The look of helplessness on Lola’s face had Liza’s heart quickening. The poor woman appeared defeated.
“Well, sure,” she found herself saying. “I have some chairs over here. Why don’t you come and have a seat?”
Once they were seated, Liza leaned in closer. “So what’s going on?”
“Well your granny, she…she sometimes helped me,” Lola all but whispered. “Now I’m a good Christian and I don’t believe in any of that devil’s work but what your granny did was God’s work, no matter what anyone said. She was a good Christian woman and was at church every Sunday. She led our choir!”
Liza nodded politely.
“But she did help me and I was hoping that you could, too,” Lola continued. She bit her lip and looked down at the floor. “Now I don’t gossip or nothing like that but I heard about Cotton. And what you done to him.”
“Oh, but you see I didn’t really...”
Lola smiled and waved Liza’s words away. “What happened is between you and him and our dear Lord and Savior. I don’t judge, only God and the little baby Jesus can do that. Besides, I never liked that Cotton no ways. He was one of them mouth breathers, you know what I mean? So annoying. So can you help me?”
“Well, I can try," Liza replied. "What, exactly, do you need?”
Lola straightened and primly smoothed down her long blue jean skirt. “It’s about making someone pay for something bad that they did to me.”
“You mean revenge?” Liza asked dubiously. She didn’t really get into those kinds of spells. They could get messy. And sometimes they backfired. That was precisely why she hadn’t done anything to Cotton, at least not intentionally.
A horrified look crossed Lola’s face. “Oh no! I would NEVER seek revenge on anybody. I was just hoping that I could teach a lesson to someone who did something terrible to me.”
Um, that would be revenge, Liza thought to herself but kept her mouth shut. Instead, she asked, “Can you tell me what happened and we’ll kind of go from there?”
Lola leaned forward, her eyes glistening. “Well, it’s terrible. The most horrible thing in the world, really. What they did is inexcusable, unforgivable.”
A knot of fear formed in Liza’s belly. Had someone killed a loved one? Not fixed her car properly and caused her to wreck? Stolen the family heirlooms?
“It was the Pizza Hut.”
“Huh?” Liza wasn’t sure she’d heard her correctly.
Lola nodded, satisfied with herself. “The Pizza Hut. Yep, it happened three weeks ago. We went the night before my big day, before my wedding to Hannelore Epperson? We went there for the rehearsal dinner. Spent $187, I’ll have you know, and that was with coupons. It wasn’t until later that night, after I got home and was reading my Bible, getting ready for bed, that it hit me.”
Lola paused and tugged on her long, muddy brown hair. It fell like a waterfall to her lap, the split ends brushing her thighs.
“What hit you, Lola?”
“The diarrhear, that’s what. All at once. Likely not have made it to the bathroom. Came all night, too. Awful cramps like you wouldn't believe. Called my sister and she brought me over some of that Imodium.”
Liza might have laughed, if not for the fire flashing in Lola’s eyes. “Well that sounds awful.”
“Then the vomiting started. Oh, it just carried on all morning. My mama had her gallbladder out last fall and still had some of that Phenergan left over from the surgery so she brought it to me. It helped the vomiting, all right, but I had to hold onto my daddy walking down the aisle. Fell asleep in the car on the way to the reception at the Armory. We had to wait a full day before we could go on to our honeymoon to Gatlinburg! Lost $79.95 for that night because they wouldn’t refund it.”
Liza sat back, dazed. “So what is it that you need for me to do?”
“I want to make the Pizza Hut pay for what they did to me! They done gave me the food poisoning, is what. Made me sick because they used bad pepperonis. I knew they tasted funny,” Lola snapped.
“Did anyone else at the rehearsal dinner get sick?”
“Naw, but I’ve always had a delicate stomach,” Lola informed her.
“And you’re sure it was the Pizza Hut? That it wasn't just one of those viruses?”
