A Spoonful of Magic

by Irene Radford

  “Be nice,” I mouthed at him.

  He retreated to the dining room and stood at the head of the table where he could see the progress of each of the children. A protective patriarch of the old school.

  BJ flicked his bell twice more. Nervous habit? Or a signal.

  “Come back to my office,” I said to John, uncomfortable with the way the evening was turning out, and led the way past the dining room and through the swinging door, which I closed behind us. In the kitchen, I took the roses from him and laid them on the counter. “I’ll deal with these later.”

  John hesitated within the frame of the glass French doors. “Your house smells of cinnamon,” he said casually.

  “I made a batch of snicker doodles.” I hit print and watched the paper unfurl from the machine. “Would you like one?”

  He took the sheet of paper from my hand. “I didn’t know G would be here.”

  “He often comes over to supervise homework. The kids should be finished soon and clamoring for food. I swear Jason will eat an entire dozen cookies if I turn my back for a moment.” When in doubt, talk about the children.

  “An active teenage boy in a growth spurt. His job is to eat his way through the grocery store.”

  We laughed. But it was brittle and false. Uncomfortable.

  How would I respond to John if G weren’t in the next room?

  I remembered the sloppy, smootchy kiss he’d pushed through his phone. Probably the same way.

  If John’s talent was reading minds, he certainly picked up something from me and returned to neutral business. “I’ll run off a hundred of these and have my assistants plaster the town with them. A fund-raiser for our ballet company and the news that Magical Brews will be selling baked goods should guarantee a good turnout. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to run. I need to do the paperwork to put a bid on a house first thing in the morning. For a nice young couple. It’s their first purchase, and they require a lot of handholding.” His rambling dribbled down to nothing. Was it his manner or his words that sounded false?

  “Okay. But take some cookies.”

  “I’ll get a cinnamon bun tomorrow at the coffee shop.”

  And he was gone, practically running out the front door, which G slammed shut as soon as he’d passed through.

  BJ’s bell rang three times.

  “I thought he was your friend.” I admonished my ex. “Even if you don’t trust anyone, why not him?”

  G retreated to the dining room and guided Shara through the shifting borders of a small Asian country.

  Alakazam!

  Magic Slam

  I sang as I danced around the shop kitchen, tapping every surface with my wooden spoon, re-creating the catchy rap rhythm.

  “Boo!” G whispered in my ear.

  Startled, I gasped and spun around, nearly clonking him on the head with my spoon.

  He grabbed my wrist, lightly, before I connected.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, still breathless from my celebration of baking and knowing I got all the treats for the bake sale right.

  “I might ask you the same.” His gaze wandered around the kitchen while he still held my wrist.

  “I’m waiting for the last batch of cupcakes to cool enough to apply frosting, then I’m going home. Why are you here?”

  “Checking on you. It’s four in the morning.”

  “What?” I shifted my gaze from his eyes to the surrounds. “Um?”

  “Um is right.”

  All around us flour and sugar and stuff hung suspended in the air, sparkling with my joy.

  “It looks like magic,” I whispered in awe.

  And all around me, in the cooler, on the counters, everywhere I looked were masses and masses of baked goods. Instead of ten dozen cupcakes, I had baked and frosted ten times that many. Gluten-free bar cookies, and vegan sheet cakes as well. Enough to feed my customers for a week, or service the bake sale single-handedly.

  “Because it is magic, love.” He kissed my nose and released my hand. “I’ve been waiting for this to happen since the day I met you.” He reached to encircle my waist and draw me close. “Hopeful and scared at the same time.”

  Because D’Accore had magic and she’d scared him badly when he was young, probably only in his mid-twenties when he fell in love with her. I knew that without him having to tell me. I knew that from the way he spoke about her the other night. She scared him to the bones and beyond.

  I ducked away from him. “What is that supposed to mean?” I wandered around, mouth agape at the ingredients that looked like stars glinting against a dark sky. Only the room was bright and the overhead lights didn’t dim or wash out the glow.

  “If you wave your spoon in a big circle once clockwise, you can gather it all together. Then close your fist as if capturing the whole and spin yourself and the spoon counterclockwise. You’ll break the spell but not have a huge mess to clean up,” he said with a chuckle.

  I did so. Strangely enough, the suspended flour and sugar vanished from the air and piled in the prep sink with its garbage disposal. Easy to wash down the drain without extra sweeping.

  Then I rounded on him. “What do you mean, you’ve been waiting for this to happen?” I screamed at him, loud enough to wake Gayla two floors above us.

  “I sensed latent magic deep within you that first day in the coffee shop when you knew precisely what I wanted to drink before I knew myself.”

  “But . . . but I’m an adult. Magic manifests in adolescence.”

  “Most of the time. But occasionally if the talent is buried deep or repressed—as your parents would have done to you after they locked your beloved grandmother in an insane asylum—it can blossom later. That usually needs exposure to others working magic on a regular basis. Living with me, in my house for fourteen years . . . it had to happen sooner or later. Given the strength of your baking magic, and your weather witching, I’m surprised it took this long.” He rocked back on his heels, hands in his pockets, cocky and self-assured. But I’d seen his hands tremble in fear before he stuffed them in his pocket to hide them.

