Chapter 6
I expected florals and quilts and pastels and maybe more cardboard movie stand-ups.
I would not have been surprised by faded country chic and mothballs and, I don’t know, ceramic roosters everywhere.
And yet here I stand in a full-on hippie retreat.
There are crystals on every windowsill, macramé plant hangers in every corner, shawls over every lamp, dried flowers on every surface, posters of Stevie Nicks and Picasso’s peace dove and Woodstock. The dominating odors are incense and patchouli.
“Home sweet home,” the annoying voice says, relieved.
Now that I’m in a private place, I close the door behind me, put down my bags, unzip the backpack, and gently take Doris in both hands, holding her up to face me.
“Are you talking?” I ask, inspecting her for a hidden speaker.
“Not with my mouth,” she admits. “It’s telepathy. Pretty neato, right?”
There’s nothing new or unusual about the cockatoo that’s been my ward for the past three years, aside from the dried human cremains dusting her pink feathers.
When she struggles in my hands, I place her on the floor.
She waddles back and forth, looks at her foot, spreads her wings, raises her crest.
“This body didn’t come with an instruction manual. Gonna take some getting used to. But I always wanted to fly—”
“One of your wings is clipped, so don’t get too excited.”
She looks up at me, her eyes dilating in annoyance. “I thought you young people believed in personal freedoms.”
“You do not currently have the personal freedom to fly into a school bus. I actually don’t approve of wing clipping, but until recently, my boss, Mr. Horace Buckley, was your legal owner, and you did attempt to attack a couple of his clients—” I drag my hands down my face.
“Oh my God, I’m trying to reason with a cockatoo. ”
I scoop Doris up and walk over to a long, low bookshelf filled with paperbacks by Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts, plus several photographs, a crystal ball, and a big vase of dried flowers.
The bird struggles in my grasp, so I help her perch on my wrist. The image that’s caught my attention is a beautiful young woman with long auburn hair wearing a slip dress and swinging a chubby baby around near the very waterfall I’m currently soaked in.
The woman looks like me—and she looks like Mama.
“I sure was pretty, wasn’t I?” the voice asks, sounding wistful. “Then again, I guess it’s easy to be pretty when you’re young.”
I look from the bird to the photograph. I don’t want to ask the question I need to ask, because I know it’s absurd, but…I have to ask.
“Am I talking to my grandmother, and are you, um, possessing my pet cockatoo?”
Doris—is it Doris, still?—clucks a laugh.
“That’s one way to put it. I had everything planned out with Diana. I was supposed to come back as my cat and become her second familiar.”
“A familiar? Like, the pet of a witch? And if you’re in there, where did Doris go?”
The cockatoo nearly falls off my wrist, so I gently place her on the floor.
She fluffs her feathers and hesitantly walks around, her head bobbing.
“Every witch needs a familiar. And if Doris is what you called your bird, then yes, I’m talking about her.
As for where she went, I don’t know. I don’t think cockatoos have souls. ”
“But they have feelings,” I argue, annoyed by this assumption. “She had a personality. She liked musicals.”
“Feelings and a love of musical theater are not a soul, honey. I’m sorry if you’re going to miss her, but hopefully you’ll be comforted by the fact that your grandmother performed a very complicated spell that—Well, it went totally wrong.
But now that you’re here and you fumbled your way into the waterfall, at least I’m still around to teach you how to be a witch. ”
The whole world goes silent in that moment.
I can hear a clock ticking, somewhere deeper in the apartment.
“I need a minute,” I say.
Leaving the cockatoo—the cockatoo that is apparently my estranged dead grandmother—to peck at her own rug, I run out the door and down the stairs to the alley, grumbling to myself.
“This can’t be happening. Weird-ass will, and no cavern behind the waterfall, and I’m wet and covered in dead grandma, and my pet bird is talking, but she’s actually speaking in sentences instead of Rodgers and Hammerstein lyrics.
Maybe I have a brain-eating amoeba from the water and I’m hearing a disembodied voice—”
I have tunnel vision and am extremely preoccupied, which means I run smack into someone, but they’re sturdy enough that we don’t go tumbling to the concrete. Instead, firm hands grasp my shoulders, and I flick my damp hair out of my eyes as I prepare to give somebody the what-for.
Oh.
It’s him. The guy who gave me the purse hanger. Hunter.
And he looks amused.
“Well, I’m not disembodied, if it makes you feel any better. Can’t be disembodied if you have a body,” he reasons.
And he does. Have a body. I have definitely noticed it. I was just momentarily pressed up against it. I’m very close to it right now. I’d like to—
Nope. Not now. I have bigger problems.
Leaving home for the first time, driving from Alabama to Georgia, being soaked to the bone, suddenly having a talking bird, inheriting a store that has no business existing, paying a salary to an absentee centenarian employee with money I don’t possess. What else could go wrong?
“Sorry. I’m having…a day.”
He looks me up and down with concern in his stormy gray eyes and apparently decides I’m not going to fall over, as he releases my shoulders.
I immediately miss the way he made me feel all tingly and grounded.
In that moment I realize that I’m farther away from everyone I love than I’ve ever been, and since I turned down Billy Wayne’s crappy proposal weeks ago, no one has touched me, beyond Colonel’s meaty handshake and Tina’s awkward hug this morning.
I feel both disconnected and yet also right where I’m supposed to be, and these two sensations are playing tug-of-war with my heart.
The good-looking man standing before me knows none of this.
He doesn’t know about the tingles.
He just sees a strange woman talking to herself, looking like she recently crawled out of a well.
