Chapter Eight
Eight
S era and Poppy both came into the back room when Liberty was done with her meditation. The candle and the meditation hadn’t brought answers.
Samhain was that season of endings, the time when the lush greens of summer faded. She should be embracing that and the ending of...her childhood.
That’s what this was. She was facing her first problem without her mom there to fix it for her. Keeping secrets, balancing lies and trying to juggle Nan’s illness and her shop and Merle was a lot. There were times when she wanted to pretend she was still a child and let Mom tell her everything would be fine.
This was something only she could figure out for herself. As a sixteen-year-old, when she’d rejected knowing his name, she’d done it partially out of rebellion, partially out of support for her mom, and maybe a little out of spite for the man who’d walked out of her life before it had begun.
But at twenty-eight, she was making a different choice. She could have ignored the name...
As if. She wasn’t that kind of girl. She never had been.
“I’m lost.”
The words just came out without thought and Sera and Poppy rushed over as one and hugged her, both of them reassuring her at the same time. Poppy with a “we’re here” and Sera with a “we know.”
Of course they knew. These were sisters of her heart that the universe had put in her path when she’d needed them most.
“Merle got a lead on my John Jones. There is a chance that I could find out more about him,” she said.
Sera stepped around her and picked up one of Liberty’s rings. It was made of three strands of bronze wiring braided together and then wrapped around a small obsidian crystal. Sera held the ring in her palm and closed her eyes saying words to herself, but Liberty knew what her friend was uttering.
“Friendship binds us in our hearts and in our lives.”
She passed the ring over to Poppy, who took it and did the same thing before handing it to Liberty. For a moment she was overwhelmed by the love she had for these two women. She slipped the ring onto the index finger on her right hand. A sensation not unlike a hug wrapped itself around her body.
“Okay so you’ve got us with you. What else do you need?”
“I think I need to tell Mom.”
“I agree,” Sera said. “She’s going to be hurt that you haven’t yet. Not just about the John Jones part. She needs to know what’s going on with your Nan too.”
Liberty took a deep breath. Sera had really started to grow into her feminine strength since she began a relationship with Wesley. There had been a time when Sera wouldn’t have spoken up. Liberty loved seeing her friend come into her own. But right now she wasn’t sure she was happy with the truth bomb.
Sera was right. But once she mentioned everything to her mom, she was going to face learning more about her father than she could predict—probably from the one source she should have gone to in the first place. She was afraid of learning something that would make her see her mom in a different light.
“I agree with Sera. It’s your life and of course we’re going to support you no matter what, but keeping this from your mom isn’t helping you,” Poppy said. “But you can’t talk to her now, so we’ll go with you to talk to Merle. That way, whatever happens, we’re there.”
Liberty looked back to the salt circle on the floor and the debris of the meditation and the ritual she’d tried to perform. Was the goddess showing her that her strength was this friendship?
Or was she so disconnected from her authentic self that she needed her friends to make her decisions for her?
The universe had sent her a message. Offered her a nugget of something that could lead to a rebirth. A chance to really face that one part of her past she’d never resolved. That part she ignored and pretended didn’t matter, buried in her deepest heart.
All of her life, she tried to say she didn’t need to know anything about that man who hadn’t wanted her. Pushed it down on Father’s Day, when other kids had asked questions on the playground. But a part of her was ignoring that feeling of abandonment that had always dogged her. No matter how much she’d tried to hide it behind her I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude.
She’d developed a hard skin to protect herself against the teasing from others about how her and Mom were two strange witches living without a man. John Jones’s abandonment led to financial struggles and emotional ones as well for both Liberty and Lourdes. But they’d gotten through it and were strong. Her home life was good. She’d been so loved and supported by both Mom and Nan that she’d learned to not let that missing man bother her.
She wasn’t going to just be passive about this.
She had been angry to hear the way Nan was talking to her mom about that man...about how Mom had loved him and tried to get him to stay... That he’d still walked away pissed her off.
