Chapter 6 The Rules Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right
Crystal Moore had a schedule, and she stuck to it every day of the week. She locked up her classroom at Troy Elementary at four-thirty and was home by five. Between five and five-thirty, she took off her work clothes and folded laundry or tidied the house. At five-thirty she started dinner, which was always on the table when Russell pulled into the drive precisely one hour later.
Thursday was chicken parmesan night. Russell’s favorite. But it was seven o’clock and he still wasn’t home.
Crystal hated to bug her husband at work. Russell managed the Piggly Wiggly on 441 right outside Troy. He always said it was like running his own country, and the Piggly Wiggly couldn’t have asked for a better king. No one loved produce like Russell Moore. He could pluck a perfectly ripe cantaloupe out of a pile with his eyes closed. He was a master of meat, who chose the very best cuts for his own barbecues and would often wax eloquent on the subject of marbling. And every Saturday, he liked to greet kids at the store entrance dressed as the Piggly Wiggly mascot, Mr. Pig. Each year around September, Crystal’s second-grade students would discover her secret identity as Mrs. Pig and pandemonium would briefly ensue.
Crystal and Russell had been married for twenty-five years, and she could count on one hand the number of times he’d been late for dinner.
“Hey, honey.” Russell sounded winded when he answered the phone. That alone was unusual. Managing the Piggly Wiggly might have been mentally taxing, but it didn’t require much in the way of physical exertion. “I just saw the time.”
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, yeah. The supply chain is still all kinds of screwed up. We got a bunch of shipments in all at once. Gonna take us a bit to sort through them. You okay there?”
“’Course.” Crystal watched the cheese congeal on top of her chicken.
“Alright then,” Russell said. “I’ll be home when I can.”
The next morning at breakfast, Russell looked bleary-eyed.
“What time did you get home last night?” she asked as she set a plate of biscuits down in front of him.
“Round eleven, I think,” he told her. Crystal was always asleep by ten.
“That late?” She’d heard him come in at one-thirty. She felt her pulse pick up speed. Russell had never lied before.
“’Fraid so.” Russell kept his eyes on his plate as he dug into his food.
Crystal’s heart was pounding like a pile driver, and she could feel the earth opening up beneath her. “Do you think you’ll be late again tonight?”
“Not sure yet,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”
He did not let her know. So at seven that evening, Crystal slapped some foil over the skirt steak and potatoes that had grown cold on the stove and drove across town to the Piggly Wiggly. She pulled in next to Russell’s truck and walked across the lot toward the brightly lit windows, which were already decorated with Fourth of July bunting. She could see her tall, handsome husband in his white short-sleeve dress shirt and red tie, hair graying just a smidge at his temples, waist just as trim as the day she’d met him. He was standing by one of the checkouts, and chatting with Janelle Hopkins. Crystal slowed at the sight of his smile—that wide toothy grin she’d fallen in love with. Then a customer showed up and started slapping packages of ground chuck onto the conveyor belt, and Janelle reluctantly turned back to her register. Crystal was ten feet from the windows when she witnessed Russell reach out a hand and knead Janelle’s shoulder. Crystal stopped like she’d rammed into a wall. Her feet refused to move and her lungs wouldn’t breathe as she watched the cashier lean her head back and nuzzle her husband’s arm. It lasted two seconds tops, but it told Crystal everything she needed to know. As soon as Janelle’s customer stepped forward to pay, Russell let go of her shoulder and moved on.
Crystal sat in her car and wondered how it had all gone so wrong. She had followed the rules. She’d done everything that had been asked of her. She saved herself for marriage, despite the best efforts of her senior-year boyfriend. She’d worked like a demon to get good grades. She won a scholarship to Emory, but chose a good Christian college instead. There she met Russell and fell madly in love. They were married before God and raised three beautiful children. Two were now upstanding citizens and the third was trying his best. Aside from the month Crystal spent in the hospital after her youngest was born, she’d never missed a Sunday at church.
And now Russell was fucking a cashier at the Piggly Wiggly.
On her way home, Crystal stopped off at the package store, bought a nine-dollar bottle of rosé, and drank every last drop on an empty stomach. She cried herself to sleep and woke at ten the next morning, reeking of vomit and filled with shame. Having never suffered a hangover before, she took it as a sign of God’s displeasure. In the face of adversity, Crystal had crumbled. She promised the Lord it wouldn’t happen again and crawled out of bed to find her husband. All wasn’t lost. There had to be some way to make everything right. But Russell, she soon discovered, was not in the house. In fact, there was no sign that he’d come home the previous night. So she slipped on her shoes and set out to hunt down his cheating ass.
