“What happened?”
“They don’t know.” May looked on the verge of tears. “Her tummy got real upset a few days ago and she can’t stop throwing up. She’s also real weak and in a lot of pain.”
To Liza, it sounded like the stomach flu or a virus. If it was enough to put Gwen in the hospital, however, then it had to be bad.
“How can I help?” she asked, getting right to the point.
“You have any healing stuff in here I could take to her? Mama don’t trust the doctors. My grandma had a colonoscopy last year and it killed her.”
Well, not really, Liza smiled to herself. May’s grandmother did have a colonoscopy over the summer but she’d died six weeks later of complications from pneumonia. She was eighty-six.
Still, Liza wasn’t going to get into that. Instead, she walked over to her wall of herbal remedies and scanned the shelves. “I don’t really want to contraindicate anything the doctors might be giving her so you make sure you show any of this to her attending physicians, okay?”
“Yeah, okay,” May nodded.
“I mean it,” Liza warned her.
“I promise.”
After ensuring the things that she handed over could be helpful without interacting with anything else they might have her on in the hospital, Liza filled a bag for May. “There are things in here for pain relief on the stomach. It goes in the microwave for thirty seconds. It will help relieve tummy discomfort and it smells good. There’s something in here to help her sleep. It’s aromatherapy. It won’t counteract any pain medication or anti-nausea stuff they might be giving her. It will just help soothe her. There are a few other things in here as well. Some lotions for her legs for restless legs and cramps. Sometimes those happen when you get dehydrated.”
“Thank you.” The gratefulness on May’s face just about broke Liza’s heart. “How much do I owe you?”
Liza was surprised. “Nothing,” she replied. “Gwen’s a friend. No charge.”
“Are you sure?”
“You tell her just to feel better and maybe one day when she’s back on her feet she can make me some pancakes,” Liza told her.
“I will,” May sniffed.
Liza watched as the young woman’s eyes filled with water. “Hey, it’s okay. She’ll be alright.”
“I know, I know. But it’s scary.”
“I know,” Liza agreed, thinking of her own grandparents’ declining health and how frightening that had been to watch. “I’ll say a little something special for her, too.”
After she left, Mare stepped out of the treatment room where she’d been folding fitted sheets. Mare was one of the few people Liza Jane knew who could actually fold them. She, herself, always ended up balling them up into a shapeless lump.
“You’re a nicer person than me,” Mare grinned. “I’d still have sold them. At a discount, of course.”
Liza laughed. “I like to help where I can.”
“That was Gwen’s daughter, right? From the restaurant?”
“Yep.”
Mare bit her lip and gazed at Liza thoughtfully. “Huh. Wasn’t Gwen the one your sister was rude to not too long ago? The one she kind of snapped at.”
“Yeah,” Liza said, remembering the uncomfortable scene vividly. “It was.”
“Huh,” Mare replied. She didn’t say anything, but she looked troubled.
Liza turned and gazed at herself in the mirror again. Damn Pinterest, she thought. With a few waves of her hand her hair lifted on its own and tied itself into a perfect knot, Instagram worthy. What was the point in having gifts if you couldn’t use them to make yourself look better?
* * *
“SO WHAT IS GOING over there?” Bryar asked, pointing at a vacant lot, overgrown with weeds. Several fast food cartons littered the grassy area, including a burrito wrapper from Taco Bell. (Interesting, since there wasn’t a Taco Bell within an hour radius of Kudzu Valley. Someone must have really wanted a run for the border.)
“The kids’ bouncy things,” Liza replied, looking down at the crude map they’d drawn.
“Ew. In that garbage?” Bryar asked, wrinkling her nose.
“Well, we’ll clean it up,” Liza said. “Okay, let’s move on down the street a bit. I want to see the food area.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Bryar protested as she grabbed onto Liza’s shoulder and pulled her back. “What do you mean, exactly, by ‘we’? You don’t mean ‘we’ as in me and you, right?”