Standing in her back room with the scent of candle wax and rosemary surrounding her, she could finally admit that she needed to find out the truth about her father so she could shove it in his face how awesome she was, and how much he’d missed out on leaving her mom.
Merle read through the search results. Though the query hadn’t pulled back one man, but four. Maybe he should have done this before he told her he had found some information.
He just wanted to deliver some results. He’d already admitted he wanted to impress Liberty, and normally this wasn’t what he did for a living. But he knew computers and how to find information that no one wanted found. This should have been easy.
These results were, well, lackluster in his opinion.
But they were a start. He was being too hard on himself. Sighing, Merle initiated a more detailed search on the four men and then put his smartphone away.
He rubbed the back of his neck, trying to come to terms with Marcus’s visit. His world felt like it was off its axis. Marcus getting signed and the family celebrating was normal. Marcus coming all the way to Birch Lake, which his family sort of hated because it’s too quiet and odd, was decidedly not normal.
He was used to being the odd man out. To keeping this part of his life separate from his family. But Marcus, in the way only the baby of the family could do, had swept in and brought the two halves of his life together.
Merle wasn’t sure he liked it. D she’d seen a particularly large rust-colored one that she wanted for her mantel. It was like she was losing pieces of herself to this obsession with getting information about a man who didn’t want her.
A man who meant nothing to her.
Why hadn’t she seen that before? Why had she allowed the fact that she had a name to drive her into this frenzy?
“Okay. But what will we be doing with the pumpkins?”
“Decorating. It’ll be fun. I’ll get some more for your place too. Tonight I’m going to bring over the altar piece I made for you from the branches and foliage we collected in the woods the other day.”
“Great. But I don’t have an altar.”
She shook her head. “Disappointing. We can figure something out. Do you have a countertop?”
“I do.”
“I’ll make it work,” she said. “Now to the D&D session tonight. Should I wear something druid-y?”
“If you want to. No one in the group dresses like their characters. I tend to wear jeans and a T-shirt. But there isn’t a dress code,” he said.
“Disappointing,” she repeated. “I was picturing you in some tight leather pants and an adventurer’s shirt...maybe a medallion nestled in the deep V.”
“Sorry to keep letting you down—and just to manage expectations—I don’t own a pair of tight leather pants,” he said.
“You don’t? I’ll put that on my gift idea list. I was just thinking how much fun it would be to dress as my character.”
“There’s a group that does that. I haven’t been, but if you’re interested I can see when they’re meeting up again.”
“What group?”
“LARPers. Live-Action Role Players,” he said.
She stole a potato chip from his plate. “Why haven’t you done that? Seems right up your alley.”
He was so good at world building and character creation, she wanted some recognition for him.
His face got tight in a way that meant he didn’t want to talk about this. Part of her knew she was using Merle as a distraction from her own messed-up life, but also, she wanted this for him.
“I tend to keep D&D private.”
“That’s not D&D, right? Are you embarrassed to do your nerd thing out in the open?” There was something so cute about seeing him almost blush when she asked him. It made her like him a little bit more.
He sighed. “Yes. I am. Plus my mom is on Facebook so if anyone tags me in pics, she’ll see it and then it’ll become a thing.”
She had started out teasing him, but it sounded like there was more to it than that. “So?”
“So, I’m not the perfect son, Liberty. I don’t have the relationship with my family that you have with yours. Even my hair and the fact that I haven’t cut it in ages causes discussion at every family get-together. So as much as I’ve wanted to try to meet up with the LARPers, I haven’t done it.”
Merle gave off all the confident vibes when she saw him, so realizing he was actually shy about his interests angered her. Merle deserved better than whoever had made him feel this way.
She’d never empathized with him more. All of her life she’d boldly shouted her differences to the world because she knew she’d never fit in. But she’d assumed that Merle did the same.
She reached over and rested her hand on his, which he’d clenched into a fist. “Screw them. I like your hair, and I’m not sure what they’d want to discuss about it. And if you want to do the LARPers thing, I’ll go with you. Until then I’m looking forward to D&D and seeing you in action.”