Thistle Down

by Irene Radford

  “Go wash your hands, girls, and I’ll be with you in a minute,” Joe said as he entered the museum. He nodded to Dusty, looking weary and worried. He headed straight for his office, a tiny cubicle off the pantry that served as curator’s office and document storage. He barely had room for an antique writing desk and straight chair. Fortunately, the room borrowed air-conditioning from the adjacent lounge.

  Last year they’d considered giving him an office in the attic rooms of the gift shop—another historic house, but newer and smaller than the museum. Joe had lasted less than a week before he moved back. He didn’t like being away from the core of the exhibits. And the gift shop didn’t have air-conditioning. Only a couple of fans in the front parlor.

  “You look tired, Joe,” Dusty said, following him in and closing the door behind her. Deep lines radiated from his eyes. His naturally pale skin had an almost gray tinge beneath the high color on his cheeks from the heat.

  “That’s only half of it,” he muttered, flopping into his chair and letting his legs sprawl. He ran his hands through his thinning brown hair. Then he loosened his tie with a frustrated yank. He wore a suit today, his good navy one, instead of his usual khakis and polo shirt.

  “What’s wrong? Trouble with our grant from the state?”

  “I wish it were that trivial.” He choked out a laugh.

  Dusty held her breath. Keeping the museum in good repair had occupied most of Joe’s life since . . . since Dusty couldn’t remember how long ago. He’d befriended her during her junior year in high school when she started hanging around asking too many questions about history and how the house was built and who built it. Soon after that, he’d given her a job cataloging the books and documents the Historical Society kept in storage without knowing what was there. By the time she’d finished her BA, she was running the place behind the scenes and he was her best friend.

  “Don’t look so scared, Dusty. The grant’s in good shape, though the state’s going to ask for a bigger chunk of matching funds. We just have to pass the inspection tomorrow morning, before the parade starts. The committee could have chosen a better time.”

  He straightened a little and began fussing with the piles of reference books, papers, fat folders, bits of cloth, and other detritus of museum work that overflowed every flat surface available. “The parade participants are supposed to show up around nine and start marching at ten. So if we meet the committee at seven, we should be in good shape. I just wish they’d postpone the inspection until after Festival,” he continued, filling the silence with banal words rather than coming to the heart of the matter.

  “The Ball? Are the plans falling apart without Mom overseeing them?” The annual Masque Ball held in the park at the end of Festival provided a large portion of operating funds for the museum. Townsfolk, and a growing number of patrons from nearby Portland, paid good money for tickets, then dressed in outlandish or elegant costumes and danced the night away to live music in the gazebo. Dusty loved stringing tiny Faery lights through the trees to add a magical flavor to the evening.

  “Actually, the plans are going better than usual without your mother’s interference.” He looked down sheepishly.

  This time Dusty laughed. “Yeah, Mom does get carried away sometimes.”

  “Like the year she tried requiring costumes of Shakespearean characters that all had to pass her scrutiny for authenticity?”

  They both laughed at that fiasco.

  “You’re doing a good job, Dusty. You’ve managed to keep all the committees on track and out of each other’s hair.”

  “The magic of email,” she explained. “Mom prefers face-to-face confrontations . . . er meetings. I don’t think I’ve even met any of the committee chairs.”

  “Your mom is a force of nature, not necessarily a good leader and organizer.”

  Joe stopped laughing abruptly and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “So spill it. What happened that you’re in your best suit and have the girls with you?”

  “I don’t suppose you’d consider marrying me?”

  “Joe, the only time you propose to me is when your ex starts playing nasty games about custody and you think marrying again will look good to the courts. What’s she done this time?”

  “Monica has left her lover, the Italian count turned chef, finished her fancy cooking school in Florence, and gotten herself a very good job in Seattle at a four-star hotel restaurant. She has followed her bliss. Now she wants the girls back.”