“It’s a garbage bag, Bryar Rose, not a rattlesnake.”
“I’d rather touch a rattler,” Bryar muttered, looking down at her gel tips.
“Relax. There’s a clean-up committee.”
The two women walked along the quiet street, keeping their thoughts to themselves. The sun was bright and high in the sky. Rain had fallen every day for the past week. It was the first sunny day they’d seen in awhile. Liza Jane was even wearing short sleeves. It almost felt like spring.
“Kind of dead, isn’t it?” Bryar remarked after a few minutes of silence.
“Well, our downtown is kind of lacking in business,” Liza agreed.
And it was true; there wasn’t much to be said of their downtown area. Her own business took up one of the old buildings. A café, coffee shop, and pizza place were scattered amongst a few secondhand stores. And then there were the two lawyers’ offices.
That was it.
The rest of the buildings were empty, their vacant storefronts sad looking with “For Sale” signs gathering dust in their windows. Since they’d built the new bypass, which didn’t really get anyone anywhere faster, there was no need to drive through downtown anymore. People didn’t tend to come there unless they needed to renew their license, pay taxes, or visit someone in jail each Saturday morning.
Still, even by Kudzu Valley’s standards, it was quiet.
“It is a little unsettling,” Liza said at last.
“Unsettling my butt,” Bryar snipped. “It’s weird.”
Liza paused and looked around. There wasn’t a single car as far as she could see. Even the parking spots in front of the court house were empty. She’d had three appointments that afternoon and they’d all been canceled. It was Mare’s day off and Liza had closed up shop early.
“Yeah, okay, maybe.”
Bryar rolled her eyes.
“Anyway,” Liza began, resuming their stroll up Broadway. “So that’s where all the food vendors will be going.”
They paused before the empty parking lot between the coffee shop and Historical Society’s little museum.
“What kind of food we got going?”
Liza flipped through her notebook until she found her list. “We’ve got barbecue, burgers, pizza, pork chop on a stick, Polish and Italian sausages, and the fried booth.”
“Fried booth?”
“Oreos, Twinkies, pickles, and funnel cakes.”
“Fried?” Bryar asked, eyes wide.
“Deep fried,” Liza Jane confirmed.
“Damn.”
“So I think we’ve got everyone’s locations settled. We just need to work on making a map with their spots marked and start getting our goodie bags together,” Liza said as they walked back to her truck.
“Sounds good to me,” Bryar said.
When they reached the vehicle, Liza began fishing around in her backpack for the keys.
“Hey,” Bryar said suddenly. “Can I drive?”
“This?” Liza asked in surprise.
“Yeah. I’ve never driven a truck before.”
Liza hesitated, not sure what to say. Colt told her that a truck was like a baby. He sure treated his like one. He’d even named it. She’d thought that was crazy at first, but now that she had her own she got it. It wasn’t just a vehicle–the truck did stuff. It hauled crap she needed to get places, it took gravel and snow like a dream, and she enjoyed towering over the little compact cars she used to drive.
“Well, okay,” she said at last, slowly handing her keys over to her sister. “
Just…be careful, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bryar muttered.
Liza hopped up into the passenger side and pulled her seatbelt on with trepidation. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust her sister; it was just that she didn’t have a lot of confidence in her driving abilities. This was the same person, after all, who regularly bragged about reaping speeding tickets in all the lower forty-eight states.
Bryar first fiddled with the radio station, changing the country crooner to classic rock. When she was satisfied with Boston, she turned up the volume and grinned.
“That’s a little loud,” Liza yelled over the thumping bass.
“So?” Bryar hollered back. “Nobody’s downtown anyway. Who’s gonna care!?”
She had no sooner put the truck in reverse when Liza found herself flying forward from the waist. If her seatbelt hadn’t caught her, she’d have smashed her forehead into the dashboard. Beside her, Bryar let out a shrill yelp. The Ale-8 Liza had carefully balanced in the center console flew out from its cup holder and rolled to the floor, sending lukewarm liquid sloshing onto Liza’s sandaled feet. Bryar slammed on the brakes, jerking Liza forward again. She steadied herself with her hands and looked wildly around her.