  D’Accore had really done a number on him. No wonder he’d used me rather than loving me. He was afraid to love a woman with magical talent.

  But he trusted me to raise his children.

  “You? You did this to me!”

  He nodded. “Afraid so.”

  “You infected me with this disease! You made me one of you, like D’Accore?”

  “Not like her. Never like her.” All the color drained from his face. Then he gulped and turned his fabulous blue gaze on me, directly and without a trace of manipulation or lies, or . . . or fear. “You would never hurt anyone for your own gain. That’s why I’ve fallen in love with you. I only lusted after my ex.”

  “You think you’ve fallen in love now. What about when we first met? You made me think it was love at first sight.”

  “Not at first sight. But over the years . . .”

  “You used me.” The old fear grabbed hold of my heart and wouldn’t let go. “You manipulated me with magic to make me think I was in love. But all you really wanted, what you needed, was a babysitter so you could travel the world when you got the big promotion from deputy to Sheriff.”

  “Not entirely.” He started backing toward the door while I took a fiercer grip on my spoon.

  “You are as big a slimeball as when I thought you slept with every bimbo in town!”

  I whacked him across the temple. Once, twice, thrice.

  In another brightly colored sparkle of sugar and spice, he shrank into a black goat and bleated long and loud, tongue hanging out in a wail of bewilderment.

  But just like the animal he truly was, he recovered quickly and trotted over to the counter where he pulled a tray of cooling cupcakes to the floor and began eating them.

  Twenty-T
hree

  “GAYLA!” I wailed into my phone.

  “Wa . . . What, Sweet Pea?” she replied sleepily. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Yes, and I need your help. Now.”

  “Where?”

  “In the shop, where else?” G had wandered toward the cooler and found more interesting things to eat. I dashed to bump him in a different direction, and almost lost the phone to his mobile mouth. My hip in his face discouraged him from finding fodder in the cooler. He returned to the crumbling mess on the floor.

  “Where the hell did that beast come from?” Gayla screamed. She stood framed in the doorway to the interior stair, still in her oversized T-shirt that hung to her knees and sagged across her shoulders. Her straight black hair stuck out at odd angles, and her eyes were rimmed with red where she’d rubbed the sleep out of them.

  “Gayla, this is G.”

  “Huh?”

  “We had a fight. I bopped him upside the head with my spoon which apparently is my magic wand, and he turned into what he truly is: an old goat with an insatiable appetite,” I babbled. “I’m a real live witch, and he’s a master wizard, and all three of our kids have come up with magical talents.” I stumbled over the inadvertent pun of young goats. “And all I did was bop him upside the head.” Tears burned behind my eyes and threatened to flood. Given what had happened, I wondered if once I started crying I’d be able to stop before I flooded the kitchen.

  “That’s not all you bopped upside the head.” She wandered around the perimeter of the room, goggling at the racks and racks and racks of cupcakes. “No wonder I dreamed of that stupid rap magic song all night long.”

  “Um. That was me. In some kind of trance until G woke me out of it.”

  “Then you had the fight. Because he woke you, or was it something else?”

  “Everything else.” This time I sobbed. Gayla produced a paper napkin to mop up my tears before I sank into the oblivion of hysterics.

  “Well, it’s about time you admitted you’re a witch. Everyone in town knows that what you do in the kitchen is genuine magic. More than just talent. Frankly, I’m jealous. I always wanted to be a witch, but I guess you have to be born with it, not learn it in middle age.”

  I laughed through my tears. Leave it to Gayla to turn my problems upside down, inside out, and backward so that they were really funny, not tragic.

  “Now what do we do with him?” She eyed G from every angle, head tilting back and forth, hands on hips. “You know, he does have that certain look about him that could be G. But those bluer-than-blue eyes can only be G.”

  “You aren’t questioning my explanation? You believe all this magic stuff?”

  “Of course, I do, Sweet Pea. We live in Eugene. Every other person you meet on the street claims to be a psychic or a witch or descended from faeries, or something weird. What better place for real magicians to hide than in plain sight among the other weirdos? Now can you turn the old boy back?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know that I want to.” Except there was his psycho ex wandering around lighting fires and probably threatening my children. I needed G whole and hale to counter her.

  “Well, he can’t hang around this kitchen. We’d have a hell of a time explaining him to the health inspector.”

  “That’s for sure. I guess I need to take him home. There’s a ton of blackberries along the fence. Goats like blackberries. Don’t they?”

  “I don’t know. But according to the newscasts, farmers are renting out goats to clear property overgrown with blackberries. Let me throw some clothes on, and I’ll help you load him into the van. Then he’s your problem. I’ll set about cleaning the entire place with bleach.”

  G let loose a mournful bleat that smelled of spun sugar and rotten milk.

  Twenty minutes later, we’d finally shoved G’s butt into the back of the van. He protested mournfully that we were abusing him, making him go where he didn’t want to go. The only thing he could find to eat was an old gym sock of Belle’s. I grabbed it away from him. He turned his mouth and his attention to the ribbing along the upholstery seam that separated the back of the driver’s seat from the front.

