All About Evie

by Cathy Lamb

  “Agreed,” my mother said. “She took Kora’s husband, and that makes her not hat or flower worthy.”

  “She’s on The List,” Aunt Camellia intoned. She enthusiastically drew Tina’s name in the air with an imaginary pen.

  My mother and aunts have a Flower Black List they keep—it’s short—with the names of people who have wronged others.

  My mother and aunts will give hats away to friends who are going through hard times to cheer them up. And sometimes they’ll sell their hats in Flowers, Lotions, and Potions for charity or for school fund drives. They also donate hats to other worthy charity fund drives. But if you’re on the Flower Black List, you’re on it for good, shame on you and your meanness.

  I decided that tonight I would bring up one more teeny, tiny subject to see how they would react. “I’ve noticed more people coming in and out of the greenhouse.”

  None of them answered, and the atmosphere suddenly felt charged. I almost laughed. My mother squirmed and reached for her wine. My aunt Iris suddenly found that she was extremely interested in the small wood bridge near the willow trees in the distance. Or maybe it was the pond with the red bench. My aunt Camellia hummed, the song rising and falling dramatically.

  “What a wonderful place to grow your exotic flowers. From Hawaii and South America and Delaware.” Exotic flowers. From Delaware. I almost laughed again. “And your orchids. Why, your orchids must be in a delicate full bloom.”

  My mother squirmed once more, rolled her shoulders, slugged down more wine.

  My goodness! The willow that Aunt Iris was fixated on must be fascinating.

  Aunt Camellia’s humming rose to a high, near-shrieking pitch.

  “The greenhouse is particularly, uh, perfect, for the plants and flowers that are more . . . difficult to grow outside,” I said. “The ones that need special care.”

  Squirm. Stare. Hum hum hum!

  “More wine?” my mother said, and got up.

  “I’ll get it!” Aunt Camellia and Aunt Iris said. They all three darted into the kitchen, chairs scraping the deck, to get more wine.

  I laughed, then tried to muzzle it under a cough. There was already wine on the table. I had one more slice of cheese and garlic pizza. If I met my maker tonight I’d want to have a full stomach. We had a lot to talk about.

  * * *

  The bookstore was busy the next day. Tourists streamed in. Part of the reason was that I had an employee standing outside giving away samples of apple cider caramel cake. It was the treats that drove them in. I don’t blame them. I believe a treat a day keeps the doctor away. I also had my tea specials up on a board at the door: Honey Lavender and Cinnamon Chai.

  But who couldn’t love a shop called Evie’s Books, Cake, and Tea? The finest things in life, right? They loved sitting in the café area and looking out over the bay. They loved the deck. They loved the bouquets I sold for my mother and aunts today labeled “Men Are Dense, Like Cheese. Buy Your Own Bouquets” and “A Woman’s Place Is Wherever She Damn Well Wants It to Be” and “Laugh More, Laugh Loud, Drink Beer.”

  They loved my aunt Camellia’s lotions and potions, called A Lady’s Secret and Carnal Coconut and Soothing Seduction.

  And they loved my aunt Iris’s puzzling/somewhat suggestive /now and then a little creepy flower photographs that made you stop and think and tilt your head as you tried to “get it.” One of her purple flowers definitely resembled a penis, and two other exotic red flowers together definitely resembled breasts. She had turned many of her photographs into cards, and they flew out the door.

  I met with customers and tried to get them to buy piles of books they would love. I am not bragging, but I know my books. I can find any book for anybody. And I can usually figure out what they might like to read that they had never thought to read. Books are my business. I am their book gal.

  But in between customers and loading up shelves with new books and rearranging displays, when I had a minute, I thought of Marco. I knew I loved him. But there could never be a future because of what I knew, what I had seen, would happen between us.

  I could not let that happen.

  And that made the inside of me feel lonely and cold.

  I touched a yellow rose petal in the bouquet on my office desk. I would eat a raspberry rose cupcake to warm me up, then I would have some honey lavender tea.

  * * *

  The Book Babes were back.

