“No,” said Evan.
“Or you could make deliveries, or Lacey might be able to use you for yard work—you know anything about that?”
“No,” said Evan.
“Where you been all your life?” Pop sounded intrigued, which I figured was better than irritated.
“I guess…nowhere,” Evan said. He cocked his head.
“No special skills?”
“I can hunt, and I can track. I can do a lot of other things I don’t think people know enough to want.”
“Like what?”
Evan bit his lower lip. He lifted his left hand above the table, palm up, and danced his fingers above it until he pulled the yellow spiral of his signature up.
“Holy moley,” whispered Granddad.
“Magic tricks?” Pop asked.
“Yeah,” said Evan. He closed his hand and the spiral faded.
“You know any card tricks?”
Evan frowned. “Not yet,” he said. “I could probably learn.”
“Hmm,” said Pop. “We might be able to put something together with Parsley, if you could work up a show. You done any magic professionally?”
Evan glanced at me, eyebrows up.
“Magicians put on these shows, where they perform for a big audience,” I said. “They make things appear and disappear, people float, change people into animals…” I didn’t want to pursue that one. “Pull rabbits out of empty hats. People pay to see them.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not good with crowds,” said Evan.
“So you’d have to work up to it,” Pop said. “Maybe next summer. Hmmm.” He drummed the tabletop some more. “Tell you what. We’ll float you for a while till you find your feet. Three rules. One: you have to be trying to find work—you get a job and give it an honest try, no slacking. You make it an aim to contribute to the household, and that means helping with the day-to-day, too. Two: you have to not steal anything—any abuse of our hospitality, and out you go. You’re welcome to whatever you find in those suitcases in the attic, though, long as you check with me first. Three: no smoking, drinking, or leading Nick into wild behavior, though maybe he knows more about that than you do. What do you say?”
Evan folded his hands and stared at the tabletop for a little while, then nodded and looked up at Pop. “I say thank you.”
Pop smiled and offered Evan his hand. They shook.
We all finished breakfast. When I got up to clear the table, Evan rose, too, and helped me, smiling the whole time at some inside joke. I ran hot water into the dishpan, thinking that Evan could probably make it hotter faster. “Pop, about what’s in the attic. There’s a locked trunk up there.”
“Shee-ooot, I forgot. That one’s off limits.”
“What’s in it?”
“Just things,” he said. “Private things. Nothing you’d need. Leave it alone, Nick.”
“Okay.”
Pop checked the kitchen clock. Still only around eight-thirty. “I’m guessing you haven’t got out much since you came here,” he said to Evan. “Otherwise people would be talking about you. Nick, you got more than an hour before opening. Why don’t you take Evan around and introduce him? Check if Archie still needs help. Show Evan to Mabel. Give things a feel. If nothing else suits you, Evan, I got work up at the motel you could do. You ever run a washing machine?”
“Nope,” said Evan. He smiled.
“How about a vacuum cleaner?”
“Nope.”
“Criminy,” Pop said. “Like the wild man of the woods or something.”
“Yeah,” said Evan.
Pop was still shaking his head gently as we left.
“Is this going to work?” I asked Evan as we walked along the road. He was barefoot. “I mean, isn’t this the same as Uncle Bennet telling you to get to work?”
“No,” Evan said. He had his hands buried in his overall pockets, and he walked looking at the sky and smiling.
“Why not?”
“Because your pop asked me. He didn’t tell me. He gave me a choice. I picked.”
“Hmm.” Pop had never given me a choice. Or had he? He’d never offered me the chance to not work. What if I just didn’t get up one day? What if I completely screwed up at work? What if I just left the house and ran around all day without telling Pop or asking him?
The way Evan had with his relatives.
I thought about that. I wasn’t ready for the kind of fallout I’d get if I defied Pop that way. But maybe someday I would be.
I introduced Evan around as my cousin and said he was spending the summer with me and looking for work. Everybody shook hands with him, and he smiled at them and they smiled back. Whenever they asked him if he had any experience, he said, “No, but I’m ready to learn,” Nobody said they had work for him. I figured they needed to get used to him first.
We got home in time to take another look through the clothes trunk in the attic. Evan tried on worn jeans that were loose around his waist, Pop having been bigger around than Evan even in the past. When I gave Evan a belt and he slid it through the belt loops and buckled it, he shook his head. “Too binding,” he said. Without the belt the jeans slid down. We gave up on the jeans and found him a couple more pair of overalls and some loose shirts. I wondered what would happen when winter came.
We stowed his extra clothes in my room and went downstairs to open the store. Evan really liked punching buttons on the cash register; accounting would be difficult at the end of the day. I tried to save all the receipts from his playing around so I could void them out later, and I showed him how to restock stuff to get him away from the register, then how to dust and straighten, and how to use the pricing gun, which he also liked. Granddad watched us from his seat by the stove, nodding once in a while. People came in and bought things. Evan soloed on the register, made change, smiled at strangers. I stood at the magazine display, looked at him behind the counter, and shook my head. Maybe I’d get used to seeing Evan in mundane contexts someday.