When Crystal reached Janelle Hopkins’s house, Russell’s truck wasn’t in the drive. She might have banged on the front door, but Janelle’s twin boys were wrastling in the front yard, their shrieks of pain alternating with peals of laughter. The Hopkins boys had been in her class two years earlier, and by the spring semester, they’d had Crystal questioning her calling.
“Look, look! It’s Mrs. Pig!” Daniel shouted, pushing his nose up into a snout. Cute, charismatic, and completely evil, Danny had the makings of a successful salesman or serial killer.
“Hey there, Mrs. Pig!” Brian waved with both hands. He’d either be president or in prison by age forty, Crystal was certain. Both boys followed their greeting with a chorus of snorts and oinks.
Her cover blown, Crystal waved back and picked up her pace, frantically searching for something to explain her presence on the Hopkins’s side of town. She found it just up the street at Lula Dean’s house.
She’d been meaning to stop by Lula’s lending library since she’d read about it in the paper. She was curious to see what kind of books the town bully thought they all should be reading. Crystal had no respect for anyone who’d ban books—much less burn them. Her daddy had been a man of God. He’d even handled a snake or two in his youth, but he’d never censored his children’s reading material. As far as he was concerned, if your faith was shaken by foul words or sex scenes, then you must not have had very much to begin with. Back in high school, Crystal had dedicated her spare hours to reading every Stephen King novel ever written. Those books were filled with f-bombs, blow jobs, and beheadings. She slept with the lights on for years, but none of it ever made her any less Christian.
Crystal browsed Lula’s silly library, trying to pretend that was what she’d walked across town to do. The selection seemed to have been thoroughly picked over. The few titles left on the shelves looked like castoffs from the local library. The Art of Crochet, Contract with America, Manhood,and A Caledonian Fling appeared to be the best Lula’s library had to offer. Then Crystal’s eyes landed on a book partially hidden from view in the upper left corner. She pulled it out and examined the cover, remembering the fuss that had accompanied its launch thirty years earlier, back when she was in college. All her friends had bought copies and read them cover to cover, but Crystal hadn’t bothered. She hadn’t felt any need. She’d already met Russell.
Now God had sent her The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right. Clearly, it was a message. She still had a lot to learn. And with her rival for Russell’s heart just a little ways down the street, she certainly didn’t want to leave the book where it might fall into Janelle Hopkins’s home-wrecking hands. So Crystal hurried away with The Rules tucked under her arm.
Once she was safely home, Crystal took a seat at her breakfast bar and cracked the book open in the middle to the strangest recipe she’d ever encountered. Confused, she flipped back a page to find a chapter heading: Make a Blazing Heart Burn Only for You. Right below the heading was a warning:
If you ignored the rest of the book and flipped straight to the love spells, please return to the beginning. Witchcraft is a spiritual practice and a worldview. It is not to be dabbled in lightly. If you are in a rush and won’t listen to reason, please read Chapter Three at the very least.
Crystal immediately stole a glance over her shoulder to make sure no one was watching. It sure felt like the warning had been meant just for her. Witchcraft? She sat back and let the word tumble around in her brain. She couldn’t recall any of her old college friends dabbling in the dark arts. At a Christian school like theirs, the thought alone could have led to expulsion. And hadn’t The Rules author been on Oprah back in the day? Sure, she’d cursed the world with Dr. Phil, but would Oprah really have welcomed a witch?
Always a stickler for doing things right, Crystal closed the book and started again at the beginning. According to the title page, it wasn’t The Rules after all. Lula must have mixed up the dust jackets. The book’s true title was All Women Are Witches: Find Your Power and Put It to Use. Well, that certainly explained Lula’s rise to prominence, Crystal thought. The self-righteous ones were always the biggest hypocrites.
Crystal turned the page and found the table of contents. Chapter One was titled No, You Won’t Be Summoning Satan. That came as quite a relief. Crystal was willing to do a lot to keep her husband, but she had no interest in selling her soul. Chapter Two was even more on the nose. Yes, Witches Can Believe in Jesus. Crystal stopped for another quick glance behind her. To be honest, it was getting a little creepy how the book kept reading her mind. The third and absolutely essential chapter, The Chapter You Must Read Before You Begin, started on page twenty-seven.
Before you can cast an effective spell, you must set your intention. In order to do so, you must know what you want and be able to articulate your desires. This may sound simple. Sometimes it is. More often it’s not.