  I climbed in and started the engine. Then I batted his nose away. “Five minutes, G. Five minutes and you can work on the backyard. Much better for your tummy.”

  “Bleahhhhch.”

  I backed out of the alley while G nibbled at my hair. Over by the dumpster, Raphe threw back his head and laughed. “No cheese rolls or cinnamon buns for you, buddy,” I called to him as we passed his favored nook.

  G shifted from the loose ends of my ponytail to my ear, sticking his long prehensile tongue deep into that orifice. “I hope you like earwax.”

  He kept up his attentions, now to my cheek and neck below my ear. The one place G knew drove me wild.

  “Stop that!” I slapped his muzzle and pulled his beard down and away from me. “You aren’t my husband anymore, in any form. If you keep it up, buddy, I’ll turn you into a louse.”

  Some glimmer of human intelligence must have lingered in his single-minded brain. He closed his bluer-than-blue eyes, fluttered his extra-long lashes, and moaned as if grieving over my grave.

  “I’m not dead yet. But our marriage is,” I informed him as we climbed the hill toward the house. Two more blocks and I turned into the long driveway, taking it all the way to the back of the house. I stopped in front of the garage beside G’s big sedan. The right-side passenger door of my van should open next to the gate in the weathered picket fence. If only I could manage him for six steps. . . .

  The lights were on in the kitchen. Not yet five o’clock.

  Oh, yeah, we had to be at the Saturday Market by six to set up and open by seven. And Belle had an outdoor chess match that started at eight. This was the last Saturday the chess club could count on good weather in the park where six small square tables invited pickup games among strangers. Club participants welcomed the challenge of playing older, more experienced members of the community. Not all of those adults could beat the club. Few could manage a stalemate with Belle, unless she got hit by a super bad attack of the clumsies and knocked all the pieces off the board. It had happened before.

  I jumped out of the van and slammed the door quickly, before G could escape. Then I yelled for Jason to come help.

  He opened the kitchen door, sleepily rubbing at his eyes, barefoot and shirtless. “Can’t it wait?” he mumbled.

  “I need your help now!”

  He must have heard the panic in my voice for he bounced lightly down the three steps, barely wincing at the chill that assaulted his feet and chest.

  When he was through the gate and right beside me, I finally slid back the passenger door. G didn’t hesitate to leap free of his prison. Fortunately, Jason was quicker with his dance-honed reflexes.

  “What the hell?” Jason spluttered, instinctively grabbing G by the nape and the beard.

  I pushed them both into the backyard, making certain the gate was closed and latched behind them. By this time the girls had appeared in the doorway. They both wore jeans and T-shirts, but hadn’t yet thought to don sweaters or shoes.

  “Shara, guard the gate so he doesn’t get out. Use your powers to secure the latch rather than open anything.”

  “Yeah, sure.” She took up her place and folded her arms across her chest. She mumbled something, fluttered her fingers, and jerked her head downward once. We’d seen that movement performed by a genie on some TV show.

  “What’s going on, Mom?” Belle asked.

  I noted that she wore her hair sticks. Hopefully, her magic worked on animals as well as people.

  “Lead him over to the blackberries and let him graze while I think.”

  “Mom, why did you bring a goat home on a day when we have to be everywhere in a hurry?” Jason asked. Then he stared into the eyes of the beast.


  G blinked at Jason, then followed Belle willingly.

  “Oh, my God! Is that Dad?” Jason gasped, leaving his jaw hanging open.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “What happened, Mom?” Belle abandoned the goat and came to stand beside me. She wrapped her arm around my shoulders. She stood almost as tall as me. When had that happened?

  Shara came up on the other side and grabbed my waist to help hold me up. She at least was no taller than I remembered. Still my baby, but acting more like she needed to babysit me.

  “He came to check on me. There’s four or five van loads of baked goods at the shop that we need to transport to the market.” I trailed off, not sure how to continue.

  “What happened?” Jason pressed me.

  All three children focused on me.

  “We had a fight. I hit him upside the head with my spoon.” I fished for the tool in my back pocket and showed it to them.

  “Is that your wand?” Belle asked quietly. She peered at the ordinary cooking implement as if it were an alien artifact.

  “I . . . I think so.”

  “Your talent finally manifested,” Shara said, sounding not at all surprised.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “So what happened when you knocked him silly?” Jason continued to urge the story from me.

  “He became that in a blaze of sparkling spun sugar.”

  Silence. We all turned to watch G strip the blackberry vines from the fence. Only he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere.

  Shara ran around to the back of the greenhouse, to the tiny trapdoor where excess water drained into the creek on the other side of the fence. I followed her, dreading that I would find she had widened the opening for her own secret explorations.

  Yep. She had. And G was stuck there, wiggling his butt and pawing at the ground with his back hooves while he happily ripped delicate herbs from their trays. How had they gotten so close to the vent? They should be atop one of the long tables.

  I glared at Shara.

  She looked back at me blinking innocently. “We will talk later,” I promised her.