“I’m positive! And it was such a nice wedding, too,” Lola said forlornly. “So much better than my wedding to Eugene, although our reception at the fairgrounds is something folks are still talking about, what with the salute to veterans we did during the ceremony. And, of course, Steryl and I eloped to Jellico so we didn’t have much a wedding, just a Justice of the Peace. Maybe not as nice as my one to Buford but he worked for the railroad so he could afford that reception hall over in Richmond. We had real flowers, not fake ones, and bubbles for everyone to blow.”
Liza sat back, dazed, as Lola Ellen Pearson ticked off her weddings, one by one.
“So can you help me? I would a gone to my preacher about this but we're Pentecostal and I feel like I've prayed enough. Had it up on the prayer board at church for two weeks but nothing's happened yet. Your granny was always helping me when the prayer circle wasn't enough.”
“So you want to make the Pizza Hut pay for making you sick the night before your wedding?”
“Yes! You can do that, right?”
The hopeful look in Lola's eyes softened Liza just a little. She didn’t normally like to perform hexes, but it would be bad to get started off on the wrong foot with what appeared to be the town gossip. Besides, she’d had food poisoning before. It wasn’t nice.
“Okay,” she said at last. “I can try. Now here’s what you need to do…”
Chapter Thirteen
YOU TRIED any Vic’s?” Bryar demanded of her sister.
“Yes, Mom,” Liza replied sarcastically before going into a dramatic coughing fit. She was pretty sure she’d cough up a lung if it went on any longer. “I’ve slathered so much on my chest that I am probably pickled for posterity at this point.”
“What about a doctor?”
“I don’t have one yet. No insurance. But I’ve made myself some chicken noodle soup and peppermint tea and–“
“You cooked?”
Liza could also see the incredulous look on her sister’s face.
“Well, I am able to heat of a can of soup. I can’t ruin that,” Liza answered wryly. “I’m just upset that I just re-opened. I know it’s Saturday but I hope I’m better by Monday. I don’t want to be in there throwing up and sneezing all over clients.”
“Probably a good way to ensure they don’t return,” Bryar agreed. “Well, let me know if I can do anything.”
Liza knew why she was sick. It was the damned drafty house. She was bad about keeping the fire going all night, the heat only worked intermittently, and she couldn’t find the feather duvets her grandmother had locked away. She’d found an electric blanket but was terrified of electrocuting herself. Not that there was an overwhelming amount of people who suffered death by electric blanket every year, but it wasn’t something she could risk.
Her luck had not been great lately.
Holding a healing crystal in one hand and a steaming cup of tea in the other, Liza staggered to the living room in a ratty bathrobe she’d found in a closet. It smelled like her grandmother and mothballs.
She’d tried to keep the fire going but finally had to admit that she sucked at it. She could get the kindling lit without any trouble. It never seemed to “catch” the rest of the wood, though.
She kept resorting to magic.
“But I can’t stay awake doing spells all night just to stay warm,” she snapped.
When a knock came at her door she startled, a little jumpier than usual thanks to the Tylenol Cold and Flu she’d been taking, which was doing nothing for her nerves (or her cold or flu).
It was just the heating and air man, coming to check on her baseboard heaters.
“Thank God,” she cried, almost throwing her arms around him. “It’s freezing in her
e. I thought maybe I was doing something wrong.”
Then she realized she was looking at Santa Claus. The repair man, a tall beefy guy in a thermal overall suit and steel-toed boots, had a long white curly beard, curly white hair, and little horn-rimmed glasses.
She watched in fascination as he bent over and tapped one of the units. “Cold as a witch’s teats,” he remarked cheerfully.
Liza grimaced a little and the man, whose nametag read “Whistle” flushed with embarrassment. “Sorry ma’am,” he apologized. “Didn’t mean no disrespect.”
Liza laughed in spite of herself. “It’s okay,” she smiled. “This witch’s ‘teats’ are frozen solid.”
Now Whistle really flushed with embarrassment.
“Um, I hate to be rude or anything but you kind of remind me of…”
“Santa Claus?” he suggested, raising a bushy white eyebrow. “But I am Santa.”