  Dusty didn’t need to see his deadpan expression to know how much hurt he hid behind the mask. She’d held his hand more than once while he worked through the grief of Monica’s desertion after reading some damn self-help book. The break she “deserved” grew from a three-week vacation to two years of finding herself.

  One of these days Dusty might accept one of Joe’s offhanded proposals just to have his children full-time. She babysat them three nights a week while Joe taught a high school equivalency class at the community college. But she knew Joe didn’t love her. Part of him still pined for Monica.

  “I guess she found herself, ’cause now she’s suing for full custody, claiming I can’t support her precious children on my salary and that I’m neglecting them.”

  “If her children are so precious to her, why’d she walk out without so much as a good-bye, leaving you with two toddlers and a mountain of her debts?” Dusty couldn’t understand how anyone could leave those girls.

  “She said I was undervaluing myself and my education by settling for the museum job instead of teaching at a university. I know she never understood the total lack of glamour in faculty politics.”

  Monica didn’t deserve him or Sharon and Suzie.

  Dusty wished she had a place to sit. The office didn’t have a second chair.

  “Will you accept the full-time teaching job at the community college? It pays better than the museum.” Dusty knew to the penny how much it paid. She’d turned down the position when the college offered it to her based upon her academic work and the application her parents had filled out in her name—without telling her because they knew she’d never do it herself.

  Her stomached roiled at the thought of facing classrooms full of students every day.

  But Joe would thrive there.

  “I may have to. That would leave you in charge here. I wouldn’t trust anyone else to love this museum as much as I do.” He grinned at her. “Think how much fun you’ll have working with the county commissioners, the tourists, all the grant committees, designing field trips for school children, teaching special classes for teacher in-service days....”

  Dusty ran out of the tiny room, bile burning in the back of her throat. Her hands grew clammy. The moment she cleared the doorway to the basement, her breathing eased. Two steps down into the cool dimness, her stomach settled. She hastened back to her dirty potsherds.

  She barely noticed Thistle playing jacks with the girls in the lounge. They hummed an almost familiar tune that followed Dusty all the way to the bottom of the stairs.

  Dum dee dee do dum dum.

  It reminded her of her favorite music box, broken for fifteen years now. But not quite.

  Four

  “WHAT HAPPENED TO DUSTY?” Thistle asked no one in particular.

  The young girls kept bouncing their little ball and collecting the oddly shaped metal stars.

  “Oh, some bully beat the crap out of her in the schoolyard about a billion years ago,” the blonde teenager replied, just returning from her tour. She shooed the children into their father’s office.

  “Everyone in town knows that story,” snorted the darker girl. “One of the advantages of living in a small town. We all know each other’s dirty laundry.”

  Gossip! Thistle wiggled with excited anticipation. Good gossip provided food for Pixies when pollen was rare. But were these girls reliable gossips?

  She eyed them closely: exact opposites, tall and fair, short and dark, heavily made up and bare-faced, careful em
bellishments of lace and jewelry to the blonde’s pioneer costume, the other’s stark and prim. Yet they seemed joined at the hip, true friends. Like Thistle and Dusty used to be.

  “Pretend I’m not from around here,” Thistle prodded the girls. “Pretend I was born and raised by wild Pixies in The Ten Acre Wood.”

  Both girls giggled. “If it was The Ten Acre Wood, then you were raised by pirates. More barbaric and unlettered than Pixies. Pixies have better manners,” M’Velle said.

  “What about Dusty?” Thistle prodded before the girls went into a gigglefest about childhood games. “I know she was really sick for a while, but I thought she got over it.”

  “She beat the cancer with chemo and a bone marrow transplant, but her mom insisted on homeschooling her even after she got better. They always eat organic, take their shoes off at the door, and wash their hands like a hundred times a day. Dusty tutored us last summer, but she did most of it by email. I’m Meggie, by the way.” The blonde tossed the words over her shoulder as she reached inside the icebox for a cold drink. She didn’t clean off the can top as Dusty had.

