Chapter 13
Or destitute, maybe, which is just under it.
Could be either one, and I don’t trust one-offs.
I flip through the dictionary nine more times.
Nine.
Nine.
The words I land on: stay, tome, inherit, absolute, stores, future, dream, succeed, and, oddly, squirrel.
“One more time,” I say firmly.
As if laughing in my face, the dictionary gives me one more word: magic.
“This shit is rigged,” I mutter.
Fate seems determined to keep me here, but I am a very logical woman, so I need to do more research. I start by walking into the video store and standing at the counter. The two customers are still browsing. Abraham is snoring gently, so I call his name, but that doesn’t help.
“Just drop a few dollars in the fishbowl when you find what you want,” the lady customer says. She and the man are in their seventies and at the point where they’re starting to resemble each other, outside of his mustache and her perm. “He’s hard to wake up during naptime.”
“So how does the store keep track of the videos?” I ask, because these folks seem local and friendly.
“There’s a clipboard on the counter. You just write down whatever you take.”
The office manager in me is horrified as I look over the clipboard.
It’s a copy of a copy of a copy, a form with spaces for date, time, name, and movie.
A stump of pencil is taped to a string attached to the clipboard, and many of the entries are borderline unreadable.
There is no computer, no cash register. Just a fishbowl full of green and silver and the goodwill of the town.
“So they don’t take cards?”
The man laughs. “No, but checks are okay, if they know you. Which it sounds like they don’t. You new or visiting?”
“Just visiting for now. Y’all come in here a lot?”
He holds up a copy of Batman Returns. “I probably ought to buy this one I watch it so much, but this place is pretty convenient. VHS is getting hard to find.”
“We’re in here a couple of times a week,” the woman says. “Sure do wish they had some new stock, but I’d hate to see one of those newfangled robot boxes show up. We like the homey touches.”
“Can’t get boiled peanuts like that from a robot box!” the man agrees, going to grab a Styrofoam cup.
I don’t have the heart to tell them that the robot box company went bankrupt.
As an unknown quantity, I don’t really feel comfortable snooping around, even if this place legally belongs to me lock, stock, and barrel of peanuts. Luckily, I have an easy source of information locked in my apartment.
And that’s another positive if I stay in Arcadia Falls: a comfortable, safe home that’s paid for outright and doesn’t seem to have any major problems. I don’t even know what it’s like to live in a place where you don’t have to put down pots and bowls every time it rains.
I can use the rent from the Billingses to pay the mortgage on my folks’ place in Cumberville, which means my living expenses here would be almost nothing.
Something in my shoulders relaxes when I think about that—not owing anybody anything.
I wave to the customers getting their peanuts and head out the door and around back to the alley, where I stomp upstairs loud enough that Maggie will know I’m coming.
Even though she has everything a cockatoo could conceivably need, including food, water, and the enrichment of playing parkour on her own furniture, I still feel guilty for locking her up, but I am not the only one at fault here.
I take a deep breath and unlock the door. Something flies at my face, and I instinctively bat it away with my hands.
“You nasty little so-and-so!” Maggie screeches, landing on the floor and immediately launching herself at me again. “Locking me up! In my own home! When I’ve done nothing but help you!”
I gently push her away as she telepathically chews me a new one as only a little old Southern lady can. At least she seems to have forgotten that she has a very sharp beak, because if she wanted to, she could definitely draw blood. Again.
“Rude! I would tan your hide—”
“Nobody spanks their kids anymore, Grandma Cockatoo,” I say, guiding her away. “Now, did you get it all out of your system?”
“The disrespect!” she screeches. “You’re worse than your mama!”
That gets my attention. I set her down on the ground and prepare myself for another winged onslaught, but she just bustles back and forth angrily, her feathers ruffled.
“What did she do that made you so mad?” I ask. “And why’d she hate you so much?”
She stops and blinks at me. “Oh, so we’re doing this now?”
“I need to know. I have some decisions to make.”
I get a Diet Coke out of the fridge—it’s the only thing in the fridge, which means the family Diet Coke addiction runs deep—and sit down on the couch.