“What the–“
But she’d already heard the sickening grind of metal on metal. She didn’t have to look behind her to know they’d backed into something big.
“Oh,” Bryar groaned. “Crap.”
* * *
“SHE WAS PRETTY NICE about it,” Bryar said helpfully as they bounced along the gravel drive in the truck.
Liza resisted the urge to scowl.
Rather than talk, and risk an argument, she turned the radio up just a little louder. Little Texas’ “God Bless Texas” rang through the cab.
“And we got it fixed for her, right?” Bryar shouted, not deterred by the increasing volume.
Yes, they had been able to fix both of their vehicles. But it had taken a lot out of both women. Liza had never attempted to bend metal before and it was draining. Even her arms ached, and she hadn’t used them. Together, however, they’d managed to get out the dents. Liza’s truck had chipped paint but it would live. Exhausted from the mental work it had taken on her part and frustrated by the extra stress it had thrown into the mix, Liza didn’t feel much like talking.
“She said thank you,” Bryar grumbled.
Yes, Pepper Parker had said “thank you” when the women were finished putting her little Ford Focus back together. But the blond, dour soccer mom had not looked happy about it, in spite of what Bryar was insisting. She’d also turned a suspicious nose up at the magic Bryar and Liza had worked around the vehicles. The only reason she’d turned a blind eye to it was because it would’ve taken a garage longer and didn’t want the hassle of filing an insurance claim.
Liza herself was glad they didn’t have to file an insurance claim. She couldn’t afford higher premiums. If the damage had been anything more than a few scratches and dings, however, they wouldn’t have been able to manage it. Both women had limited knowledge of vehicles. Their particular brand of magic was only useful if it was used on skills they already possessed. Bryar still lamented over the loss of full-service gas stations and didn’t even know how to check her oil.
When Reba came on, singing about Fancy and dolling herself up in a red dress and heels, Bryar surprised Liza Jane by singing along. Her voice was pure and sweet, not at all what Liza would have imagined. As she listened to her sister joyously match the red-headed legend note for note, her sour mood began melting.
“I didn’t know you could sing like that,” she said once they’d pulled up in front of the house. “I haven’t heard you sing since you were a kid.”
“I like to sing,” Bryar shrugged. “It’s why I got into the business in the first place.”
Liza felt ashamed that she didn’t know that. She knew Bryar had gone to college and majored in Music Business (emphasis on Recording Engineering and Production) but she didn’t know that singing was her first love. How much was there to her sister that she didn’t know?
“I didn’t know you were a Reba fan either,” Liza said.
Bryar paused on the porch and cocked her head to the side. “I like all music, as long as it’s good. I don’t discriminate. Besides, don’t you remember that song? We used to sing it as kids, act it out.”
Liza smiled a little. She did have a vague memory of being nine years old and dancing around the bedroom with her sister, using hairbrushes as microphones and watching themselves perform in the mirror over their dresser. But that felt like a very long time ago.
“We used to have fun when we were kids,” Bryar said. Liza was startled to hear a touch of sadness in her voice. Despite her often volatile moods and temper, Bryar Rose was not one given to despondency.
“We did,” Liza agreed, but she found herself quickly wracking her brain, attempting to bring up more memories. There just didn’t seem to be that many. What was that about?
“Sometimes it felt like you were all I had,” Bryar said. “Sometimes I still feel that way.”
It struck Liza, at that point, that her sister’s phone had been strikingly quiet in the time she’d been in Kudzu Valley, despite the fact that she kept it glued to her body. She’d made plenty of phone calls; very few had come to her. Bryar Rose was a successful music producer. She had produced albums for some of the biggest names in the business. Not only that, she was also insanely popular outside of the studio. And why not? She was a gorgeous, lithe blond with an attitude. Even Hollywood loved her and occasionally asked her to make cameos in films about music. Her face regularly adorned the interior of magazines like People and Us Weekly. She got invited to the Playboy Mansion for drinks in the grotto, for goodness’ sake.