  “And I’m M’Velle,” the brunette with milk-chocolate skin added. “Ms. Carrick takes books from the library around to old folks in town who don’t get out much. And she helps her mom organize Garden Club meetings and stuff, again by email. The old folks, and those of us who work at the museum, may be the only people she sees face-to-face.”

  “Her mom went ballistic over the cancer thing,” Meggie took up the story. “Blamed the school system for letting Dusty ‘catch’ it when her scrapes and bruises from a playground dustup didn’t heal. As if you can ‘catch’ cancer.” She rolled her eyes in disgust.

  “Sounds like guilt to me,” M’Velle snorted. “Mrs. Carrick blames herself for not being able to protect her child from cancer, and then she couldn’t heal her because she wasn’t a perfect bone marrow match. Anyone who has passed high school biology knows that a full sibling has the best chance of being a match.” M’Velle rolled her eyes. “Ms. Carrick plays in the dust down in the basement rather than face reality. And her mom encourages it because she’s still afraid she’ll catch something from another person that will kill her precious baby girl.”

  “You know, if Ms. Carrick got out more, she’d learn a few social skills and feel less awkward in public. She’d learn to talk about something—anything—but history and this museum,” Meggie said quietly. “She tells us all the time that practice makes perfect. She should take her own advice. Maybe she’d make a few friends if she took the trouble to go find them.”

  Thistle hummed a bit of displeasure into the tune that clung to the back of her throat. Dum dee dee do dum dum.

  “What she needs is a date with a bunch of people. Have a few laughs with a guy before she goes on a solo date,” Meggie said.

  Thistle wandered around and around the room, her gaze flitting from this to that. Starshine! She missed her wings.

  “She needs more than a few laughs. She needs to find someone she can take a mating flight with,” Thistle mused. The music inside her soared in memory.

  “A what?” both girls asked in chorus.

  “In Pixie, when you fall in love, the truly, deeply, forever kind of love, you both fly up to the tallest branches of the Patriarch Oak in the center of The Ten Acre Wood, the one with mistletoe. Then the female flattens her wings, the male grasps her from behind, and they plummet downward. His wings will slow the flight, but aren’t strong enough to actually fly them both. The girl has to trust him to get her to the ground safely.” Thistle settled on the floor in a corner with her legs crossed. Her middle ached so badly she couldn’t stand up anymore. Her internal music died on a sour note.

  “Before you can love that deeply, you have to be friends. There’s responsibility in friendship.”

  “Wow! That sounds like the best kind of love ever.” Meggie’s eyes glazed over, lost in a dream.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to face each other, so both of the Pixies can support the flight?” M’Velle asked. She sounded a bit bewildered.

  “Oh, that’s fun, too,” Thistle brightened a bit. “But the other, the mating flight depends on that deep and abiding trust. You have to trust the man with your life as well as your heart and soul. He completes you, and fulfills you. There’s nothing else like it.”

  “What a beautiful metaphor. Pixie love. I’ll have to use that expression, start a new fad,” Meggie said dreamily, still lost in her imagination. “Maybe I’ll write a story about it.”

  “Sounds like you’ve had one of those kinds of relationships.” M’Velle’s eyes narrowed in scrutiny. “What happened? I mean why did the police drop you off here with nothing but a borrowed T-shirt to wear? Seems to me, if you had a guy you trusted so much, you should have called him rather than Dusty Carrick.”

  “He betrayed me,” Thistle replied softly. And I’ll have my revenge on Alder yet.

  “If my boyfriend ever did that to me, I’d kill him,” M’Velle insisted.

  “Killing is too good for him,” Thistle said, an unmusical chuckle formed in the back of her throat. “I gave him a comeuppance. A really good one.” She laughed long and hard in memory of her best trick ever.

