by Amity Allen
“Is that so?” Cricket put away the last cup then came and sat down in the chair next to mine.
“Yes. She told me I could only sit at one table designated for the judges. One of them was doing his newscast so he wasn’t there, and once I met the other one I wished I hadn’t. She was a former Miss Pumpkin Patch or something. She wouldn’t even talk to me, just texted people on her phone the whole time.”
Cricket sniffed. “She’s probably jealous. A lot of people dream of making it in Hollywood, but they never get there. Or if they get there, they never make it. And you did.”
“I guess so.” Some days it didn’t feel that way. My show had been canceled. Deep down, I knew five years was a good run, and I should be grateful to have been on TV that long, but I don’t like change and in some ways I wished the show was still in production.
I guess I could have stayed in Hollywood and gone on a bunch of auditions . . . but instead I’d chosen to come home. Figuring out what was going on with me with regards to my newfound powers was a bigger priority than show biz at this point.
“Hey, I made some pumpkin chocolate chip muffins.” Cricket jostled me from my musings. “Want one?”
“No,” I said. Purely a knee jerk reaction. The camera added at least ten pounds to your appearance so I’d made it a habit to turn down baked goods.
“You don’t have to watch your weight anymore, Poppy. Go ahead. Have a muffin.” She hesitated then backpedaled in case she’d been too pushy. “Unless you’re too full from the party.
“All right, fine. I’ll take a muffin,” I said, enjoying my new rebellious streak. No one in Hollywood would dream of eating carbs past eight p.m.
Something creaked as Cricket got up, and I wasn’t sure if it was her bones or the chair, but I knew better than to mention it. Aunt Cricket was a pistol. And I didn’t just mean the one she was packin’ most of the time.
Aunt Cricket and my mother, Eleanor, were born and raised in the same home where we lived today. Their wealthy father, Samuel Parker, had been almost eighty when he’d married his child bride, Eunice, who had been eighteen at the time. The offshoot of their curious union, my aunt Cricket, was born Clarissa, but was too much of a tomboy from the beginning to fit her original moniker.
Cricket’s existence alone was enough to drive Samuel’s children from his first two marriages mad, but when my mother was born almost twenty years later, on Samuel’s one hundredth birthday, the rest of the family was furious.
So just how did my crotchety old grandpa react to his family’s disapproval? He wrote them out of the will, of course. It was rumored that people around town thought my grandmother odd. Some were even convinced she used “unnatural charms” to get my grandfather to do her bidding.
Upon his passing, at the ripe old age of one hundred and six, they say that my grandmother, Eunice, still a young woman, was inconsolable. Not even my beloved mother, who was almost seven at the time and an utter darling by all accounts, could comfort her. By the time Eleanor turned ten, her own mother was gone, died of a broken heart.
This left Cricket all alone to pick up the pieces of their lives and carry on. She must have done so admirably, because she raised not only my mother, but when my mother died in childbirth with me, she raised me as well. Fortunately, Cricket had inherited Samuel’s vast fortune and this house, which sat atop a bluff overlooking Mobile Bay.
Cricket might have been my aunt, but she was the only mother, or even family, I’d ever known. I was told that my father died in the first Gulf War and never knew about me. Everyone on my mother’s side of the family hated us, except for a few distant Cajun relatives of my grandmother, who lived deep in the Louisiana swamps and never communicated with us.
No, there was no one else. All my life it had just been me and my aunt Cricket.
She handed me a muffin. I bit into it, dribbling crumbs into my lap. “Wow! This is really good. What kind is it again?”
“Chocolate chip pumpkin.”
“I didn’t even know I liked pumpkin.”
“That’s why it’s good to mix it in with the chocolate chips,” she laughed. “I’ve been sneaking vitamin A into your meals without you knowing it your whole life.”
I made a face, and she smiled back.
“As soon as this pageant is over, I want to sit down with you and talk more about these powers I may have.”
“All right. I can see why you would be resistant to the idea, but Eleanor always had special gifts. She was never really comfortable with them either. I always felt if you use them for good and learned how to harness them, it could be a positive thing, but Eleanor wished she didn’t have them. I think it made her feel different from everyone else. Isolated perhaps”
“But you never had them?”
“No.” She shook her head. “But I always wanted them. I was always jealous of your mother’s powers. But that’s human nature. People always want what they don’t have. If you have curly hair, you want straight. And vice versa. If you’re short, you want to be tall. That’s the way of it.”
“Do you really believe that?” I asked, taking another bite of my muffin.
“Yep. That’s human nature for you. Nobody can be happy with what they have.”
“You mean the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence?”
“Exactly.”
We sat together quietly, me chewing my muffin, her sipping a cup of tea. It felt good to be home, and I let the warmth of it soak into my bones, fortifying me more than the muffin ever could.
“I got some of your mama’s old books that your grandmother gave her.”
“Witchcraft books?”
Cricket nodded. “I tried to get something out of them after your mama died. When you were little, I figured I could use all the help I could get raising a baby by myself, but I couldn’t make magic if my life depended on it.”
“So are they books of spells?”