Easy enough, Crystal thought. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t daydreamed about it for years. She wanted to go back in time. Preferably to June 3, 1996, the day she and Russell first met. She wanted to relive the first ten years of their relationship and fix all the mistakes she’d made along the way.
What you want must obey the laws of physics.
Well, that didn’t seem terribly magical. Fine, so no going back in time. Then let’s keep it simple, Crystal bargained with the universe. Just keep Janelle Hopkins and her giant boobs away from my husband.
Be sure to consider any unforeseen consequences.
The old Monkey’s Paw dilemma. Janelle gets run over by a brush hog (a fantasy Crystal had been gleefully entertaining), but Russell ends up grieving his lost love for the rest of his days. Whatever, Crystal decided, just make him fall back in love with me.
And ask yourself if you really want to interfere with another’s free will.
Dammit! If deciding what you wanted was this hard, no wonder people ended up summoning Satan. Crystal would just have to figure it out later. There was no time to lose. Russell may have been gone that morning, but he would be back at some point, and Crystal wanted to be ready. She returned to the love spell and jotted down a list of ingredients. Matches, an iron pot, fresh water from an unsullied spring, DNA of the beloved (preferably blood), honey, hot sauce, chocolate, the pollen of a wildflower, and a lock of her own hair.
Crystal loaded a tote with all the ingredients she had on hand—including a Band-Aid that Russell had left in the bathroom wastebasket—and hurried through her back door to find the others. For twenty-five years, she’d washed dishes at a kitchen window that looked out at the edge of a forest. Only a handful of times had she bothered to cross the moat of mulch and petunias that separated her tidy world from the one beyond. When they were little, her kids would disappear into the wilderness for hours at a time. They’d return for dinner filthy as pigs and happy as clams. She’d heard them talk about a spring somewhere out there—and the trail they’d forged to reach it. When Crystal looked, there it was. Her kids had been out of the house for a while now, but somehow the path remained clear. It was almost as if it had been waiting for her to find it. She set off into the forest, relieved to be taking matters into her own hands.
Once Crystal was well on her way, her mind returned to the question she hadn’t been able to answer. What is it you want? What she really wanted more than anything, Crystal realized to her surprise, was to scream. She’d never thought of herself as an angry person. In fact, she’d spent two decades teaching seven-year-olds how to cope with their feelings. But she hadn’t bothered to deal with her own. She’d been stuffing her rage down deep inside of her until every cell in her body was smoldering. It seemed safer to keep it there. The last thing she wanted to do was offend someone. But in the woods, there were no neighbors to frighten. No church ladies to scandalize. No children to hear—and later repeat—all the terrible things she desperately needed to say. Crystal stopped on the path and let it all out in a great gushing torrent of profanity and heartbreak and rage.
“Fuuuuuuuck! Fuck you, Russell, for breaking your vows. And fuck you, Janelle, and your fucking cleavage. Fuck me for believing in happily ever after. And fuck you, Mama, for not telling me how things really are. And fuck Lula Dean and her book banning posse! Fuck that fucking Nazi! Fuck Mr. Pig! Fuck my kids for not calling every week after I worked my ass off to raise them! Fuck all you fucking fuckity fuckers!!!”
The moment it was all out of her, the wind swept it away. The trees whispered their reassurances, their voices the soothing sound of rustling leaves. A hawk screeched its support and a dove cooed in sympathy. The smell of rich earth and green chlorophyll surrounded and sedated her. The dappled sun danced on the leaves. Emptied of her rage and resentment, Crystal kept going, feeling lighter than she had in years.
The path disappeared at points and reappeared later. She couldn’t tell how far she’d traveled and it never occurred to her to check the GPS on her phone. The sun was directly overhead when she found the spring—its crystal-clear waters collected inside a bowl it had carved into a boulder. She stood in shock at the edge of the water. A magical fairy-tale oasis had been out here all along and she’d never even suspected. What do you want? The question popped back into her head, and this time she had a different answer. She wanted a fucking swim. Without a second thought, Crystal stripped out of her clothing and jumped in buck naked. How many years had it been since she had gone swimming? How many hours had she wasted worrying about stretch marks and cellulite? The only thing that mattered now was that the water was cold and the sun hot and damn, her boobs felt amazing now that they were out of that bra.
When she emerged, she lay naked on the boulder until the sun dried her off. She thought, perhaps, she should get to work on the spell. But she didn’t want to. She ate the chocolate bar and opened the book she’d brought.
There is no need to make magic. There is magic all around us. We need only to recognize it and make use of what is already there.