He sticks his hands in his pockets as if trying to appear nonchalant. “Seems like it’s not just a day, but a bad one. Are you okay? Did you get in a fight with a fire hydrant? And where’s your emotional support cockatoo?”
A mad laugh breaks out of me at that thought.
The cockatoo in question is currently the cause of most of my problems.
“Let’s just say she’s currently in Cockatoo Jail for committing a crime of passion. I’m Rhea Wolfe, by the way.”
He sticks out his hand, and I feel a jolt of electricity when we touch.
Not in the “oh, it’s like it was meant to be” sort of way.
A literal shock, like touching a doorknob on the coldest day of winter.
He pulls his hand back and winces. “Oh, sorry. That happens all the time. Dry hands, thick shoes. I’m Hunter. So you’re new in town, huh?”
I nod and force myself to look up. “Brand new.” The longer I look at his muscular, tattooed forearms, the harder it’s going to be for me to avoid doing anything but that.
“Well, normally I’d warn you about parking in Maggie Kirkwood’s space.
She’s got a mean fastball with an egg from that balcony.
Or she did. Sometimes she would try to snipe me just for tossing work trash in the dumpster.
She was mean as hell, if you’ll pardon my saying so, but she died a few weeks ago, so I guess you’re probably safe. ”
I tuck away that bit about being mean. Didn’t Colonel say she wasn’t well-liked around town?
“So much for free eggs.”
There’s a frantic slapping noise, and we both look up to see a pink-and-gray blur caught in the ivory blinds and flapping madly.
“Oh, lordy,” I mutter.
“Looks like your parrot is currently the one who needs the emotional support. She’s not going to hurt herself up there, is she?” Hunter asks.
Doris—
No. Grandma Maggie.
Grandma Maggie pecks wildly at the glass as her wings strike the window again and again and her gray toenails scratch and scrabble furiously. She looks like she’s about to have a cockatoo stroke.
“She’ll be fine,” I say, waving at her. “At zoos, they call this enrichment.”
“Wait.” He looks at me more closely. “Why is your bird in Maggie’s apartment?” He glances at my Explorer, which is stuffed with most of my belongings. “Are you renting it?”
I’m not sure how much to tell him. I barely know what’s happening myself.
“I’m staying here awhile. Well, maybe. Probably. It’s complicated.”
Hunter peers into the back of the Explorer, where Doris’s enormous cage sits folded up on top of everything I own. He gazes up the wooden stairs to the apartment. “Do you have someone to help you move in?”
That thought did not occur to me until this very second, and suddenly the world feels desperately heavy. “Nope. Just me and Doris, and she had to give up powerlifting.”
With a winning smile, he walks over and opens the cargo area. “Think we can get the cage up there together, or should I get my friend Cisco to stop by after work?”
I’d honestly hoped I’d be on the ground floor somewhere. I never thought I’d be moving to a walk-up above the last video store in the world. Once unfolded, the cage is on wheels and is extremely sturdy, but I’m strong, and I know Hunter is strong, and he’s right here….
“If you have time and don’t mind, I’d appreciate it,” I tell him. “I think I can get everything else on my own, but the cage is a beast.”
He inspects the metal bars. “Okay, so you weren’t lying. Was this thing built to hold the Hulk?”
“Parrots can be a handful. Imagine an emotionally volatile toddler who has a knife for a nose and wolverine claws, and who’s probably going to outlive you.”
He chuckles, a pleasant rumble. “I think I’ll stick with dogs. All of the innocent sweetness, none of the knifework.” He maneuvers the cage into position and looks back at me as if measuring my grip strength.
I head over and heft the other side. “I helped load it, so I can help unload it. It weighs around a buck-fifty, but it’s unwieldy.”
“If you don’t mind walking backward, that’ll have me carrying the brunt of it.”
It’s a good plan. I nod and lift with my legs, not my back, and then the banter stops and the grunting begins.
We cross the alley, and I begin the laborious work of walking backward up unfamiliar stairs while carrying something that weighs as much as I do in sopping-wet clothes and squelching sneakers while staring down at the taut forearms of the best-looking man I’ve seen in ages.
I somehow manage not to trip or drop the cage on him, and soon we have it sitting on the balcony.
“You’re strong,” he says. “Are you a powerlifter, too?”
“I’m an office manager,” I tell him. “But it’s very heavy stuff.”
He raises his eyebrows and reaches for the cage.
I hold up a hand. “Let me get Little Miss Knife Face into her backpack, just in case.”
Hunter nods, and I squeeze through the door.
As soon as it’s shut, I hurry to the next room, where Maggie is tangled up in the blinds. I gently extract her and whisper, “What on earth are you doing? You were better behaved when your brain was the size of a walnut.”
“Life’s a lot easier with hands,” she says as I smooth down her feathers. “It’s like I’m wearing oven mitts and stiletto heels, and my eyes go in opposite directions.”
“Then why’d you decide to get in a fight with the blinds? Apparently, you can still think like a person, even if you’re not great with this body.” I snort. “God, that sounds completely unhinged.”
“I was trying to tell you to get away from the Blakely boy, but I guess my telepathy can only go so far. Didn’t you hear me shouting?”
“We both heard you screeching. And smacking your beak on the glass like a damn fool.”
“That’s cockatoo for ‘Get away from the grandson of my mortal enemy Joyce Blakely.’ ”
“Mortal enemy?” I ask her.
She shakes herself. “Well, let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. Not that it matters. When that boy finds out you’re a Kirkwood, he won’t want anything to do with you.”