Where were her friends? Where was everyone?
Bryar opened the screen door and started to let herself in. Then she hesitated. “Sometimes,” she giggled a little, looking more like herself, “when I look at you I still see that little redheaded Pippi Longstocking girl with the braids and all those freckles across your face. You hated those.”
Liza grimaced. Yes, she had. And the spell she’d done to get rid of them had only given her a poison-ivy like rash.
“And I think about how I told you that Oscar the Grouch lived in the dumpster in the neighborhood. You were, like, seven or something and you’d go talk to it and tell it your problems. I’d hide behind it and laugh and laugh. But I still thought it was cute. I’d have beat someone’s ass if they’d laughed.”
Bryar turned and went on inside then, leaving the screen door to flap behind her.
Liza Jane turned and studied the mountains that enveloped the farm. She had a fondness for Colt’s sisters. She thought she might be falling in love with the country cowboy who was nothing but kind and good to her. She was comforted by the mountains and town that was starting to embrace her.
But nothing, nothing, took the place of someone who had known her as a child. The older she got, the more important that was becoming to her–just to have someone who remembered.
Chapter Ten
Normally, Liza would meet Colt for lunch somewhere in town but the air conditioner wasn’t working at The Healings Hands and she was burning up. She’d sweated through her long-sleeved shirt and cardigan and needed to go home and change.
“Nice to have you back,” she said, patting her truck on the steering wheel. Bryar had been driving her truck. A lot. It seemed like at least once a day Bryar was grabbing the keys and driving into the next county, sometimes for nothing other than cheese.
“Why don’t you take your car?” Liza had asked on more than one occasion.
“I don’t like putting the miles on it with these country roads,” she’d shrugged. “The curves and stuff are hard on my transmission.”
“So you’re destroying mine?” Liza had asked, not joking.
“It’s a used truck. It will be fine!”
At least Bryar was courteous enough to fill it
up after she’d driven it.
When Liza got home she found the front door locked. She didn’t have her house key with her. Indeed, she very rarely locked her door at all. Only at night when she was sleeping.
Liza had to pound on the door a good five minutes before Bryar opened it and let her in. Bryar looked like she had just rolled out of bed. Her eyeliner and mascara were smudged under her eyes. Her complexion, without her foundation and blush, was splotchy and pale. Her hair was sticking up from her head in a tangled mess. Her eyes were heavy-lidded as she waved Liza in and yawned big enough that Liza could smell stale wine on her breath.
“Did you just get up?” Liza asked. It was nearly 1:00 pm.
“Sort of,” Bryar yawned again. Sleepy or not, she still managed to jump in front of Liza and cut her off as she attempted to sit on the sofa. Bryar landed with a “thud” and stretched out, taking up the whole thing. Sighing, Liza turned to the recliner.
“Did you go to bed late or something?”
Bryar closed her eyes and snuggled into a pillow. “I was playing some bubble game on the computer,” she said.
Liza shook her head. Her sister should have been trying to make contact with her business associates, trying to get back in the good graces of people and do some damage control–not play around on Facebook and sleep all day. Liza certainly understood the desire and even necessity of relaxing and checking out for awhile but there had to come a point when one got their act together and started moving forward.
For Bryar, that time was now.
“Oh, yeah, and I got woken up the first time by some woman wanting to use your bathroom,” Bryar said, yawning again.
“Jessie?” Liza asked.
Bryar opened one eye and gazed at her sister. “You know her?”
“Yeah, my neighbor.”
“She didn’t even knock, just came right on in and started to go to the bathroom. I chased her out, of course.”
Broommates: Two Witches are Better Than One! (Kentucky Witches Book 2) Page 8
