Rituals

by Mary Anna Evans

  Someone at the diner would be able to tell her what had happened. The smell of smoke and the sight of Myrna’s delicate hankie warned Toni to brace herself.

  ***

  The museum’s workroom was full of sagging cardboard boxes holding things that bereaved adult children couldn’t part with, but didn’t want to store. Everyone thinks their family heirlooms belong in a museum. In very few cases is this true.

  Smart museum curators find a way to politely refuse family keepsakes. Rosebower didn’t appear to have ever had a smart museum curator.

  Still, archaeologists are treasure-hunters at heart, so every time Faye opened a box, she hoped for a miracle. Instead, she usually got early-twentieth-century family photographs that someone had donated because it seemed a shame to throw them away. She liked looking at the black-and-white images of serious people in hand-sewn clothes and quaint hats, but the photos were unlabeled. There wasn’t much Faye could do with these mystery pictures.

  Faye had given a big box of photos to Amande, asking her to sort out the ones with an identifiable background. She’d thought it might be interesting to compile an exhibit showing how Rosebower landmarks—Main Street or the lakeside picnic area, for instance—had changed over time. Most of the other photos were probably worthless for her purpose, which was telling the story of Rosebower in four rooms or less.

  Maybe Samuel would enjoy having a museum open house where residents could have a chance to identify Great-great-aunt Maud among all those trapped-in-time faces. In most cases, Faye would be perfectly happy for Great-great-aunt Maud to go home with her descendants, thus decreasing the load of paper in this room by one piece.

  With no donation records, she wasn’t sure she could ethically go even that far. Depending on New York’s abandoned property laws, ridding the museum of this stuff might be more trouble than it was worth. She didn’t have the budget to jump through the legal hoops. She didn’t even have the budget to find out exactly what those hoops were in New York.

  Her work plan, which Samuel had approved, was to identify and catalog materials that should definitely be retained. Everything else would be stored properly—and by “properly,” Faye meant “for God’s sake, not in cardboard boxes”—then deferred for later re-evaluation. In a world-class museum, some of the deferred items would have been destroyed. In Rosebower, the new archival boxes would probably just sit, forever. Part of her job would be to train Samuel to say no the next time someone offered him the contents of his parents’ attic.

  Amande stuck a photo in front of Faye’s nose. “Retain or defer?”

  The cars and their sherbet-colored paint jobs dated from the 1950s. Faye thought the faded shades of old color photos were pretty, so she was going to have trouble weeding them out, but some things had to go. She was pretty sure this photo was one of them, until she noticed the town’s one-and-only diner in the background. A spherical sign, adorned with neon tubes and metal spikes, rose from the parking lot. It was just so…so…tacky and Sputnik-fearing and atomic, and this might be its only surviving photo.

  She sighed. “Keep it for the Main Street exhibit. But don’t stop asking me. We’ve gotta do something about those overstuffed displays or the floor’s gonna cave in. Samuel won’t like paying for a new one.”

  “Let’s get him to pay us instead,” Amande said.

  “I like the way you think.”

  ***

  Faye’s cell phone beeped. She had told it to let her know when noon rolled around, because checking the time every five minutes wouldn’t bring lunch any faster.

  “Let’s go see if we can find the hole in the diner’s parking lot, the one where that futuristic neon sign used to be,” she said, grabbing her purse and rising in a single motion.

  Amande quickly darkened the screen on her tablet. Faye felt her brows lower into her own mother’s what-have-you-been-doing? face.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve been off the clock for ten minutes. I’m keeping track of my hours. My timesheet will be accurate.”

  Faye wished she didn’t look so much like her mother, because she knew what a charming face she was showing her daughter.

  “I was talking to Dad. Really.”

  Faye didn’t think her eyebrows could go any lower.

  “It’s a surprise. Let’s go eat. You look like your blood sugar’s hanging down around your knees.”

  Faye hated it when her daughter was right. No, that wasn’t quite true. Faye hated it when she, herself, was wrong.