  Then she sobered as she remembered how Alder had lashed out in anger. He’d blasted her so hard she’d landed in Memorial Fountain, stark naked in the middle of rush hour without wings to fly her back home.

  No Pixie ever plays tricks on another Pixie. Ever. Go live with humans a while and learn to appreciate being the victim of Pixie tricks, Alder had said.

  “Dusty needs to learn to trust people again. I know just the man she belongs with,” Thistle said instead, looking toward Joe Newberry’s office as the sound of childish giggles erupted in the background. “And you girls are going to help me teach her.” Maybe then Thistle Down could find a way home.

  “What? No way.”

  Thistle loosened her clenched fists, hoping she had a little Pixie dust left. With a sharp flash of her arms she flicked her fingers at the girls. A satisfying shaft of lavender, pink, blue, and gold sparkles shot forth from each fingertip.

  Meggie and M’Velle gasped in wonder. “What was that?” they asked in unison.

  “A diversion to get your attention. Now listen to me,” Thistle insisted.

  “Well why didn’t you just say you had, you know, like something important to say,” Meggie grumbled.

  “This is important. Dusty is your friend.”

  Both girls rolled their eyes in response.

  “Believe me, she is. How else did you get your jobs this summer? She spoke up for you. She helped you both get better grades in school, so you’d qualify for the jobs.” She silently thanked the network of Pixie gossip for that bit of information.

  “Yeah, she did,” M’Velle admitted. “And I appreciate it. She showed me the best way to get away from prejudice is to get an education.”

  “So now it’s time for you to be a friend to her. Go talk to Dusty. Nothing special, just be friendly, recount your day, laugh at the antics of the children in your tour groups. Let her know that you trust her with your secrets. Be as good a friend to her as she has been to you,” Thistle instructed. “I just wish I could go downstairs and help, but underground is death to a Pixie,” she mumbled to herself.

  “No, I’m afraid you can’t assemble your float on the museum grounds tomorrow. The rules say you have to bring it here complete for judging.” Dusty said anxiously into the phone in Joe’s office. The room was too quiet. She needed background music to keep her from listening to the old house creak as it settled. Or strain to hear how Thistle was getting on with Meggie and M’Velle.

  Her boss had taken his daughters to day care and then gone home to change to casual business clothes. She had the place to herself for a couple of minutes until Thistle or Meggie or someone else came looking for her with a problem only she could solve.

  “But we just can’t get everyone assembled at the garage and then transport them all to
the museum by nine!” wailed the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Those are the rules you agreed to when you sent in your application for a place in the parade. You signed the agreement. Besides, there will be another activity on the grounds that won’t be clear until nine. You cannot show up early just to assemble your hay bales and park benches on the back of a flatbed truck.”

  The man complained and grumbled with a threat to take the restrictions to the City Council. Dusty held firm, happy that she could conduct this conversation over the phone and not have to face the man. One scowl, and she knew she’d cave in to his demands and ruin the inspection for the grant.

  Eventually, he hung up on her.

  No sooner had she replaced the phone in its cradle when it rang again.

  “Ms. Carrick, I really must insist you open your parents’ home for the Historical Tour Wednesday night,” Janelle Meacham, chair of the Historical Preservation Committee, demanded without preamble. “It’s bad enough that Mabel Gardiner won’t open her home. We can’t bypass yours as well.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Meacham. I can’t do that. My parents are on sabbatical until September. No one will be home to decorate and show the public rooms.” Dusty bit her lip. She began to shake at the idea of playing hostess to hundreds of strangers wandering through the big Queen Anne style home and gardens.

  “Nonsense, what else have you and Dick to do with your time? I’ll email you the recipe for those shortbread cookies . . .”

  “No. I can’t eat white flour or processed sugar. I will not bake for your tour, nor will I cancel several meetings and appointments to be there. You will just have to do without stopping at the house. You can admire the gardens from the street.”

  “But your mother always . . .”

  “I am not my mother.” This time Dusty hung up first.