Maggie flutters up beside me. I can see now that she apparently took out a lot of her anger on one of the uglier throw pillows.
I am very familiar with the decorating sense of a furious—or even bored—cockatoo.
“Oh, sure, just help yourself to my Diet Coke. Didn’t even ask!” she grumbles.
“May I please have one of your Diet Cokes, seeing as how you can’t drink them anymore and you can’t actually stop me?”
She chirps irritably. “Fine. Help yourself. When I planned this spell, I didn’t really think about what it would be like, being trapped in such a powerless body. It should’ve been Moon. A nice little cat, tidy and cozy. This is so…undignified.”
She watches me as I sip my refreshing Diet Coke. I’m ready to give her the silent treatment. After all, I can walk right back out that door and leave her alone in here, and she knows it.
“Your mother was a hellcat,” she finally says. “From the day she was born. High energy, rebellious, adventurous. Falling out of a tree or into a creek every day. Broke a bone every year. ADHD is what they call it now, but back then we just said, ‘She’s a mess.’ And she’d argue with a stump.”
“Well, none of that changed.” I smile. “My sister Cait takes after her.”
“Still can’t believe there’s two more granddaughters.
” Maggie fluffs her feathers and settles down, all tucked up.
“When Miranda was born, I almost died. I couldn’t have any more children.
And I never married, so it was just me and her.
I could tell she had the Kirkwood way about her early, so I tried to raise her the way my mama raised me—to be responsible and respect her legacy.
I taught her the little spells to help the bread rise or keep the mice out, but she just saw it as work.
She was like a horse that wouldn’t take to the saddle.
I’d ask her to do something—hell, I’d command her to do something—and she’d just run off. ”
“Sounds like a typical teenager.”
“Teenager? I’m talking about when she was seven!
” Maggie flaps her wings. “Headstrong from the start. She wanted to go far away for college, but I needed her back home to help with the store, and there’s a perfectly good college nearby.
She had a knack for weather, and even if Miranda and I were the only ones who ever knew the truth of it, her magic meant the world to the farmers in these parts.
The vineyards, the greenhouses, the little old man with the tomato stand on the side of the road.
Everywhere else in Georgia was in a drought, so dry the trees were bribing the dogs, and she could give us rain.
And if a tornado came from somewhere else, she could make it veer off. ”
“I thought you said knacks were little things.”
She clicks her beak in annoyance at that.
“Some people are born with a little basic power, and some people are born with gifts, and some people are gosh darn Mozart. Your mama was that last type, and lordy, she hated it. She called me a nag, but this wasn’t like asking a normal kid to do the dishes—one spell from her was the difference between a farming family having enough money for Christmas and going bankrupt. ”
But what she’s saying does not describe the mama I knew.
“My mom was all about responsibility,” I say sharply. “She was dedicated to her daughters. Never late on a payment for anything. Worked hard, and always took good care of us.”
Maggie hops up onto the back of the couch.
I guess even when they’re run by people brains, parrot bodies can’t sit still.
“Well, people change sometimes. See, your mama and I had a big argument. We needed rain, and the moon was right for big magic, but she refused to do the spell. It was homecoming and she didn’t want to lose blood or have a Band-Aid in her pictures or rain for her date.
I remember her standing on the front porch with her hands in fists, shouting, ‘I never promised to hurt myself for you, not for anybody. It’s my life. ’ Like it was ever for me. Ha!”
She’s quiet for a minute, and even though cockatoos don’t have expressive faces, I can tell that this wound runs deep.
“And I’ll admit—I was angry, too. I’d sacrificed things in my life to keep food on the table and be at every school play, and I always did my bit to help the community, even though I’d never had powers like hers.
So I brought the basin full of water and ingredients and told her…
” A cockatoo sneeze. “Lord, I’m ashamed of this, but I was mad, and she was seventeen.
I told her she had a responsibility to the community that was more important than one selfish night of dry-humping a boy on the dance floor in a glittery dress. ”
I grimace. Arguing with Mama never went well for anyone at our house. I can’t imagine having the gall to call her selfish—or the thunderstorm that would follow.