A Snicker of Magic

by Natalie Lloyd

  Jonah must have seen the fear in my eyes, because he quickly added, “Something good will happen at the Duel. Trust me.”

  So I sat beside Frannie Jo on the bus ride home, flipping through the blue book in search of awesome words. But thinking about words got me to thinking about standing in front of the entire school at the Duel. And I felt barfy again.

  “Hey, Fliss-tee Pickle!” Day Grissom hollered from the front of the bus. “How’s your aunt Cleo doing?”

  “She’s fine as frog hair,” I said. “She’s probably either sewing or solving the world’s problems.”

  “Don’t I know it!” Day grinned. “I never met a more talented woman in all my days.”

  As Day pulled up in front of the Sandcut Apartments, before I stepped off the bus, he said, “Fliss-tee?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  Day drummed his fingers against the steering wheel, trying to find some sort of rhythm for the words about to come out of his mouth.

  Right then is when I realized Day Grissom had a chunk of a doughnut stuck in his beard. I figured it’d be rude to mention it, but I couldn’t help but stare. A beard is a gnarly place for a pastry to reside.

  Day must have noticed me staring, because he looked down and said, “Oh!”

  And then he untangled the doughnut from his whiskers and started eating it.

  “I wondered where that got to!” he said. Crumbs spewed out of his mouth as he spoke. “Will you tell Cleo I said … hi?”

  “Sure thing.” I didn’t tell him that I’d delivered that same message, “Day Grissom says hi,” five times already and the response was always the same. “Pffft,” Cleo’d always say. Or “Toss me that pack of cigarettes.”

  Frannie Jo and I had no more than opened the door to Cleo’s apartment when Cleo yelled my name.

  “Felicity Juniper Pickle!”

  “I’m right here!” I kicked the door shut with my heel.

  Aunt Cleo’s hands were propped on her hips … or at least the vicinity of the region her hips probably were under her long, flowing dress. Cleo’s eyebrows were knit so close together that it looked as if somebody’d taken a Magic Marker and drawn a squiggly black line across her forehead.

  Biscuit sat on the floor, staring up at Aunt Cleo, cocking her head from one side to the other, trying to figure out whether or not she was in trouble.

  “Felicity,” Cleo heaved. “You take this dog on a walk. A long walk. She’s been chewing up my quilt squares, running circles on my carpet. She’s stir-crazy today, and that’s making me crazy. I gotta finish this wedding quilt for the Slavens and I can’t have it smelling like puppy slobber. I’ll never get another job if it does.”

  Cleo’s real job, when she wasn’t fixing the world’s problems, was quilt making. Cleo says people used to ask her for nursery quilts — hedgehog patterns were her specialty. The hedgehog quilts were all the rage for a few years, but then people got tired of those.

  So Cleo started making wedding quilts instead. Those were easy, she said, because people always wanted the same pattern: wedding rings.

  The rings on Cleo’s quilts are way prettier than real wedding rings, though. All the wedding rings I’ve seen are plain gold, boring and simple and round. But the rings on Cleo’s quilts were shaped like gigantic onion rings. And they were packed full of colors, all the pieces and patches she’d saved up over the years. Cleo collects fabric the same as I collect words.

  “Here.” Cleo tossed me Biscuit’s leash. “Go explore down around the picnic tables, but don’t go any farther than that, understand? And take your sister walking with you.”

  “Yay!” Frannie squealed. “I’ll go get my hat!” A few minutes later, she scampered back into the living room, wearing a paper pirate hat with ROWDY RANDY’S PANCAKE HOUSE stamped across the front. She was also wearing a baseball mitt over her hand.

  “What’s the mitt for?” I asked.

  Frannie shrugged.

  “Get on out!” Cleo waved us toward the door. “Go have fun!”

  “Wait!” I hollered. “I nearly forgot to tell you! Day Grissom says hi.”

  Cleo sighed. “Toss me that pack of cigarettes before you head out.”

  I probably should have clipped on Biscuit’s leash as soon as we walked out the door so she could scamper around and stretch her legs. But I decided to carry her down the stairs instead. Sometimes I like to cuddle her as close to my heart as I can. Biscuit never seems to mind. She nuzzled her soft face against my cheek and licked me on the nose.