“These tasks repeat and repeat,” Evan said. He was lining up canned goods at the front edge of a shelf.
“That’s right. Once you know them you’ll get lots of chances to use them.” I was checking our stock of soda and making up an order form for the vendors.
“Discipline,” he said. “Don’t you get bored?”
“I might, if I stopped to think about it. So I don’t think about it. I have this model of the store as it should be in my head, and I try to make everything match that image. Keeps me busy. If everything’s perfect, I read a magazine or play solitaire, but that doesn’t happen often. It’s a living.” I listened to myself talk about work and realized I had never articulated my feelings about it to this extent before. Would this way of correcting things toward an imagined end translate to other types of work? I guessed detective work would involve gathering information to fix something that didn’t work the way it should.
“A living,” Evan said. “Hmm.” He pulled a wadded-up gum wrapper from behind the cans. “Where’d this come from?”
“Somebody tossed it there. So many agents of chaos…” Well, you needed agents of chaos or you’d run out of things to do. Might be nice to try living without them for a while, though.
He frowned and tucked the trash into his pocket.
Mom came in and stood quietly beside the fishing rods, staring at me and Evan. Evan looked at her with narrowed eyes. “This is your mother?” he asked. I glanced at the mirror by the hat display and moved around until I could see her reflection in it. She looked like herself.
“Mom?” I said. I hesitated, then went toward her. Where was Pop? I was pretty sure he was up at the motel office. If he saw Mom being herself, what would he do?
“It is time for me to be brave.” She glanced at Granddad.
“Sylvia,” he said, standing up. He collected himself into being the person he had been when I was very little. It was strange to watch him shrug into awareness and intention as if
they were a comfortable old jacket he hadn’t worn for a while.
“Leo.”
“Thought you were dead,” said Granddad.
“In a way, I was. It’s good to see you.”
Granddad walked over and stood in front of Mom, peering at her, his head forward, his eyes wider than normal. “You staying?” he asked after studying her for a moment.
She looked down and shook her head slowly.
“We been missing you.”
When she looked up again her eyes were tear bright.
“But,” said Granddad, “better if you stay away. You’re poison.” He shuffled back to his chair by the stove and collapsed down into his current self, his eyes going blank.
How could he say that to Mom? Had he always felt that way about her? I tried to remember back, but mostly what I remembered was how it felt to have her close; I would only have noticed how Granddad treated her if he had hurt her, and I couldn’t remember her telling me anything about him hurting her.
Mom blinked and a tear streaked down her face. She nodded at Granddad even though he wasn’t looking at her. “I’ve been building my strength,” she said in a low voice, “but I’m not strong enough to stay yet. Not in the face of that. Facing your father will be even more difficult. Nick, I love you very much, and I always will. But I have to go home now. I’ll come back.”
I tried to think about whether I wanted her to come back. Her presence confused me. I didn’t want our old closeness back, and I wasn’t sure what to want in place of it. I was glad to know she was doing so well and learning how to use whatever powers she had, and I was still mad at her for deserting me in such a clumsy way. I wondered if I could get Evan to teach me anything. Maybe if I asked him the right way…
“Here’s my address and phone number,” Mom said, holding out a folded piece of paper to me. I took it without touching her fingers. “If there’s anything you need, or anything you think I can do for you, call me. Write me. Do you want me to call you?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said slowly. Suppose she called and Pop answered. He would know she was back in touch. There would be fallout from that.
She looked down. She looked up. Her eyes showed hurt. “You decide,” she said. She touched my cheek, and for an instant I was deep in the center of her sadness, a place of unceasing warm rain and dark skies. It was paralyzing. The bell rang on the door as she slipped out before I could even come up for air.
Mariah arrived at noon, as usual, and stared at Evan. He put down the videocassette he had been studying and stared back, his face quiet. She edged closer and circled sideways, watching him. His gaze followed her. After they had exchanged stares for a little while, I said, “This is Evan.”
“What?” said Mariah.
“This is Evan.”
“But the wolf—”
Evan cocked his head at her and gave her an open-mouthed grin. She blinked. “No,” she said.
He yawned, tongue curling, then smiled at her again.
“How can that be?” she asked.
“I think he’s staying the summer,” I said. “I’m teaching him how to run the store.”
“How can you take a thing out of a fairy tale and stick it in a convenience store? This makes no sense,” she muttered.
“Evan, this is Mariah.”
“I know.”
“Oh.” I had introduced them while he was a wolf.
“Delighted to meet you again,” Evan said to Mariah.
“I—oh, all right,” she said, and took his hand for a second.
“We’ll be back in about an hour,” I said to Mariah, and to Evan: “Let’s get something for lunch and take it outside.”
“Okay.”
In the kitchen I threw together a couple of sandwiches, and put them in a sack with a bottle of water. We ran away, Evan letting me set the pace and the direction. I plunged off my path to Lacey’s about halfway along, going to a place where big rocks stood in a flat-topped spine that ran from the shore out a little way into the lake. We followed the rocks out to the end and sat surrounded on three sides by water.