  ***

  It was only a few blocks to the diner, past the blackened hulk that had been Tilda’s house and the house of mourning that was Myrna’s. The sooty smell in the air made Faye walk faster. If Tilda Armistead had been killed by a resident of Rosebower, then the murderer was likely within a half-mile radius of Faye. The stench of smoke probably reached that far.

  The sidewalk took them past two quaint tea rooms, both opened within the past year. They served lunch to the increasing numbers of tourists who came to Rosebower for spiritual readings and, on Sundays and selected evenings, to spend an hour in a real live Spiritualist church service. Faye hoped the tourists put some money in the collection plate, because it didn’t seem right to use a church as a tourist attraction.

  Samuel wasn’t paying Faye and Amande enough to eat at the tea rooms. Besides, when Faye traveled, she liked to eat where the locals ate. The Rosebower Diner, which she now knew had once been called The Jetstar, was more her style.

  The diner was still furnished in 1950s chrome, vinyl, and linoleum. The air was savory with roast chicken. Faye doubted that this place was going to offer her a side of okra or turnip greens—she was in New York, after all—but it did what it did very well.

  An elderly African-American woman sat in a wheelchair pulled up to the table next to theirs. A slight young man with ebony skin and close-cropped hair sat with her, methodically shoveling her meal into her mouth. Rather, he was trying to do it methodically, but she kept shaking her head from side to side. Faye could see that he didn’t like it when she messed up his rhythm.

  Trying not to watch their battle of wills, she listened to Amande order fried chicken without warning her that it probably wouldn’t taste like it did at home. Neither would the gravy on her mashed potatoes.

  One of the benefits of travel was learning that people in different places did things differently. Making gravy without a roux was different, but it wasn’t wrong. Well, okay, maybe Faye’s grandmother wouldn’t have considered it actual gravy, and maybe Faye didn’t intend to eat any of it, but that didn’t mean it was wrong.

  The waitress left their table, paused at the next one and asked, “Would you like some more Pepsi, Ennis?” Now that Faye knew the man’s name, she had a focus for her rising discomfort. Ennis wasn’t raising his voice at his companion. He wasn’t speaking to her at all, but Faye could see his frustration in every motion of the spoon.

  Her own frustration crept up another notch when the old woman began trying to speak. “Ous. I…”

  Ennis took the opportunity to slip in a bite of potatoes when she opened her mouth to speak. Faye watched closely, worried that he was going to choke her with such antics, but the woman seemed fine.

  Again, “Ous…I!”

  Was she saying “ouch”? The words didn’t seem to match his actions, not in a way that would suggest he was hurting her. As for the word, “I,” maybe she was just asserting herself. Or maybe she was asserting her dignity.

  Faye couldn’t decide whether she should intervene, nor what she would say if she did. If she intended to make a scene, then “I think you should feed the lady nicer,” seemed inadequate. She was on the point of doing it anyway, when a tall blur blotted out her view of the wordless little drama.

  Amande had shoved her chair back, leapt to her feet, and positioned herself behind the wheelchair before the woman’s companion could scoop up more of the
potatoes that he was letting drip off her chin.

  Seizing a wheelchair handle with one hand, Amande said, “Come on, Ma’am. If you want to go outdoors to eat, I’ll take you.”

  Then she looked Ennis in the eye and said, “Do you not understand the word ‘outside’ when someone says it to you? I wish my grandmother were still here. I’d feed her potatoes all day long.”

  With her other hand, she plunked the woman’s plate onto the tray fastened across the arms of her wheelchair. Then she snatched the spoon from Ennis and pushed the chair out of the diner at top speed.

  Feeling like the incompetent assistant of an avenging angel, Faye picked up the old lady’s napkin and her glass with its bendy straw. Giving Ennis a withering look, she followed her daughter’s sweeping exit.