Crystal’s old self would have rolled her eyes. Now she could see it. The seeds with their perfectly formed wings twirling down from above. The oak sapling rising in the last spot of sunlight. A tree trunk, which had stood for hundreds of years, carved and carbonized by a bolt of lightning. The pollen that sprinkled the boulder like fairy dust. Every patch of ground was a world of its own. Every life-form inside it was thriving, dying, or transforming. And all these years, she’d been trying so hard to keep things the same.
What do you want?The sun was heading west, and she still couldn’t answer the question. She found it much easier to list all the things she didn’t want. Arguments seemed pointless. Accusations the same. But going back to the way things had been simply wasn’t an option. She realized there were no rules for her to follow now, and that was totally fine. Crystal no longer believed in them anyway. And if she ever saw another plate of chicken parmesan, she planned to fling the fucking thing at the nearest wall.
The ping of a text message brought her back to the world. She rooted through her discarded clothing until she found the phone. Russell was announcing he’d be home for dinner. The clock informed Crystal it was almost four-thirty. She needed to get going if she planned to have dinner on the table by six. Crystal picked up a nearby rock and smashed the phone. That was what she wanted to do. She had no desire to go back yet.
She lay by the edge of the pool and watched the sun set and the moon rise. The light made her flesh appear to glow. She slept and woke in the morning to the sound of birds chattering in the trees all around her. When she opened her eyes, she knew her marriage was over—that it had been for years. It surprised her to realize she had no desire to blame Russell. He’d been an excellent husband and father. Perhaps things hadn’t ended as neatly as Crystal would have liked. And Russell could do a lot better than Janelle freaking Hopkins. But Crystal cherished the memory of their first decade together, and she did not want to resent the man who had made her so happy—even if he no longer could.
At dusk a hunting dog bounded out from between the trees and practically pounced on her. Crystal was wearing a shirt at that point, but little else. A camo-clad man in his mid-twenties soon emerged. A dirty blond beard covered most of his face. The little that was left was obscured by a baseball cap or concealed behind sunglasses. He held a rifle to his chest, which was dressed in a hunting vest with orange safety patches.
When the man reached the clearing, he froze, as though he’d stumbled upon an exotic beast—and he was trying to determine whether to shoot it or run.
“You Crystal Moore?” He hadn’t let down his guard. He still had the rifle in a ready-carry hold, as though he might have to use it.
“Yes,” she told him. She kept her voice neutral—her answer merely a statement of fact. She was alone in the woods with a man holding a gun. His dog was stationed three feet away from her, awaiting its owner’s command. She kept her eyes on the man, sensing what might happen if she dared look away.
Finally, he pulled a walkie-talkie out of a holster and held it up to his mouth. “Got ’er.” Then he let it drop. “You get lost out here? Your husband’s got the whole county looking for you.”
If he was looking for her, why bring a gun? “I’m not lost,” Crystal said. “I just needed some time to myself.”
She saw the man’s head turn toward the book she’d been reading. She’d left the dust jacket back at the house, and the gold-embossed title on the cover shone in the sun. When the man returned his attention to her, she could sense his hatred and fear. There was no telling what he might have done if he hadn’t already radioed the search party.
“You know what the Bible says about witches, don’t you?”
Crystal smiled. He wanted to scare her back into submission. That’s how men like him kept women in their place.
Who the fuck cares what he thinks? Crystal asked herself. What do you want? A hot bath and a sandwich, she thought. “I haven’t eaten in ages. Would you mind calling Russell and asking him to make me a PBJ?”
“You want your husband to make you a sandwich?” the man sneered.
“He won’t mind,” Crystal said. “He’s a better man than most.”
Russell was in the backyard, waiting to greet her with a PBJ when she and the hunter emerged from the woods.
“She’s fine. But if I were you, I’d keep a better eye on her in the future,” the man told Russell. He handed her husband the book, as though it could explain the whole episode.
“If he were you, every woman he met would run away screaming,” Crystal said with a mouth full of peanut butter.
The hunter took a step in her direction and Russell rushed to smooth things over.
“My wife gets cranky when she’s hungry,” he explained, putting a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “We’re both real grateful for all your help, Logan.” Once the hunter moved on, Russell glanced down at the book, then made sure no one else was in earshot. “Everyone’s going to say you’re a witch now,” he whispered, sounding relieved and amused.
“I don’t care what anyone says,” Crystal told him.
“Were you really out in the woods casting spells?”
“I considered it, but then I realized I don’t need a spell to get what I want.”
“And what’s that?” Russell asked.
“I just want us both to be happy now,” she said. “Our marriage was a complete success.”