”
I groaned. “How am I going to find time to do Christmas cookies for the rest of the household?”
He smiled and waggled his eyebrows. “I’ll put these to good use. Maybe sweeten the tempers of my bandmates, eh? We’ve been fighting a lot lately.”
“All right.”
“Gypsum, how are your shoulders?” Tobias asked.
I hunched them and frowned.
“How tight?”
I sighed.
“Before you get to the kitchen, maybe you should discharge some more energy. Wouldn’t want it to get in the food.”
“Let’s do something together,” Flint said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Are you nuts?” Jasper said at the same time.
“I don’t care,” answered Flint. “Anything. I just want to see if we can mix powers again and do something cool.”
“Please take it outside,” said Tobias.
“Out back is best,” Jasper said.
“Come with us?” I asked Tobias.
He pointed to my notebook and pens. “Keep track of what happens and tell me later.” He waved his hand to dismiss us, and we jumped up and left.
We went out on the back lawn and sat in a circle.
“Do you all really want to be here?” I asked. “This stuff backfires. I think it’s supposed to. It might be messy.” I glanced at Jasper, then Beryl.
“No matter what happens, I want to see it,” Jasper said.
“Me too,” said Beryl.
“If it affects me, I hope this time I remember that I can take care of myself,” Jasper said. “Last time was scary. I didn’t know I could fall apart so fast.”
“I bet you would have come out of it pretty soon. Shock can affect anybody, even you guys.”
“ ’Fess up. What happened?” Flint asked.
Jasper tapped his lips with his index finger a couple times, then said, “Gyp’s demon friend made me fat, too, and I didn’t react well at all.”
“You, fat? Gaw dang! I don’t want to miss anything else!”
Jasper gave him a rueful grin. “It’s been a long time since anybody made me change without my consent.”
“Pretty cool it’s Gyp,” said Flint.
“It wasn’t me. It was her,” I said.
Flint only smiled.
“It was educational, anyway,” Jasper said. “Knocked me in the self-confidence.”
I shifted one shoulder, then the other. I felt like a vise was tightening around me. “Guys, I need to do something curselike soon.”
“I know! Let’s do two things at once!” Flint said. “Let’s make something to eat.”
That would defeat the purpose of cooking. I really wanted to get my hands on some knives and chop things up the good old-fashioned way. Kitchen therapy. Maybe Flint and I could make dessert together, though. That had worked pretty well last time.
“How do we combine powers?” I asked. “I curse something, and you use it to make something good?”
“That’s two steps. Let’s try just one. Give me your hands.”
I handed Beryl my notebook and pens. She nodded, opened the notebook to a blank page, and started writing.
Flint reached across the circle to me, and I placed my hands in his.
He jerked his away. “Whoa! Hot hands!”
I checked my palms. They looked the same as ever.
“Let me try that again.” Flint rubbed his palms across each other, murmured something, then held his hands out to me. When I touched his hands, they felt icy. “Let’s do this fast. What do you want for dinner?”
“Let’s make dessert. Something easy.”
“Nothing’s easier than sheet cake,” he said.
“Don’t you want some variety? Let’s try cinnamon rolls, huh?”
“No. Let’s do chocolate this time. Brownies. Those gooey ones.”
“All right. You guys, get back.” I waited until Jasper and Beryl moved a little ways away, then closed my eyes and ran through a brownie recipe in my mind, all the ingredients and the steps: melt together butter and unsweetened chocolate, remove from heat and stir in sugar, vanilla, then eggs; beat all together into a warm, dark, chocolate, gooey mixture, then blend in the flour (a little less than the recipe calls for), pour the mixture in a pan, sprinkle in loose chocolate chips for little bursts of flavor, then bake at 350 for twenty-five minutes or so. The broomstraw test for done didn’t work on these; something always stuck to the straw. I just took them out when I thought they were done. Cool them on a wire rack before cutting. The house would fill with the smell and everybody would come to the kitchen, watching and waiting until I said it was time to eat.