  “Can I walk her now?” Frannie asked, as we reached the last flight of stairs.

  I clipped the leash on to the dog collar, settled Biscuit on the ground, and then passed the leash to Frannie.

  But Frannie tried to grab on to the leash with her baseball mitt instead of her hand. So the next thing I saw was a streak of white as my dog barked and took off in a speedy run.

  Frannie screamed. Screaming is Frannie’s involuntary reaction to most things. “Felicity! My dog!”

  “Don’t worry! I’ll get her!” I was already chasing after Biscuit, jumping down the stairs three at a time. “Stay right there, Frannie Jo!”

  I leaped from the last step and ran as hard as I could down the hillside, hollering for Biscuit every step of the way. My sneakers pounded dust-colored words out of the ground:

  Zippity

  Velocity

  Dash-away

  Boundless

  “Biscuit!” I yelled. “What the hayseed are you running after?” But Biscuit never looked back. She sprinted past some picnic tables with her leash trailing along behind her.

  I swung my arms and pumped my legs as hard as I could and then I jumped — arms straight out in front of me so I could grab on to Biscuit’s leash.

  I heard somebody yell, “I got her!” at exactly the same time that I slammed into the ground and yelled, “OOMPF!”

  When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was the tip of a tan cowboy boot. As I glanced higher up, I could see jeans and a plaid shirt, too, the silhouette of a tall man standing against the sunlight. He was laughing while my dog climbed all over his shoulders, licking his face and his ears.

  “You okay?” the man asked as he reached down to pull me up off the ground. “This is some guard dog you’ve got here.”

  Biscuit licked his face in agreement and he laughed again.

  I dusted the grass and dirt off my pants and shielded my eyes and tried to get a better look at the dog saver. He was as thin as a zipper, with scruffy blond hair and stubble along his jawline. He was smiling big while he petted Biscuit, but the dark circles under his eyes made him look kinda tired. Kinda sad, too. I smiled up at him and thanked him for catching our dog.

  He passed Biscuit back to me and chuckled. “I think your dog’s the one who caught me.”

  That’s when I realized he had a guitar case slung behind his back. As soon as he let my dog go, he clutched tightly to the strap across his chest. The way he held it reminded me of the picture of Oliver’s grandfather. I thought about how Berry Weatherly held his banjo over his heart like it was a shield, the only protection he had between him and the world.

  I nodded to the man and turned to wander off when I heard him yell, “Hey! I’m looking for Cleo Harness and I hear she lives in this apartment complex now. Do you know her?”

  I spun around and narrowed my eyes to try and assess whether or not he had any criminal potential. He didn’t look mean. He looked like a regular grown-up with sad, sky-colored eyes. He was handsome. But I wasn’t stupid, and I didn’t let that fool me. I figure the witch that took Hansel and Gretel probably looked like a prom queen. He was awfully sweet to my dog, though. And Biscuit’s a good judge of character.

  “What do you want with Cleo Harness?” I asked.

  He looked down at the ground and dragged the tip of his boot back and forth across the grass. “I’m an old friend of hers. Just wanted to say hello.”

  I had two instincts building up inside me right then. Th
e first was to say, No, sir. You keep right on walking. Because I didn’t want this handsome grown-up to go rob Aunt Cleo blind, shove all her quilt patches and tabloid magazines and porcelain hedgehogs into his guitar case and dash out of town.

  But my other instinct was YES. Because what if this man was the answer to my prayer? I’d prayed for a man for Cleo and now a man was standing in front of me. He looked a lot younger than Cleo, but maybe age doesn’t matter as long as you’re already old. Even the Beedle couldn’t have put together an opportunity so fine.

  So what I settled on saying was, “You wait right here, mister.”

  I tucked Biscuit underneath my arm again and ran for the apartment.

  Almost no time had passed before me and Cleo were back down by the picnic tables. The man hadn’t moved an inch. I saw words of cities shining all around him:

  Nashville

  Roanoke

  Kalamazoo

  Bakersfield

  Burnside

  Home again

  Home again was the color of ashes.