Liza looked at him, not knowing whether to laugh or not.
“Ho, ho, ho,” he actually laughed, not managing to sound ironic at all. Instead, he sounded quite natural. “I’m town Santa but I am also a card carrying member of the International Organization of Santas.”
To prove it, he whipped out a business card and handed it over. Liza studied his name, website, email, and little red, embossed sled in the upper right-hand corner.
“In fact, it’s a good thing you called now because next weekend I’ll be down in Gatlinburg, Tennessee for our annual Santa conference. We do it every year, right before Christmas. It’s a great time, but, I’ve got to tell you,” he lowered his voice to a stage whisper, “some of those guys are really weird.”
Liza had no doubt.
“And then, of course, our big day is just around the corner…”
Liza, nodded, eyes wide. Okay, dude thinks he’s Santa.
She’d seen weirder. It wasn’t like she was one to judge.
“So what you got it set on?” he asked as he rubbed his beefy hands together and looked around for the thermostat.
“It’s on eighty right now,” Liza replied. “I turned it up as high as it would go.”
“Has it worked at all since you’ve been here?”
“A little,” she replied hesitantly. She didn’t exactly want to tell him that the only time over the past three days it had worked was when she used her mind to heat it up.
“Well, we’ll have you sweatin’ it up in no time. Let me go take a look-see around,” he said.
Liza curled back up on the couch and wrapped an old afghan tightly around her shoulders. It was probably made by one of her relatives, the red and green colors the only thing she had out so far that were Christmassy at all. The warm mug of tea felt good in her hands and it was making her drowsy.
Liza must have drifted off for when Whistle re-entered the room and spoke her name she jumped straight up in the air, spilling her now-cold tea and sending the mug shattering to the ground.
The flames in the fireplace jumped accordingly.
“Um,” Whistle began, as though trying to ignore what he’d just seen, “the good news is that it’s not your unit, it’s your thermostat. The bad news is they almost all of them need to be replaced, at least in the rooms you’re going to be using. I have some out in the truck, but I’ll have to charge you $50 for each one. Are there any rooms you’d like to be heating at the moment?”
Liza sighed, disgusted at the idea of having to spend more money she didn’t have. “This room for sure, and maybe my bedroom and kitchen. My office. I guess that’s all I need.”
“You can hang blankets over the doors of the other rooms you can’t shut off,” he supplied helpfully. “We do that at home. Just shut off the dining room completely during the winter. Eat dinner on the couch.”
“Yeah, I can do that. It’s just me,” Liza sighed and then went off into a coughing spree.
“I’ll just go get those thermostats,” he said.
As he reached the door, however, he stopped and paused. “I know it’s not my place to say this, but you don’t look so good, Miss Liza. You’re looking right sickly.”
“Yeah,” she threw him a wan smile. “I’ve seen better days.”
“You got someone who can stop in here and check on you, bring you something if you need it?”
“Not yet,” Liza replied brightly. “But I’ll be okay. I’ve got my Vic’s and my tea, and now I’ll be warm.”
Whistle did not look convinced. “Well, old Santa might just have some tricks up his sleeve yet.”
Half an hour later, Liza had heat. In spite of her throbbing head and sore throat, she stood up and did a little dance in the middle of the living room floor, the rag rug sliding dangerously under her feet as she did her best “Risky Business” moves.
“Oh my God, thank you,” she cried, wrapping her arms around Whistle’s thick waist. He had the decency to redden, somehow managing to look even more like Santa, but appeared tickled all the same. “It’s gonna feel so good in here!”
“And you need to build up your wood, too,” he added as he started for the door. “I seen your wood pile and you’re running low. This heat here ought a keep you warm the rest of the winter but you need that back-up heat, ‘specially since you ain’t got no generator if the power fails you. Which it’s likely to do at some point. Last year we got an ice storm here that threw the whole town’s power out for damn near three weeks.”
“Yeah…” she began slowly. “Where would I get wood?”