“Something like that. At least I think so. Most of it I don’t understand, and I wondered if maybe you might have to have the gift to be able to even read and comprehend what’s in those books.”
This piqued my interest, and for the first time I began to look forward to learning more about my mother’s legacy of magic.
I thanked Cricket again and stood up from the table. “I’ve got a big day tomorrow so I’m heading off to bed.”
“Pageant starts tomorrow, huh?”
I grimaced. “Bright and early.”
“Sounds fun. I might stop by.”
Cricket reached up to give me a big hug. I leaned into the embrace and kissed her on the cheek. “Sounds like it’s going to be a big weekend. Sleep tight, honey.”
I hugged her tight and thought about how nice it was to have her comforting arms around me. This was something that I had missed while I had been in California. I threw away my napkin, refilled my water glass, and started up the back stairs.
As I reached the landing between floors, I heard someone talking on the phone. The voice came floating down from the floor above. Normally, I didn’t pay visitors any mind, but I picked up the word “pageant,” and even though I should have kept going, I froze.
“It’s rigged you know. That’s why all this is happening,” the nasally female voice droned.
The floorboards creaked over my head as the woman paced the floor while she listened to the person on the other end of the line.
“Next year is going to be different.”
Silence.
More pacing.
Who was it? I wondered if it might be Allessandra’s mom. Maybe she was talking about the birth certificate drama.
“Oh, I know. But don’t worry. She’ll get what’s coming to her.”
Then she continued, “Don’t you think? They always do . . . Um hmm. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer person.”
This was followed by laughter that could be characterized as a cackle. I wondered who she could be talking about. Considering the sarcasm in her voice and Allessandra’
s mom basically being accused of cheating by Heather I wouldn’t be surprised if it was her.
I wanted to keep listening, but then I heard the creak of the front stairs and I knew someone was about to join me on the landing where the back and the front stairs met. Not wanting to be caught listening to our guests, I barreled up the rest of the stairs at full steam so it wouldn’t appear as though I’d been creeping.
When I got to the top, the woman gave me a sharp look then tucked her chin, cradled her phone to her head, and marched purposefully down the hallway. When she got to her room, she quickly opened the door, entered, and closed it behind her. I heard the click of the lock as the deadbolt turned over.
So, she hadn’t wanted me to hear what she was saying . . .
Hearing a light footfall behind me, I turned around to see who was there.
It was a lady wearing what looked like a man’s suit. It was all white, and even though I’d lived in California for the past five years, where no one cared, I quickly noted that it was past Labor Day, which meant that in the South, people still expected you to retire your white shoes and pants from Labor Day to Memorial Day each year.
Women’s Wear Daily may have invented “winter white” decades ago, but old customs die hard in the South. And I had no doubt that poor woman had been on the receiving end of some raised eyebrows as she made her way through town today.
She was pretty in a Lauren Bacall, old movie star sort of way, but she stuck out like a sore thumb in our little neck of the woods. Down here it was so hot outside that fashion statements were usually made with accessories like a Kate Spade bag or a pair of Tom Ford sunglasses to go with our shorts and T-shirts. We didn’t often see full-on suits, especially on the women.
“Good evening,” the woman said. She had a pointed nose with prominent nostrils, a look you saw a lot on the West Coast in cases where the surgeon might have pulled a little too tight. She didn’t have a tot in tow, and looked way too cosmopolitan to be a pageant groupie. Probably a business traveler.
“Good evening,” I said, and made my way to my bedroom at the end of the hall. I felt her eyes on me the entire way.
The morning of the pageant, I came downstairs to find Cricket making up a big batch of eggs and bacon for the guests of the B&B. Before serving them, she made a special plate for me that she’d set on the breakfast table nestled in the corner of the kitchen. This was where we ate, while guests ate in the larger dining room, or, if we were at capacity, they spilled out onto the smaller tables on the enclosed porch.
“Mmm. This looks delicious.” I sat down, pulled my cloth napkin across my lap, and began eating. I wondered if Cricket had already eaten, but I knew she wouldn’t allow me to wait for her if she hadn’t, so I went ahead and dug in.
She came over with a large carafe of orange juice and poured me a glass.
“Thank you.”
“Sure, honey. Let me take these biscuits in to them, and I’ll be right back.”
“Take your time and don’t worry about me. I’m not sure how much I’m going to be able to eat this morning.”
“Nervous stomach?” she asked, transferring a batch of biscuits from the mini muffin tin she’d baked them in onto a platter. They were the little, buttery kind—my favorite.
I nodded.
She gave me a quick bob of her head to let me know she understood. Her mere presence was a comfort, but it was strange that I had spent so many years putting myself out there, acting in front of an audience, and now it was performing behind the scenes that was making me nervous. Because it was new?
When acting had been new, it made me nervous too. I guess I wasn’t a big fan of new experiences. Which made it strange how much I liked the bed and breakfast. It involved new people all the time. Each group of guests provided a novel experience. Perhaps it was different because I was only expected to be an observer, or because it was what I was used to.
