Chapter 35
With so many non-witches around at Craft Night, I never got the chance to ask Shelby about her mom, so I text her first thing in the morning and ask her where her mom lives and if she’s up for a visit. When she asks why, because who wouldn’t ask why, I tell her: I think she has my cockatoo.
Soon we’re in Shelby’s electric car, zipping a few miles down the road to her parents’ house.
“But why wouldn’t she tell you?” Shelby asks for the hundredth time.
“She knows you’re the only person in town with a bird like that!
Oh my God, do you think she took down the flyers, too?
If so, that woman owes me ten dollars’ worth of printer ink.
What the hell is she doing with a bird, anyway?
They make her sneeze. I had to rehome all her damn chickens. ”
Tina McGowan lives in an adorable ranch with a beautiful garden full of hummingbird feeders and sheet metal goats.
An older man with a comb-over and mustache waves to us from the open garage door, where he’s sitting in a lawn chair, smoking a cigar.
“She’s in the bedroom,” he calls. “Bein’ foolish. ”
“Thanks, Daddy.”
Shelby bursts in the front door, shouting, “Mama, you’d better not be harboring a bird fugitive!” When Tina does not immediately enter the room, she mutters, “I know you’re in there, soaking your feet after church.”
The first thing I notice is my pink bird backpack sitting on the kitchen table, surrounded by bird supplies.
The second thing is a loose stack of Lost Bird flyers, a few of which have been shredded by a bored and enterprising parrot.
The parrot, however, is not currently in attendance.
Which is probably good, as a cat meows and rubs against my shins—a young tortie.
A sleek black cat watches from the hearth, while a hefty tabby is curled on the couch.
So this should’ve been Maggie, I think as I reach down to stroke the tortie’s head.
I’m not a cat person, but I’m glad Moon and Artemis found a good home with Tina.
Judging by the number of cat trees, toys, and beds strewn around the space, they’re happy enough here.
Shelby sighs dramatically and leads me down a hallway to a closed door. “I hope you’re decent, because we’re coming in!” she shouts. “And don’t try to hide in the closet. I can smell your VapoRub.”
There’s no answer, so she reaches over the doorframe and pulls down a nail, which she uses to pop open the lock.
The door opens, and I’m faced with a red-cheeked, puffy-eyed Tina McGowan sitting on a recliner in Minnie Mouse pajamas, her bare feet stuck in a bubbling footbath and her neck gooped with VapoRub.
A rose-breasted cockatoo stands on the sky-blue carpet between us like a guard dog.
“This is trespassing!” Maggie shouts, making me wince.
“Mama, honestly, what the hell?” Shelby says.
Poor Tina sneezes violently and looks like she wants to throw up. “I…I just…wanted to take care of her.”
I close the door, squat down, and look Maggie in the eye. “I know everything,” I tell her. “So I’m not going to pester you for answers anymore.”
“You don’t know half of what you think you do,” she grumbles.
I reach into my pocket and hold out a handful of pistachios, which were Doris’s all-time favorite food. “Now, if you’ll come along, you can have all these nice pistachios.”
She clicks her beak as she thinks about it. “Well, I don’t know. Tina’s been an absolute pleasure.”
“That’s because she can’t hear you and is thus free of your complaints, insults, and general meddling. I’ll commit to trying to get along better if you will.”
A sigh. “Fine. But no more closing the cage door.”
“And no more calling me a hussy.”
Shelby gasps. “She did not say that!”
I look up. “Absolutely she did.”
She shakes her head. “I’ve never heard of a familiar that mouthy, but I guess parrots come with a built-in attitude, huh?”
My eyes meet Tina’s. The guilt and terror on her face tell me she knows exactly where that attitude is coming from, and she knows it’s not just the parrot talking.
Maggie must’ve found some way to communicate with her.
My eyes bounce around the room until I see a Scrabble board set up on the floor, the tiles strewn around in various words.
“Clever girl,” I murmur.
I hold out the bird backpack, and Maggie hops in. “Pistache!” she barks in a voice that now makes me miss the old Doris. I obediently put the little pile of nuts in her food cup, and she starts gobbling them down.
“Please don’t be mad, honey,” Tina says. “I was trying to help.”
I give her the best smile I can conjure, given the circumstances. “I know. Thanks for keeping her safe. But if I have a heart attack later in life due to the stress caused by the last few days, I’ll send you a bill.”