  ***

  Ennis LeBecque was startled to see his gravy train roll out the diner door. His Great-aunt Sylvia Marie, known to all of Rosebower as Sister Mama, had kept him on a short leash ever since his mother went into rehab, then disappeared immediately upon release. He had other relatives, some much closer in blood than Great-aunt Sister Mama, but they were all worthless and she had known it. Sister Mama was only semi-sane, even before the stroke, but she had the financial clout that came with being the first root doctor to recognize the potential income to be made from Internet sales. She also had an unswerving devotion to one high-flying ideal: “Family first.”

  This devotion did not make the old lady a pushover. Sister Mama’s family devotion had precise gradations. Grown adults were expected to fend for themselves. On those occasions when they failed, Sister Mama dependably paid her relatives’ bail or sent their landlords a check for the rent, but she never ever gave them money. Unless it was a full-out emergency, grown-ups were on their own.

  Old people were different. When Ennis’ grandmother broke her hip, Sister Mama had helped her find a nursing home that Medicaid would cover. After she’d plunked her sister-in-law into this government-funded prison, she had dependably sent her presents and letters and nice little checks to cover all the things that Medicaid didn’t, but Ennis’ grandmother had never breathed free air again. Ennis wasn’t sure that Great-aunt Sister Mama should get to decide where people lived, just because she was the only family member with an operational checking account.

  If Sister Mama could be said to consider old people as different from all those other people with their hands out, she considered children to be different still. When Ennis was thirteen, his mother had gotten into so much trouble with her dealer that Sister Mama’s physical presence had been required to keep her from being found shot dead in an alley. Once she arrived in Atlanta, Sister Mama had dug around until she found out that beds in rehab centers were not nearly so non-existent as she had been told on the phone.

  Perhaps they were non-existent for regular people, but not so for root doctors who knew how to sway bureaucrats with the proper midnight conjuring and the proper herbal incenses and incantations. Once the recalcitrant bureaucrats had seen the errors in their thinking, Sister Mama had plunked Ennis’ mother in a magically available rehab-center bed. Then she had left her niece to fend for herself after treatment, because adults are supposed to be able to do that.

  Ennis, however, was no adult. He remembered the way Sister Mama used to talk to herself, back when she could talk. That’s what she had done on the day she put his mama where he couldn’t see her. She had talked to herself.

  “So what am I gonna do ’bout you?” She’d been looking at Ennis, but talking to the air. “I can only spend so much on any one relative that’s flat-broke, because I got so many of ’em. But there’s times when it helps a body to be flat-broke. Let’s see what can be done for a boy without two pennies to rub together.”

  By then, she was already the hoodoo queen of the World Wide Web, so her Internet skills were inarguable. A few hours of web-crawling, a few more hours of phone work, and a few nights of midnight conjuring had resulted in a few days spent hauling Ennis from one boarding school to another. Once more, Sister Mama’s persistence and arcane talents had paid off. An elite boys’ school had agreed to take Ennis as a scholarship student.

  Her duty done, Sister Mama had plunked him in an institution full of rich classmates who knew he was a charity case and never let him forget it. For all his years there, she dependably sent him cards and presents and enough money to buy occasional sodas and candy bars, but not enough money to buy drugs.

  Yes, Sister Mama was even smart enough to do the math on addiction. Sometimes he had been able to hoard his money and work out a deal to get just a little taste of the stuff that had ruined his mother’s life, but the options of an impoverished social pariah were limited. Mostly, Ennis had drunk root beer and counted the days until he was a grown adult, able to fend for himself.

  Any reasonable person would have told him to be grateful to Sister Mama for yanking him out of the slums, but Ennis was, and possibly always would be, a self-centered adolescent. He blamed Sister Mama for his mother’s absence, instead of thanking her for keeping his mother alive. He blamed her for his loneliness and, in his mind, he painted her as a woman who stored troublesome people in places where they wouldn’t be troublesome any more.

  When Sister Mama had her stroke, Ennis had been the obvious person to come help her. He’d just collected his associate’s degree, with the kind assistance of the Pell Grant people and Sister Mama, and he’d had time to assess just how horrifying the job prospects for a community college graduate truly were. He’d had no possessions that wouldn’t fit into the asthmatic old car that his great-aunt had bought him for graduation.

