Flower Moon

by Gina Linko

  “Tally,” Digger said again, and now he was yanking on my elbow too.

  And when I looked up I understood. Because there standing in front of a stunned Tempest was Grania Greenly.

  It was the oddest feeling, seeing this woman standing there. It was Mama, but not Mama. She carried a leather bag, stuffed to the gills. She wore a long, flowery skirt, and bracelets, tons of them. All silver and jangling on her left wrist.

  There were so many weird, déjà vu sensations coming at me at once that I could barely process any of it. “Holy peapods,” I whispered.

  “Here’s my quarter, but I really only want a hug,” she said with a smile, pressing her coin to Tempest’s card table. “Surprise! It’s Tempest? Am I right?”

  Tempest nodded, her knuckles white around the liar gauge.

  There were teachers who had known us for years and couldn’t tell us apart. Marisol even got it wrong sometimes, if she wasn’t paying close attention. And Aunt Grania knew?

  Aunt Grania pulled Tempest into a hug and kissed both of her cheeks with a flourish. Next, she turned and did the same to me, and I took in her scent. “My girls!” she said. “I feel like I know you! It is so wonderful to finally meet you in person.”

  As much as she looked like Mama, moved like Mama, sounded like Mama, she didn’t smell like her. Mama always wore the same perfume—she smelled like baby powder and roses. Aunt Grania smelled like some kind of spice and freshly-cut grass. I thought then, for some reason, of that day when Tempest and I had done our fingerprints.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Tempest stammered.

  “You don’t have any gray hair,” I blurted. Mama had some. Surely Aunt Grania should.

  “Magnets,” she said. “They’re useful for all kinds of things.”

  “Thirteen,” Tempest said.

  “That’s my number?” Aunt Grania asked, a smile playing around her mouth.

  Tempest nodded again, looking totally stricken, and my eyes shot to Digger.

  “Tempest, you okay?” Digger asked her.

  She nodded, still looking at Aunt Grania. “Am I right?”

  “Hmm,” Aunt Grania said. “Let me think. I don’t know if that makes any sense for me. Nope, I can’t seem to place that one.”

  Tempest’s cheeks flamed red.

  Thirteen.

  I knew why it was her number. I might not know much, but I was starting to put some pieces together. Digger and I had Googled a whole heap of things about the lunar cycle, learning details about the moon and its phases.

  “Thirteen moons,” I said. “That’s how many moons from sliver to full moon. Thirteen.”

  “What are you talking about?” Tempest asked.

  Aunt Grania stood frozen and silent, her easy friendliness slipping. Maybe she hadn’t known she’d be walking into an interrogation.

  “What do the moons mean? What does it have to do with why you and Mama don’t see each other anymore?”

  “Tally,” Digger warned.

  “No, I don’t see why we have to dance around everything. Digger and I figured out the quilt—Granny’s quilt. It tells the story of the moon. And the full moon’s coming on our birthday. And somehow that’s connected to you and Mama. What does it all mean?”

  Aunt Grania had recovered somewhat now, and she smiled. “Oh, yes, June thirteenth? Your golden birthday, correct? Are we doing anything special here at the carnival?”

  Her small talk was a weak, half-hearted attempt to avoid answering my questions, and I wasn’t having it. “The moons are counting down to something, I know it. But what?”

  In a very un-Mama-like way, Aunt Grania grimaced. She put her hand on her hip. “Tally, I just got here. I am sensing a lot of aggression in you, and to be quite honest, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  Tempest dropped the liar gauge on the rickety card table. It was ticking something fierce, clicking and clacking, its antennae moving briskly from side to side.

  “What in the saltine cracker?” I said, but I wasn’t looking at the liar gauge anymore. I’d spied something else.

  I pointed right at Aunt Grania’s arm, where the phases of the moon played out in a circle around her wrist. I didn’t have time to count the moons before she snatched her arm from view, pressing it to her middle and covering it with her other hand, but I would bet on Bones’s life there were thirteen. “Tell me why you have thirteen moons tattooed on your wrist.”