She laughs weakly and puts her fingers to her chest. “Nearly gave me a heart attack, too, if I’m honest. It ain’t every day a pink bird lands on your windshield. I thought I was in Psycho.”
“The Birds,” Shelby corrects.
“Well, just the one.”
I zip up the bird backpack and gather the rest of the stolen supplies.
Shelby offers me a reusable grocery bag to carry everything.
Tina doesn’t budge from her recliner and footbath, but she calls, “I’d offer to fix y’all some lunch, but my feet.
Help yourself to anything in the fridge. Leftovers are in the butter tub.”
Shelby opens the fridge to show me that it’s about fifty percent butter tubs.
It reminds me so much of my mom’s fridge that my chest goes tight.
“Who needs real Tupperware, right?” she says.
She pokes around until she finds some chocolate pie, and we sit at the table and eat our slices off china saucers while Maggie works through her pistachio pile and sings little bits of The Music Man, almost against her will.
On the way back to town, Maggie is quiet and Shelby is apologetic.
“Sometimes my mama doesn’t have the sense God gave a goose.
I can imagine her taking in a stray—she tried to adopt a possum one time, for Pete’s sake—but to find Doris and then decide to steal all the flyers and keep her? That’s just beyond.”
“Doris can be very stubborn,” I tell her. “But I think we’ll learn to compromise.”
It’s a sign of that compromise that Maggie does not argue with this statement.
Shelby drops us off, and I tote Maggie upstairs, where she settles back in with a decent enough attitude.
“So did you have a nice adventure?” I ask her.
She huffs and fluffs her feathers. “Tina’s a sweet girl, but let’s just say that her porch light is on but no one’s home.
She’s a whiz with numbers, but that’s pretty much it.
I just about concussed myself trying to get her to pull down the Scrabble board so we could talk that first night.
And that was after me screeching, ‘No Rhea!’ a hundred times, and every time, she said, ‘I don’t have Blu-ray, just VHS.
’ Anyway, I reckon it’s good to be home.
” She flutters into her cage and drinks water like everything is back to normal.
I watch her for a moment, but I’m not interested in waiting around anymore. “So I know you messed up everybody’s grimoires so they couldn’t do magic—at least all the grimoires except yours and the McGowans’—but what I can’t figure out is why.”
A martyred sigh. “Do we have to do this?”
“Yes. Just tell me the truth, and I’ll stop asking. You’ll stop running away. No more secrets.”
Maggie hops onto her perch and cleans her feathers. I give her time.
Finally, she says, “It’s because of what happened with your mama.”
It feels like being slapped in the face. “What do you mean?”
She keeps her back to me, her voice in my head soft with old regret.
“After she caused the tornado, I felt responsible. I’d pushed her, and she nearly destroyed the whole town, the whole mountain.
Our family farm—our home—was gone. And then she ran away.
So I decided I needed to find a way to make the magic less easily abused.
I couldn’t let something like that happen again.
I worked up from a small spell to a bigger one, practicing, and then I invited everyone over, and…
” She runs a feather through her beak. “Sounds like you know what happened after that. It worked. No more catastrophes.”
I want to argue, attack, blame, but I know that none of those things has worked so far.
“Why’d you let some people keep their magic, though?”
She briefly eyes me and returns to preening.
“The people who kept their magic didn’t have much power.
The McGowans couldn’t start a stiff breeze with all three of ’em working together.
And Farrah…” She barks a parrot laugh. “She can talk to animals, but she can’t do much harm with that sort of knack.
And she never trusted me. She didn’t come to the potluck, so I reckon her grimoire still works.
Anyway, what’s done is done, and it can’t be undone. ”
“I think maybe it could be if I found your grimoire.”
Maggie bobs her head in annoyance. “Well, it can’t, and you won’t. So let’s put it behind us and move forward. I can give you a few spells that I remember. The dust spell, the light spell. I’ve got a good one that can help you fall asleep.”
“But without your grimoire—” I start.
She blows a parrot raspberry. “I know a few by heart. You can write them down. Start a grimoire of your own. That’s how it was for your mama and me, all the Kirkwoods down the line.
Can’t imagine how far back we must’ve learned those spells, and then they were taught, parent to child, for centuries.
I always liked how they made me feel connected to our history.
You’re a part of that, you know. Our legacy. ”