  They were discussing a book in which a woman watered her cheating soon-to-be-ex-husband’s Corvette with a hose.

  The discussion had morphed into what was appropriate in terms of revenge if a husband cheated. They decided . . .

  * * *

  1) Don’t do anything that would get you arrested. Jail would not be fun, and there might not be book club.

  2) Driving his jointly owned midlife crisis car into the ocean while cackling would be okay.

  3) Cutting out the crotches of all his pants was also acceptable.

  4) Going to visit the mistress at work and announcing yourself like this in a loud voice to the receptionist would also be acceptable: “I am the wife of Dave Miller and I want to talk to his girlfriend, Marni Smith, about why she is banging my husband.”

  5) Stalking him, taking incriminating photos, and then mailing them to his mother and grandmother was a smart idea.

  6) Going to Hawaii after the breakup and having a brief vacation affair would be a splendid postdivorce event as long as one had the affair-ee take a blood test to check for all STDs and one used condoms, just in case.

  Always interesting to listen to the Book Babes.

  “I still miss Dad every day.”

  My mother’s hands stilled. We were in our garden, snipping flowers here and there for her shop, the sun high, the wind soft. We were both in garden boots and hats. Mine was a baseball hat, hers was straw, wobbly, with a white ribbon tied below her neck.

  “I do, too.”

  “He’s been gone for so long, but that pain still hits me when I think of him.” Sundance bent down with me as I snipped a bundle of purple tulips. Butch and Cassidy wrestled nearby.

  “Me too, honey.”

  Often my father, during his career in the military/government, would return to us pale and tired. A couple of times he came home with an arm wrapped or a bandage on his head, or he would be limping. He would take calls privately, so we couldn’t hear, and sometimes, as we were stationed in various locations, cars would come and get him and whisk him off in the middle of the night. He wouldn’t talk much about what he was doing.

  I would climb on his lap, his green eyes smiling at me, his brown hair cut short, and say, “What did you do on your trip, Daddy?” And he would say, “I missed you and your sister and your mother.”

  And I would giggle and say, “No, Daddy. What did you do? Tell me!”

  And he would say, “I thought about coming home and reading you stories and chasing Jules on her bike and holding your mom’s hand.”

  And I would giggle again and say, “Daddy! When you were gone, what happened?”

  And he would say, “Let’s ask your mom to bake us a cake. You know I love cake and tea. Then we’ll read books together.”

  And we would ask my mom, and she was so relieved to see him, so happy to have him home, I could tell even then, as a young child, that she would bake us a cake. White chocolate coconut cake. Hummingbird cake. Dark chocolate candy cane. We would eat cake, drink tea, and read books together.

  “I always appreciated how you and Dad tried to help me with my premonitions and how you tried to help other people. You two taught me how to change the timing so that the premonition would pass them by, and I loved you for it. I don’t know if I ever told you that, but thanks, Mom.”

  “Of course, honey.” She gave me a hug. My mom always hugs me. “We wanted to help them, but mostly we wanted to help you. From a young age, we had to have the most serious of conversations with you about what to say, what not to say, when to act, when not to.” She shook her h
ead and wiped the sweat off her brow with her purple garden glove. “I was discussing ethics and morals with a five-year-old.”

  “The worst was when I had premonitions about Dad. Remember that time I saw an explosion behind him and he kept walking over a bunch of rocks, as if he hadn’t heard it? And he wasn’t in his military clothes.”

  “I remember that when you told your dad, his face went grim.”

  “He asked me a lot of questions, and I told him what he was wearing and what I saw.”

  “You saw him in a desert. You said you saw him by buildings made of sand and you saw guns. ‘Guns as long as jump ropes,’ you told him.”

  “Another time I told him I saw an explosion in a tower and I saw a whole bunch of jeeps with guns on the back. I cried and cried, and Dad held me. Then he asked me specific questions, and I told him that he was going to run behind a black truck and get straight down on his stomach and the truck was going to get hit by a bomb and he was going away on a stretcher on a helicopter with a lot of blood.”

  “That premonition saved your father’s life.”