  “A warning,” she said, but then it was like she realized she shouldn’t be speaking. Aunt Grania shook her head.

  Tempest seemed to find her voice. “Tally, you found all this stuff out and you didn’t tell me?”

  “I wanted to. I was going to.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.” I knew I needed to talk to Tempest. I did. But I wasn’t ready to let this go with Aunt Grania. I was so incredibly close. I had to push. I bore my eyes into hers. “Why did you leave my mama?” How could you be so heartless?

  She shook her head. “That’s what you think happened? That’s your hypothesis?” She laughed then—this ugly, bitter sound. “My dear, I’m afraid you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  “Grania Greenly!” It was Pa Charlie’s honey-soft voice, calling from near the bonfire. A riot of greetings erupted from the rest of the carnival workers.

  “Dad!” Aunt Grania called, waving her arm over her head, her bracelets jangling down to her elbow. She moved toward the bonfire, surely ecstatic to get away from us. Aunt Grania turned over her shoulder. “We’ll talk later,” she said.

  Later would probably be never, if she had her way.

  My body was fairly thrumming with something—anticipation, dread, a combination of both.

  I moved to follow Aunt Grania.

  Tempest reached out to grab my elbow, but she stopped herself. I could feel why—it was there again, between us, blooming bigger. But Tempest gave it no notice as she laid into me. “I can’t believe you, Tally Jo, jumping all over her the second she appears at Peachtree and—”

  “I’m trying to keep us from ending up like them.”

  “Like I’m not?” She picked up her liar gauge, shoving all her trinkets in her pockets. “All this stuff I’m doing, it’s for us!”

  “Oh, fat lot of good it’s doing us. I could’ve told you Aunt Grania was lying. I didn’t need a gauge for that.” My mood darkened like a thundercloud.

  “Not just this thing, Tally. But my other invention too. The tides, the magnets … it’s all about us! You know what? Forget it.” She stormed off toward the campfire, and I let her go.

  Digger started up, “You know—”

  “Can it, Digger,” I told him.

  “Got it, Tally Jo. I think I’m just gonna make myself scarce.”

  “You do that.”

  “Tally!” Pa’s voice carried over to me, and it was sharp. “Get over here.” I didn’t dare disobey him, so I trudged over to the campfire, and Pa Charlie had his arm around Molly-Mae, whose cheeks were pinker than usual.

  His eyes searched mine, but then he looked away with a sigh, seeming to work hard to find his smile. Then Pa Charlie cleared his throat. “We’re making some changes to our schedule this year, y’all, and with Grania here now, I thought we’d let the cat out of the bag.”

  Digger elbowed me. I scowled at him. Like I was supposed to care about this right now?

  “Girls,” he said, looking over at me, and then back at my sister. His true smile lit his face. “Molly-Mae and I were wondering something. Would you mind terribly much sharing your birthday celebration this year?”

  “We’re having a celebration?” Tempest asked.

  “I’ve already been working on the cake,” Molly-Mae said, smiling. “It’ll be a right party. Your parents will be here by then.”

  “Will you be here still?” Tempest asked Aunt Grania.

  Aunt Grania shook her head once, then said, “Pa Charlie, what exactly are you planning to do along with the girls’ bir
thday party?”

  Pa Charlie beamed. “Molly-Mae has done me the honor of accepting my proposal. We were thinking of getting hitched at the little seaside chapel in Ambersville, then having a wedding celebration back at the carnival.” Pa Charlie leaned over and gave Molly-Mae a kiss on her cheek. Molly-Mae turned apple-red, a shocking contrast to her spun-sugar-white hair.

  Everyone was up on their feet in an instant, yelping and hugging, handing out congratulations.

  “We’d love that!” Tempest said, but I could see through her faux-cheerfulness, of course. She was upset with me.

  Well, I was upset with everything and everyone.

  I muttered some kind of congratulations to Molly-Mae and Pa Charlie, but I scuffed my feet through the seashell gravel and went off on my own back to the darkened midway.

  Mama would be here to share Pa Charlie’s wedding day with him.

  Aunt Grania would leave by then.