Heat glowed in my chest, my own internal campfire.
I licked my lips and imagined baking more brownies, only this time blond ones, butterscotch instead of chocolate. I could smell them.
Then I thought, how about some frosted ones? Chocolate frosting on some and vanilla frosting on others. Mint frosting! Chocolate mint brownies! Let’s make some with nuts, even though I don’t like those. Chopped walnuts. I think Dad likes that kind. I wonder if we could make caramel brownies. Or how about some with minced Heath Bars sprinkled through them? Yeah, let’s try that. Yum.
“Hey?” said Flint.
I opened my eyes.
We were inside something dark and hot. The air was so thick with the scent of brownies I could almost eat it. What light there was reached us dimly through random beige squares in the walls, just enough light so I could see that
we were in something like an igloo.
My shoulders had relaxed again.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Kind of a Hansel and Gretel thing.” He slipped his hands out of mine and shook them. “Hot hot hot. Maybe next time we should do two steps so you don’t burn me. This is a lot of brownies.”
Ten
I put my hand against the wall. Gooey, soft, still hot. I brought my palm close to my face. Melted chocolate streaked it.
“Are you all right in there?” Jasper’s voice was muffled, coming through walls of cake.
“So far,” Flint called.
“I wonder how much air we have,” I said. I shouldn’t have said anything. I felt totally claustrophobic. “Flint!”
“Don’t worry. Worse comes to worst I’ll pop us somewhere else. But I think it’s easier than that. Let’s eat our way out!”
“You’ll ruin your appetite for dinner.”
“Yes,” he said, “but in a noble cause. First, though, I’ll just see if we can bust out.” He got to his feet and pushed up on the roof. “Ugh! How many did we make? Did you know that when you’re spelling, you just pour energy out? Scary big flow. Almost too much for me to channel.” He put some muscle into it and poked a hole up through the roof. Brownies and blondies cascaded to the grass around us as he widened the hole.
Sunlight poured down into our structure as heat flowed up and out. I tasted fresh air and smiled at the sky.
“Okay. Now.” Flint took a brownie from the side of the hole he had made. “Smells great.” He bit it. “Oh, yeah. Perfect! What’s this light brown one? Oh, boy! Wait, there’s another kind over here. I didn’t know you knew how to make so many kinds, Gyp. This is fantastic.” He grabbed a brown-sugar-colored brownie and offered it to me.
“Just one,” I said. I wondered if we had managed to make good food again, or if there would be some curse attached. Oh well. I had to find out, right? I took a bite.
One of the scotchies. Heaven. Chocolate had never been my favorite flavor, even though everybody else loved it best; I thought again, Flint was paying attention, and I never realized it. He gave me a blond brownie because he knows me. Oh, delicious!
“Let’s go get some plates and stuff from the kitchen,” Flint said. “Gotta store some of these for later.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me up into the air.
“Jeeze! I didn’t know you could fly.”
“Not for very far, but I can manage this much.” We went up high enough to get out of our house of brownies, then dropped with a thud to the lawn.
I climbed to my feet and looked at what Flint and I had done.
“The leaning tower of brownies!” he said.
Sheets of brownies were the bricks that had built this round, beehive hairdo-shaped structure. It was almost six feet tall, and maybe eight feet in diameter at the bottom, narrowing to about five feet across at the top. Flint had destroyed its symmetry by busting out. I stood up and brushed off my pants.
“So is it dangerous?” Beryl asked.
I licked my lip and reached for another butterscotch brownie. Perfect. Delicious. Smooth and wonderful.
“I’m going for the cookie tins,” Flint said.
“I’ll be in in a minute.”
“It doesn’t make you break out or anything?” asked Beryl.
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, or at Sábado y Domingo, the weekend open-air market down by the beach? I wasn’t sure what kind of permits 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. I 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. “I 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 we
re 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.
A Fistful Of Sky Page 14