He wrinkled his nose at tuna, then bit the sandwich I gave him and chewed slowly, his eyes closed as though he were listening to the flavor. I looked out over the lake at the pines on the opposite shore. A speedboat towed a water-skier in the distance, trailing distant motor sound. Sun touched my head and shoulders, arms and legs, and drummed a ripe algae scent from the lake.
We ate in silence. Afterward, I said, “Do you think this is going to work?” Training him in the store had been difficult, not because he couldn’t understand or perform the tasks, but because he had trouble focusing on them or taking them seriously. Mariah was right: how could you take a thing from a fairy tale and stick it in a convenience store?
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t mean to be giving you trouble, Nick. I don’t think my mind works like yours. All I really want to do is sleep and eat and hunt and run around in the woods, finding out everything that’s going on. I’ll try again. I’ll try harder. How do you make it important?”
“It’s food and drink, TV and electricity, home, heat, comfort, being able to shower, wash clothes, drive a car. Work is the fire that heats our stove, the furniture we sit and sleep on. It’s what keeps us together.”
“Huh.” He frowned. “There are other ways to get all those things, but the other ways take work, too. Huh.” He scratched his elbow. “I wish I cared about those things, but I really don’t. Well, I promised your pop. I can learn to focus. I’m pretty sure I can.”
“Hey!”
I looked toward the shore and saw Willow. She ran out along the rocks and sat down beside us. “Are you okay? They did an unbinding last night—”
“It hurt really bad. They did the wrong one,” Evan said.
“I tried to tell them not to. They closed the circle without me and sent me to sleep.”
“Still think they’re just good people?” Evan asked her. “I’m not joking. It nearly killed us. If Nick hadn’t known a counterbinding, I don’t know what would have happened.”
She reached across and touched my face, then looked at Evan, her expression troubled. “But fetch-bonding is wrong,” she said.
“Sirella! What a time to figure that out!”
She closed her eyes for a minute, then looked at him. “Uncle Rory explained it to me,” she said. “Nick explained some of it to me. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I know I always want to—” She touched my face again and frowned. “I crave it. I have to try not to do it anymore. It’s not respectful. You’ll kiss me without it, won’t you, Nick?”
“Anytime.”
“Will you show me how to find skilliau?”
“Will you show me how to do some of this other stuff, like make those lights over my hand?”
She smiled. “Yes. Oh, yes. As long as I’m here, I’ll teach you what I can…when the Keyes go, I must go with them.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because family is more important than anything else,” she said, without thinking about it Then she blinked. After a brief silence, she said, “You aren’t seeing the good things about them, Nick. I’m sorry it’s so lopsided. There’s a warmth about belonging, about being with, about always having someone to talk with who understands. About knowing where you’re going and what comes next, about knowing what the right thing to do is, or having someone to ask if you’re confused about it. About knowing that when you do things well someone will notice and give you praise and thanks, about knowing that the learning is waiting for you there.”
I remembered a belonging warmth I had shared with my mother before she left. I remembered what she said about trees shading each other out, too. To breathe or not to breathe?
“Is their teaching as sloppy as their castings?” Evan said.
“What?” She glanced at him. “They don’t have the fine control of our teacher in the Hollow, it’s true, but I know fine control already. Rory and Elissa have been showing
me new things, things Great-aunt never taught us about how to address the land and the water and life in general.”
“Does any of it work?”
“Yes. A connection kindles. I know there’s a sort of…waiting going on right now, that’s why we don’t get farther in our tasks. I don’t know what the waiting is for. I’m trusting the Powers to let me know when it’s over. But I’m touching and being touched.” She dipped her fingers in the lake, lifted them, and sent droplets sparkling in the sun, arcing and hanging on air for too long, given gravity. She smiled at Evan.
His face wore a blank look I hadn’t seen there very often. “I’m glad you’re learning,” he said after a little while.
“They would teach you too if you gave them a chance.”
“No,” he said. “What they have to teach I don’t want to learn.”
“Evan, if you don’t come back—what if the thread is cut?” She gripped his forearm. She shook her head. “Don’t let that happen.”
“I don’t want that,” he said. He put his hand over hers on his arm. “I don’t want to lose Mama or Papa or you.”
“You better figure out what you do want,” she said.
“That’s harder than I thought, as long as Uncle Bennet has my snow crystal.”
I checked my watch. “We better head back,” I said.
Evan grinned. “Yes. I’m learning how to run a store, Willow. There’s a lot of fine detail work in that, too.”
“What?” She laughed. “Whyever?”
He shrugged with one shoulder. “It’s a job.”
“Are you serious?”
His eyebrows rose. He smiled again, showing teeth. “Maybe,” he said. He stood up and stretched. I got to my feet too. We followed Willow back to land.
“Nick? Do you know where other skilliau are?”
“I don’t know. Pop was talking about my rock collection last night. I used to pick up rocks all the time because they felt different from other rocks, but I stopped taking them home because Pop would get rid of them. Got out of the habit of picking them up at all, actually.” I glanced around at the underbrush and tree trunks, trying to tune to rocks the way I had when Mom played rock-hunting games with me so long ago, but I had lost the knack. “I’d have to practice,” I said.
The Silent Strength of Stones Page 20