  Sister Mama’s body might have been wrecked, but that first stroke had left her mind sharper than a green persimmon. She had seen that Ennis needed a job. She had known that he was educated enough and smart enough to take over her empire. She had also known that she would eventually need the kind of hands-on care that was unpleasant but necessary. Ennis was physically strong, in a slender and wiry sort of way. She had presumed he was grateful to her.

  It was entirely possible that she had presumed wrong.

  Chapter Six

  As Faye and Amande parked the wheelchair at a picnic table behind the diner, Julie brought out their meals.

  “Thank you so much for helping her,” she said, gesturing toward the silent woman, sitting contented in the pale northern sunshine. “Ennis has been behaving uglier to his aunt by the day. He never hits her or does anything to call the sheriff about, but the whole town’s upset about how he treats Sister Mama. God knows what’s happening with her business and her money. He’s probably got power of attorney.”

  As she left, she said, “Dwight—that’s my boss—he says there’s no charge for your meals today. He’s been so upset about Ennis that I imagine you’ll be getting free desserts every time you come in here, forever.”

  So this was Sister Mama, the town’s famed root doctor. Faye had called around after she heard that Myrna was taking the woman’s herbal potions, and she couldn’t find a soul who was willing to say anything against Sister Mama. She was reputed to have cured cancer and made barren women into happy mothers. If the stories were all true, this wizened old woman had conquered the common cold. She could probably cure a rainy day.

  Samuel, who had a rich man’s appreciation of business savvy, had told Faye that Sister Mama was quick to see the business potential in Internet sales of hoodoo paraphernalia. Her wares ranged from mojo bags to hex-cleansing floor washes to graveyard dirt. Unfortunately, it seemed that even Sister Mama couldn’t cure old age nor, unless Faye missed her guess, a serious stroke.

  Faye didn’t like the idea of Myrna taking anything prescribed by a woman in this condition. It seemed impossible that Sister Mama was capable of prescribing anything these days. Did that mean Myrna was taking whatever Ennis wanted to sell her? Faye wouldn’t trust the man to give her an aspirin, much less an unknown number and quantity of unname
d herbs. She mentally penciled an end-of-the-day visit to Myrna into her schedule. Faye wanted to check out Myrna’s health with her own eyes, and the bereaved woman would be needing her friends today.

  Faye and Amande took turns helping Sister Mama with her meal, and the disabled root doctor ate very competently when she wasn’t angry with Ennis. She still couldn’t speak, but Faye was struck by the way she studied Amande’s features. The girl was lovely, yes, but Faye thought Sister Mama saw something else. She wondered what it was.

  After they’d all eaten their fill, they took a moment to enjoy the mild air. Faye couldn’t say she blamed Sister Mama for wanting to eat outside.

  Faye looked up and saw Ennis pausing self-consciously outside the diner’s side door. When he saw that she’d noticed him, he walked over.

  “I apologize for my behavior. Thank you for helping my aunt with her lunch. It’s been…hard…lately. I’ll try to do better.” After he’d said his piece, he’d wheeled Sister Mama away.

  Faye remembered her mother’s and grandmother’s last years. Being needed around the clock was hard and lonely. She had a notion of what Ennis’ life was like, but that didn’t mean she could excuse his behavior.

  ***

  The clock crawled toward quitting time. There was a reason Faye was here, doing work so tedious that her competitors hadn’t bothered to bid on it. Her firm couldn’t afford to be picky, and Samuel had approved a budget that would pay her salary for six weeks. Even better, it would cover clerical help that Amande was well-capable of doing. In this economy, a paying summer job for a seventeen-year-old was no small thing.

  Best of all, the project budget included travel expenses for them both, providentially paying for a trip that she had so wanted to give Amande. She didn’t know where the child would go to college but, as long as Faye had breath in her body, she would go. While they were in New York, they would drive around and look at college campuses, just to get an idea of what they were like. Just to feed her daughter’s dreams.