  “It did?” I was stunned. Sundance leaned against me. He likes to be close. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because you were nine years old. We didn’t want to scare you. But your father never forgot it. That incident played out in the Middle East. He actually saw a black truck and he made sure that he, and the other men he was with, did not go behind it. The black truck was blown to smithereens.”

  I sat with that one shocking story for a while.

  “Dad didn’t want you to know because it would have been so upsetting.”

  “I feel upset now.” I took a deep breath and bent to cut a few orange-pink roses. “I know we’ve had this discussion before, but I don’t understand why me. You don’t have premonitions, Aunt Camellia and Aunt Iris don’t. Jules doesn’t. I’m all alone with this curse.”

  My mother’s hands stopped for a second, and she took a deep breath.

  “Mom? What is it?”

  “Nothing. I’m admiring these roses. Aren’t they particularly beautiful this year? I love yellow roses with a touch of red, don’t you? And look at our Dr. Marie Curie roses. So delicate, and she was so brilliant.”

  She wasn’t thinking about roses or Dr. Curie. I saw her hands shake.

  “I don’t know why you have this gift slash curse,” she said, her voice pitching up, high and squeaky. “I don’t.”

  “I wish I could go to a support group. We could call ourselves The Future Crazies. Or The Premonitioners. Or, We Know It All. I wish I knew someone else who I could talk to. It would be helpful to have someone in the family older than me, wiser, who saw these things, too. She could tell me how to be as normal as possible and not haunted all the time by the things I see coming down the pike and can do nothing to stop. How to deal with the guilt, and not being able to fix something, or to help. The knowing is hard. Plus, trying to help people on the fly is exhausting.”

  The other night I had to sneak into Millie Coons’s barn. The only way to sneak up on her house was through her back fields. It was a long walk, and it was dark. I had had a vision of her falling off her riding mower and getting her leg run over. Somehow the seat became loose, and when she stood up to see what the problem was, she fell off, and whack. Her leg was a bloody mess. She was out in the field all alone, too, into the night, crying. So I went into her barn and fixed the seat. I didn’t want to tell her, because I don’t like advertising about my premonitions, even though we’re friends and only a couple of years apart in school.

  Anyhow, it was a long walk, and I was darn tired when I got home.

  My mother stood up, her head bent down.

  “Are you okay, Mom?” I reached for her hand. “Mom? What’s wrong?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. Not too wrong. Nothing wrong. Fine and dandy. Too much coffee. You know what too much caffeine does to me.”

  No, I didn’t. What was she talking about? She drank six cups of coffee a day. It never had this effect. “Mom. Are you sick? You look pale.”

  “I’m perfectly healthy.” She took a shuddery breath. “Tell me. How is Sundance doing?”

  Sundance? What the heck was going on?

  “How is Sundance, Evie?” She said it firmly, and I knew to change the topic, so I told her that Sundance was as loyal as ever, and I pet his head. “Also. Kara Lighthouse is going to have triplets. They’ll be early but they’ll be fine. Don’t tell anyone. She doesn’t even know.”

  She smiled. “That is the kind of premonition you need to have.”

  Later, though, walking to my blue carriage house through a column of foxgloves and delphinium, I wondered about that conversation. It upset her. It worried her. It made her go pale. But why?

  Sundance put a ball in my hand, which was my cue to throw it. Butch and Cassidy ran after it, too.

  Sometimes I wish I were a dog.

  * * *

  The red car was coming straight at me.

  The sunlight behind it momentarily blinded me. It was a tight road, one lane, mountain to my right, the cliff to my left. I hit the brakes. The other driver was looking away; she didn’t see me at first.

  I pulled my truck as far to the right as I could go, but it was too late. The other driver’s car fishtailed as she hit the brakes, but it still barreled toward me.

  The impact was fast and hard, my air bag exploded, my body jerked back. The metal crunched, the windshield split and shattered, and smoke spilled from the engine. The premonition had changed again, fluid, versatile, confusing.

  At the end, as usual, things were fuzzy.