  I found myself at Tempest’s booth, and sat down there. A few pieces of junk were left on the table: a pair of scissors, three tiny little screws, a magnifying glass, a thin strip of magnet, like Mama and Tempest used sometimes when they were crafting.

  I toyed with the bendable magnet in my hands. Tempest had said her newest invention was all about magnets. About the tides. About us. But how, exactly?

  I folded the strip of magnet, nearly snapping it in two. Then I remembered something. When Tempest had been preparing for her magnet presentation, she’d shown me how you can snip a magnet in half with a pair of scissors. They become two separate magnets then, creating new poles at each end: south and north, one positive, one negative. Like slicing an earthworm in half. Start with one, end with two.

  Tempest had pushed the two new magnets toward each other after she’d cut them apart, and they’d repelled, their like poles pushing against each other. It was a weird sensation, trying to force two magnets toward each other but not being able to do it. That invisible press was powerful and mysterious, like a living thing with an iron will.

  It was very much like the feeling when Tempest had reached for my elbow a few minutes ago, right here on the midway.

  A thought bubbled up to the surface of my mind, circling there for a second, just out of reach. Then it forced itself to the front of my brain, exploding large and loud.

  Magnets.

  No.

  No. I tried not to even let myself think it, but of course I did. I connected the dots. I saw everything so clearly.

  It all made sense then.

  Me. Tempest.

  Mama. Aunt Grania.

  “Never my choice,” Mama had said.

  “You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” Aunt Grania had told me.

  Grandma Greenly and her sister, quilting via the postal service.

  Separated sisters. The Greenly Curse.

  My stomach roiled. This couldn’t be true.

  I managed to make it to the stand of dogwood bushes past the animal tent before I threw up.

  12

  The next day I did my morning chores, avoiding everyone and everything that I could, feeling surly. It had been an extra-long night of tossing and turning, of trying to talk myself out of the realization I had faced last night, wishing I had the rhythm of Bones’s breathing to help me get to sleep. Instead, I had a little ball of rage shimmying around in my midsection, wanting to scream at both my sister and my aunt, and my mama too, for good measure.

  When I had gathered my wits I went to confront Aunt Grania. But I couldn’t find her anywhere.

  “Fat Sam said she and Molly-Mae went wedding shopping in Brunswick,” Digger said when I found him and Tempest sitting at one of the picnic tables outside of the Candy Wagon.

  “What are you doing?” I asked Tempest, sounding crabby, exactly how I was feeling.

  She had her shoebox of junk sitting on the table, but the only thing she’d taken out was an old, tarnished silver spoon. It sat on the table by itself, its handle adorned with an engraved, cursive G. Tempest had her hands folded in her lap, and she stared at that spoon intently.

  “Be quiet,” Digger warned. “She told me not to talk.”

  I stole a piece of Digger’s elephant ear—with extra powdered sugar—and I thanked the Lord above for Molly-Mae and her way around the deep fryer. Digger shoved the rest of the elephant ear into his mouth at once and tried to talk around it.

  I finished my bite. “Wait until you swallow. Jeez, get some manners.”

  “What’s wrong with your sister?” he asked.

  “She must be thinking,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “I’m not thinking,” Tempest answered. “I mean, I am. I’m always thinking. You’re always thinking. It’s not like we’re ever not thinking. But I’m doing something else too.”

  “It doesn’t look like you’re doing anything but studying that silly spoon,” Digger said, giving me a grin.

  Tempest gave her head a swift shake and sighed, like she’d given up on something. “You think thoughts are powerful, Tally?” She looked up at me, all earnest-like.

  “Of course thoughts are powerful. They’re ideas, and ideas are the first step to getting something done.”

  “No,” Tempest said, shaking her head. “More literal-like. I mean powerful. Like, can thoughts affect the environment around you?”

  “I don’t get what you’re talking about.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Tempest sighed, picking up the spoon and dropping it into her cardboard box. Then she pulled out a few different things: several small springs, a broken watch, a spool of wire.

  Digger chewed loudly, swallowing even more loudly. “I know what you mean, Tempest. You were fixing to bend that spoon with your mind. Is that what you were doing?”