  The man with the guitar looked at Cleo. His mouth smiled, but his eyes stayed sad. “Good to see you, sister.”

  Sister?

  Cleo said nothing. She kept her cigarette in her mouth and had Frannie Jo on her hip. I still had Biscuit perched on my hip. And we stared that man down like two outlaws in a Western cartoon about to have us a showdown.

  Frannie Jo pointed to the man’s case. “I like guitars,” she said.

  “It’s a banjo, actually,” the man said. But his voice wasn’t as strong as when he first spoke to me. He looked at Cleo, hoping she’d give him some answers.

  “Are you a famous musician or something?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. And his smile turned so sad that I wished I hadn’t even asked.

  “Ain’t for lack of talent, though,” Cleo spoke up. “Girls, this here is my brother, your uncle Boone.”

  “You’re my uncle Boone?” I grinned ear to ear. “Mama told us about you! She says you have songs on the radio!”

  Boone stared down at his shoes again. “I had one song on the radio. That was a long time ago. Nothing since then.”

  “What are you doing back in Midnight Gulch?” I asked.

  Aunt Cleo was the one who answered me. “If I had to guess three reasons he’s back in town, I’d say one, he’s run out of money and two, he needs a place to stay and three, some floozy out in Nashville broke his heart again.”

  “And four” — Boone swallowed — “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”

  “All I got’s potato chips and ice cream,” Cleo said.

  “We have an uncle!” Frannie squealed. Biscuit wiggled her tail.

  Boone nodded. “Y’all are a lot bigger than I thought you’d be. I thought you were babies.”

  “People grow up,” Cleo said. “People change.” I could hear a rasp in her voice that I’d never heard before.

  Boone kept staring at his boots. I’d never seen somebody stare at the ground so long. “I never really knew how to contact Holly. Is she here, too?”

  “Cleo got her a job at the ice-cream factory,” I answered, taking a step closer to him. “She’ll be home tonight, though.”

  His eyes flickered up to meet mine. “She and I don’t talk much these days.”

  “Holly probably don’t know how to get in touch with you,” Cleo said. “Since Boone Harness ain’t appropriate for Nashville. He goes by Boone Taylor out there, girls. Because he says Boone Taylor sounds better on a stage.”

  Boone didn’t argue. He scraped the toe of his boot back and forth across the grass, making an invisible line.

  Boone on one side. Cleo and the Pickles on the other. I didn’t care for that at all.

  “I don’t care what you call yourself,” I said softly. “I’m just glad to have an uncle.”

  One side of Boone’s mouth tipped up in a grin. I’d seen that grin before. When that grin stretched out into a full-blown smile, it would be a dancing smile. A painting smile. Just the same as Mama’s.

  We all got real quiet then. Boone kept blinking at Cleo with those lonesome blue eyes and I could tell — by the way he was chewing on his lip and clutching that banjo strap — that he thought she would turn him away. But I knew Cleo wouldn’t do that.

  “C’mon, then, I reckon.” Cleo sighed.

  And while we followed her in, I kept glancing back at my uncle. I didn’t know if Boone was magic or a miracle, or an answer to some prayer I didn’t know I’d prayed. It didn’t matter how he got there.

  I believe a family’s still a family no matter if you have two people or ten, no matter if you’re raised by a mama or a grandpa. A family can look a hundred different ways, I knew that. But ever since I came to Cleo’s, and from the first spindiddly second I knew Boone was my uncle, I felt like puzzle pieces that I didn’t know were missing started snapping together against my heart. I didn’t just want to belong to a place anymore. I wanted to belong to my family, and I wanted them to belong to me.

  Boone’s boots thudded heavy against the sidewalk. His heart was weighing him down, I could tell. The words above his head were long guitar strings. They trembled, as if some invisible hand strummed against them:

  Failure

  Failure

  Failure

  But Cleo’s were the same as they always were:

  Patch it

  Mend it

  Stitch it back together

  My aunt and uncle both seemed so sad that I almost felt guilty for being happy. Not just happy, but the happiest I’d ever been.