Once everyone was seated at a table in the other room, I would be able to hear everything that went on in there. The kitchen, where Cricket and I ate, was right off the main dining room. It would have been strange for us to go in there and eat with them so we did our thing, and they did theirs. It entertained me far more than it should have, listening to our guests, but I simply thought of it as people watching the way one did in an airport. Only the airport was in my dining room.
“Oh my God! What is with this weather?” A woman’s nasally voice rang through the air. The same one I’d heard the night before.
Another woman’s voice, this one deeper. “It’s dreadful. Thank God my daughter wears a wig. If I had to deal with that frizzy mess, I don’t know what we would do.”
“Exactly. We only have a fall and it’s going to be a completely different texture than her real hair. It’s like the air out there is soaking.”
I had grown up in the Deep South with swamp-like heat and humidity, so it was nothing new to me; we girls had always known that it was hell on hair. And it didn’t matter what kind of hair you had, it would flat mess it up. If you had straight hair, the weather made it curl in weird ways. If you had thin hair it made it flatter, sticking to your head like it was soaking wet. If you had curly hair like me, Lord help you, your hair was going to look like you got a bad ‘70s perm.
When Cricket came back in, I half whispered, “A fall? For real?”
“Oh, I think it’s one of those hair pieces. Maybe you clip it on. I’ve never had one myself.”
She wouldn’t. As long as I could remember, Cricket kept her silver hair in a long braid that hung all the way down her back to her waist. It looked amazing, and it was her trademark.
“I know, but for a little girl?”
A little girl’s voice carried. “Momma, I like these biscuits.”
I smiled at Aunt Cricket and mouthed, “Me too.”
She winked at me.
“Need help with the dishes?” I asked.
“No, thanks. I do this every day. You go on over to the pageant.” She shooed me out the door.
I took a deep breath. Okay, no more stalling. It was time to get the show on the road.
There was only time to refill the travel coffee mug I’d brought and occupy my seat between William McWilliams and Cecily of Watermelon fame before Heather Morgan made her way to the podium on the right-hand side of the stage.
She pulled the microphone towards her mouth, which caused an ear-splitting screech. Ignoring the technical snafu, Heather powered on. “Welcome to the Bloomin’ Belles Beauty Pageant. We are so glad you could join us for this festive event.” She went on to talk about the schedule for the day, and then announced the first category was “Beauty” and it would begin with the youngest age division.
The first age group was six to twelve months, and because these babies were too young to walk, their mamas carried them across the stage while the announcer said inane things like, “This is Marigold. She is seven months old and her favorite food is cereal. When she grows up, she wants to be a flight attendant.”
How could anyone know that? That baby couldn’t even know what a flight attendant was, could she?
Seeing as how the contestants in this age group couldn’t talk, some of the statements regarding their preferences seemed ridiculous, but I was grateful the announcer didn’t say any of them favored breast milk. It seemed bizarre to have infants in a pageant when they couldn’t even walk, but I did, however, credit the pageant system that the babies weren’t wearing the fake eyelashes you found on the older girls, and to my astonishment, none of the nine baby contestants cried when it was her turn to go onstage.
Was that luck or did some babies really exhibit an aptitude for this sort of thing? I looked to my right and my left, and considered asking my fellow judges this question. But the news anchor wasn’t likely to know, and Cecily would only show disdain at my lack of familiarity with pageant culture, so I kept quiet.
I wasn’t really sure how to judge these babies. They honestly all looked pretty similar to me. They were all c
ute, so I’m ashamed to admit I did sneak a peek at my neighboring judges’ papers to see how they were scoring them. Miss Watermelon Patch caught me and quickly covered her scores and remarks with her hand, shooting me a dirty look like I’d been trying to cheat on a final exam.
Reflexively, I whispered, “Sorry.” Then I looked over at Mr. News Anchor to see if he noticed the exchange. Nope. He was watching the next contestant with a seriousness of purpose that made me feel like a slacker.
Due to my complete lack of confidence in my abilities to differentiate, I gave all the babies the same score. The other two judges could decide this one.
Once the first toddler girl walked across the stage, my education in “Beauty” began in earnest. Skylar had warned me that they were going to look less like little girls, and more like miniature women. Still, the results of all of the makeup, hairpieces, and false eyelashes shocked one’s system.
But the more girls I saw, the less unnerved I was, and when I got used to it, I had to admit these were some lovely little girls.
And the minute that thought crossed my mind, I knew I had been sucked into the system. I glanced over at Miss Watermelon Patch and vowed that this would be as far as I would go down that rabbit hole.
We saw and scored another age group then we were given a break. All that coffee had run straight through me, so I made a beeline for the bathroom.
On my way back to the judges’ table, I ran into Skylar.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
“Fine. Kind of a culture shock, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.”
Skylar shrugged. “It’s all subjective, isn’t it?”
“I guess. But sometimes I’m not sure whether I’m judging for the right thing.”
“Don’t worry about it. Hey, you know how I told you those moms are cutthroat about these pageants?”
“Yes.”
“I overheard this one lady say to another, ‘I will give you fifty dollars if you stop that music’.”
I gave her a blank look.
“She wanted to stop the other kid’s music so she would get flustered and mess up, so her own daughter would score better.”