Whistle cocked his head to the side and pointed out her front window. “Well, ordinarily, we’d just go right out there and cut some in the spring and let it age. But I’m guessing you didn’t get to do that…”
“You’d be guessing right,” she said. “And I don’t have an axe or anything to do it now.”
“Well, I know some landscapers who probably have some cut. I’ll send ‘em your way,” he told her.
And, with that, she was left all alone again. She’d enjoyed her company, and really enjoyed the fact that the room was heating up. She’d been just as ecstatic when the internet guy had come out, at the thought of having someone else in her house, even if he was ten years younger than her and listened to Kanye West on his iPod the whole time he was there.
“So explain this to me again,” she’d said as she’d towered over him, peering at the screen while he typed away.
“It’s not broadband so you don’t have unlimited downloads on it,” he explained.
“Well, that’s okay, I don’t download a lot. Mostly just You Tube, social media, stuff like that.”
The guy had grinned then and looked at her like she had two heads. “Well, those count as downloads. See, you have a limited, storage let’s say. And every time you watch a video, look at a picture–whatever, it eats it up. You’ve got a month’s supply here but if you watched ten videos it would all be eaten up in a day.”
“You’re kidding me,” she gasped. “You mean to tell me I am paying almost $100 a month and I can’t even watch stupid cat videos on You Tube?”
“Well, you can between 2 am and 7am. That’s your bonus time.”
Liza saw a lot of late nights in her future.
***
A few hours later and she was still enjoying her heat and sitting on the couch, flipping through her Book of Shadows. She’d started it when she was sixteen and, at two hundred pages, it was full of rituals she used, rituals she liked but would never get around to using, pretty pictures she’d clipped out of things, notes she’d taken after spells, experiences she’d had with things that were both good and bad, and little pieces of paper, leaves, and stuff she’d collected over the years….
“Oh my God,” she looked up and rolled her eyes. “I am the Pinterest version of a witch. I will never get around to doing all of these things.”
Liza was trying to find something technological to help her get more use from her internet when there came a knock on the door.
Liza looked down at her ratty pajama bottoms, Freebird T-shirt, and p
uppy dog slippers and grimaced. The dogs even barked when her feet hit the ground. She hadn’t washed her hair or bathed in nearly four days. It had been too cold.
Before opening the door Liza stood, picked up a silk rose from an old flower arrangement on top of the console table, closed her eyes, and focused all her attention inwards. Lacking the time to make herself presentable, she instead focused on changing the perception of the person on the other side of the door.
"By the powers of the west, I take the beauty from this flower. With love and light I shine with its power. The beauty and grace is all they’ll see, with harm to none, so mote it be,” she chanted softly, feeling the spell slightly silly but necessary.
A surge of light and warmth washed over her in gentle waves, encompassing her like a Sherpa blanket.
The spell wasn’t going to make her a beauty by any stretch of the imagination and if she looked in the mirror she’d still see the same disheveled hair, dark circles under the eyes, and fuzzy skin with the stray black hair that always wanted to poke out of her left cheek.
To others she’d just look a little tired. (Ordinarily Liza Jane was a very attractive woman, but it took a lot of Clinique on her bad days.)
It wasn’t a complete fix, but it would work.
The matronly woman on the other side of the door was as round as a watermelon with hair that reminded Liza of the color of the squash her Nana Bud had grown. This woman’s hair was short and curly and hung to her shoulders in Shirley Temple ringlets; her smile stretched from ear to ear. In her hands she carried three containers of Cool Whip.
“Hello there,” she said cheerfully, not waiting for an invitation as she stepped into Liza’s house and slammed the door behind her with her foot. “Chilly out there ain’t it?”
Funny that. No matter where in the country you lived, the weather was always an acceptable, universal topic.
“A little,” Liza answered slowly. She closed her eyes and saw the woman before her at home, bending over a table while she beat dough in her bare hands. Whistle stood off to the side, white hair sticking up all over his head, asking when supper was ready.
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