  Tempest smiled. “Yeah, exactly. But I couldn’t do it.”

  I looked from Digger to Tempest. “What?”

  “It’s a thing,” Digger explained. “Bending spoons with mind power. Magicians and such do it. Or attempt to. They just try to bend it right at the neck with nothing but their thought waves.” Digger waggled his eyebrows.

  “That sounds impossible,” I said.

  “So does levitating a frog, and I did that with Mr. Umberto.”

  “But that was science. Bending a spoon with thoughts sounds a little bit like … magic.” Of course, I had to admit to myself that I knew mind power. Had been on the receiving end of it, even. Tempest had kept me from doling out sweet, sweet justice to Bradley Ballard.

  Tempest sat up then, pursed her lips. “I think a lot of science can seem like magic before it’s explained properly. Sometimes we don’t have the observations, the data, or the right words yet to explain it. Surely, there was a time long ago when people watched a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis and thought of it as magic.”

  “If I saw you levitate a frog, I’d probably think you were a witch,” Digger offered.

  “I would think it was magic if you ever seemed to comb your hair in the morning,” I told Digger.

  “Not magic,” he said. “Just the apocalypse.” He brought his baseball hat out from his back pocket and put it on his head.

  Tempest had a couple of tiny screws held between her lips now, and she worked to unfasten the back of the watch with a miniature Phillips-head screwdriver, but that didn’t stop her from talking. “I read something fascinating. Ice crystals, while they’re forming, they create beautiful patterns if people think good thoughts around them. And they make nasty, ugly, asymmetrical patterns when people focus their bad attitudes on them.”

  I gave Digger a look. “Your parents must’ve really focused their bad thoughts on you when you were forming.”

  Tempest laughed then, spitting the screws from her lips. And the corners of my lips tipped up, wanting to smile, though I didn’t let them. But inside, I enjoyed Tempest’s laugh—it was something I’d missed. It was a clear, two-note jingle-bell sound. Such a good sound.

  Digger was laughing too. “Oh, Tally Jo, you are gonna get it fo
r that one.” He lifted the paper plate that had held his elephant ear and he blew on it. All the extra powdered sugar puffed straight into my face.

  I inhaled at just the exact wrong moment and I choked on it, coughing hard. Digger said, “Powdered-sugar lung. You deserve it, Tally.” Tempest’s eyes crinkled at the corners as she watched me wipe my face. She and Digger laughed some more.

  Though part of me wanted to laugh with them, I didn’t. I just scowled, hacking up powdered sugar and feeling like a storm cloud.

  I got up to leave, and Digger grabbed my hand. “No, you don’t.”

  He offered Tempest his other hand and he pulled her up from the picnic table. “That’s it. I’m out of patience for you and your crabapple attitude, Tally. You two are coming with me.”

  Tempest grumbled under her breath as she stuffed her pockets full of her doodads. Then Digger pulled us along toward the Ferris wheel, calling out to his dad, “Fat Sam, you let us ride up to the tippy-top?”

  “Sure thing, son.”

  It was something Digger loved to do: ride the Ferris wheel up to the top and have Fat Sam stop us there, poised above the carnival lot, feeling like the kings and queens of everything below.

  “I don’t want to ride to the top today,” I grouched.

  “Too bad,” Digger said. “We are going up there, all three of us, and we are going to stay there until you’re over this hissy fit you’re having.”

  The authoritative tone in Digger’s voice shocked me into silence. “Humph,” was all I could think to say.

  Soon, we sat three across in one of the orange bucket seats of the Ferris wheel, paused at the top of the ride. Digger sat in the middle, between Tempest and me, rocking the bucket seat.

  “Ladies, we’re on top of the world right now,” Digger said, giving me his most charming, gap-toothed smile.

  I didn’t return it. Being up in this bucket high in the sky, two feet from my sister, was making it hard to ignore what was making me crabby in the first place. Because it was here, right now. Whatever this thing was between my sister and me. And now I knew for sure that it was not something she was engineering.

  It was something worse.