  One of us died. I don’t know if it was me or the other driver but I could see death . . . although death seemed to shift in and out.

  It was terrifying.

  And there was something else. Something about the other driver. I could not figure it out. I had never been able to figure it out. I shut my eyes and went through every inch of the premonition. What was the mystery here? What was I not getting?

  I didn’t want to die. But I’m sure she didn’t, either.

  I could only see my hands on the steering wheel. They were shadowed here and there, and it was only quick flashes, but my hands looked like my hands about now. Not older, no more age spots, no more wrinkles or lines.

  Would the event in this premonition happen soon?

  And if it did, what could I do to save myself . . . and save her?

  * * *

  Jules sent us, by e-mail, three different invitations for her wedding. “Which one do you like most?” she asked my mother and aunts and me.

  One of them had a photo of her and Mack, together, on his motorcycle. Orange and yellow flames were Photoshopped behind them. They were in full leathers, but Mack wore a black bow tie and Jules had a lacy white veil attached to her helmet. The text: “Come Celebrate With Us as We Take the Ultimate Ride!”

  “Ooo!” my mother said. “I like that one.”

  A second photo was of Jules and Mack in jeans and matching black leather vests, black knitted hats, and black sunglasses. They were flexing their biceps, Jules in front of Mack, showing off their matching tattoos of each other’s face. The text: “We Have the Tattoos, Now We’re Getting Hitched.”

  “Their inner-twined souls are coming through keenly here,” Aunt Camellia said. “You can feel the love.”

  The third photo was of Jules and Mack, both naked, from the back, standing on a beach during sunset, their motorcycles nearby. They were holding hands, my sister’s long blonde hair flying in the wind, Mack looking huge next to her. The text, scrawling across their rear ends: “Don’t Be a Beach Bum, Come to Our Wedding!”

  “This one,” Aunt Iris said, tapping it. “I think it’s modern. We all need to embrace our individual bodies and stop being so critical, so shocked, by nakedness. Plus, the message is clear and I like clear and practical messages.”

  “Which one do you like, Evie?” my mother asked, as my aunts turned to me.

  I studie
d all three. “I like all of them, but I think I’d go with the tattoos of each other’s faces. They’re getting married, it’s permanent, like the tattoos. Plus, they look tough, and inside we all know they are two of the mushiest people on the planet Earth, so it adds to that underlying humor.”

  We Skyped Jules, told her our thoughts, and she decided on the tattoo invitation. “Tattoo invitation it is. We’re going to hire a woman to paint fake tattoos on anyone who wants one. Plus, the invitations to our friends will tell them to wear their leathers! What do you think?”

  “I think it’s going to be a tough wedding,” I drawled. “Bunch of tough guys and gals.”

  She looked confused, then she laughed. “Oh! I get it, Evie! Because leather is tough.”

  “You got it.”

  “Mom, you’re going to remember to wrap black leather ribbons around the vases of the flowers for the tables, right?”

  “Yes, I got your message! We’ll wrap the vases in black leather.”

  “Aunt Iris, did you get our motorcycle photo?”

  “I did!” Aunt Iris said. “And I juxtaposed it against crazy-looking orchids bent this way and that. The orchids look like they’re talking to each other. We’ll have that picture in each floral centerpiece.”

  “Thank you!” Jules grinned. “And Aunt Camellia, you’re still making the lotions as the wedding gifts, right?”

  “The lotion will be pink with a black label,” Aunt Camellia said, “and it’ll smell like roses. I’m going to call it Motorcycle Grease.”

  “I love it!” Jules gushed. “Wait ’til I show you my wedding dress! My wedding dress designer—her name’s June and she’s on the Oregon coast—is almost done. But don’t ask about it! It’s a surprise!”

  “What’s Mack going to wear?” Aunt Iris asked.

  Jules was confused. “His leathers. Of course. Plus!” She put a finger up in the air. “A bow tie. Like in the invitation that lost.”

  I smiled at Jules, and she smiled back. “Hello, maid of honor sister-love! You look beautiful as always. When are you going to buy a motorcycle?”