  I had Mama and Biscuit and Frannie Jo. And now I had an aunt and an uncle, too. I had a best friend named Jonah and I knew secrets about the Brothers Threadbare that nobody else knew. Lonely had followed me around for so long. That word was always perched somewhere close, always staring down at me, waiting to pounce out my joy. But I hadn’t seen lonely near me in a while. And I hadn’t seen it near the people I loved, either.

  “I love this music!” Frannie Jo hollered. And she started grabbing fistfuls of silent, summer air.

  Cleo sighed and kept walking and Boone nodded and stared down at the pavement like he’d remembered, for the first time since coming here, that his family was a bunch of lunatics.

  But suddenly, I stopped right on the sidewalk. I didn’t hear music, but I did hear something, and at first it was so faint I thought it was just the wind or the birds in the woods. But the sound wasn’t any of that. I heard the sound of wind chimes, far away but moving closer.

  Boone and Cleo kept walking, like they didn’t hear a thing.

  I heard it, though. I looked across the parking lot and into the woods. As the sound of the wind chimes faded, I remembered something peculiar Oliver had said:

  “And then he told me the real story of the Brothers Threadbare and why they quarreled … or who they quarreled over, I guess I should say.”

  “Well, that’s got nothing to do with me,” I said out loud to the creepy-chimey wind.

  The wind didn’t answer me, but my heart sure did.

  Yes.

  Yes.

  Yes.

  I realize it’s not such an uncommon thing for people to have aunts and uncles, but I’d never met my family before we moved to Midnight Gulch. I’d talked to Cleo on the phone a few times, and Mama’d shown me pictures of Cleo visiting me when I was a baby. I’d never even seen a picture of Boone Harness. I always knew he was special, though, because of the way Mama said his name.

  For the longest time, I thought she was calling him Boom. I finally asked her one day, “Is his name Boom, like a firework?”

  “Not Boom,” she’d laughed. Then she fluttered her hand against her chest. “His name is Boone, like a heartbeat.”

  And now Boone-like-a-heartbeat was sitting right in front of me in the Pickled Jalapeño.

  Cleo was driving through town like a mad woman, swerving around street corners so fast that the tires squealed. Mama didn’t seem to mind Cleo’s crazy
driving today. She was happy to have the day off from work, and I was happy to see her in regular clothes again, in her paint-stained jeans and a white T-shirt. She still hadn’t painted anything, but I figured the fact that she was wearing her paint clothes was a good start. Mama sat in the front seat, angled around so she could catch up with my mysterious uncle.

  All of us were fascinated by Boone, Frannie Jo especially. She sat right up against him in the middle seat, blinking her big blue eyes up at him like he was the King of the World.

  Suddenly, the van lurched a hard left so fast that Frannie smooshed into Boone, and I smooshed into the window.

  Mama shoved her sunglasses up into her hair and glared at Cleo. “Where you going? The creamery’s downtown.”

  “You don’t think I know how to get downtown? I live here. I decided to take the girls to Snapdragon Pond.”

  “Oh.” Mama shrugged at the same time Boone slid down into the seat and asked, “Why?”

  I rested my chin on the middle seat. “You don’t like the pond, Boone?”

  Boone shook his head. “I just … I didn’t want to get out so soon. I don’t mind riding in a car, but I don’t want to be outside. I don’t want to see anybody. I need a few days to … you know … recover.”

  Frannie rested her hand on his arm. Her fingernails were painted bubble-gum pink. “Are you sick somewhere?”

  “Right here.” Boone tapped his heart.

  “Boone,” Cleo groaned from the front seat. “There ain’t nothing about sitting all by yourself all day, crying into a bucket of ice cream, that’s gonna make that broken heart heal any faster. You need fresh air and sunshine. There’s nobody at Snapdragon Pond this time of year anyway.”

  Boone let out a quick sigh of relief. “That’s good to know.”

  Cleo grinned in the rearview mirror. “I was hoping maybe you could play some songs for us. The girls ain’t ever heard you play. You bring your banjo?”

  “Nope,” Boone clipped. He chewed on his bottom lip, the same way Mama does when she’s nervous. “Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever play that banjo again. Every good love song I played came to me because of her. Now they’re all ruined.”