The Three Rules of Everyday Magic

by Amanda Rawson Hill

  “Mom? Why?”

  “Why not?” Grammy puts an apron over her head. “You don’t want her asking about that … your … uh …” she hums. “You know.” She hums some more.

  “My singing?”

  “That’s the ticket. See what I mean with this …” She fumbles tying the knot behind her apron and when she looks at me again I can see part of her is slipping away.

  I try to pull her back. “What’s the magic?”

  She blinks. “Magic. Magic. Oh, yes. I was going to make the cookies. My special cookies. I …” She sits on the stool next to me and fights to bring back the part of herself that’s walking away down some dark path. “I can’t remember. What are my special cookies?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. Yes, you do. How could you forget?” She scrunches her fists up by her eyes. “They were my Tony’s favorites. He had them every day after school and even when he was grown up I’d make them. It was a secret. My secret cookies. Kate, what are my secret cookies?”

  That’s when I know what she’s talking about.

  “Peanut butter,” I say. “Your secret-recipe peanut-butter cookies.”

  “Oh, yes,” says Grammy. “Thank you.” She pats my knee and stands back up, shuffling over to the other side of the counter. She pulls out a few ingredients: peanut butter, sugar, a knife, some measuring spoons. Then stops. “I don’t remember how to make them. Peanut butter, sugar, eggs. But how much? How could I forget this?”

  “Don’t you have a recipe somewhere?”

  Grammy stares down the hallway. More of her is drifting away. Suddenly she whispers, “Yes. A recipe.” Those words seem to reel in the rest of herself. “A recipe! A recipe. Yes, Katherine. I have the recipe. It’s in that box. The picture box I’m sharing with your mother.”

  She walks to her room and I hear the scrape of plastic against the hardwood floor.

  After Dad left, Mom took down most of the pictures in the house because he was in them. She said it hurt too much to look at them. Now our walls have bright spots where sunshine didn’t fade the paint because a picture of us used to be there.

  Mom put some of Grammy’s things in the plastic tub holding those pictures. It’s sort of like a memory box now. But nobody looks at it. I guess some people want to remember and can’t, and some people remember and don’t want to.

  I hear Grammy shuffle through the papers and picture frames. Finally, she emerges with a little square, cut out from a magazine and glued to an index card. The edges are frayed, and it’s all yellow and faded. But there’s a recipe on it. The same secret recipe Grammy never shared with Mom, no matter how much she asked.

  Maybe this is all a big mistake. Will Mom be mad to have the magic cookies she wasn’t ever able to make herself?

  Grammy starts mixing, and I stay close by. I know how fast she can forget what she’s doing, and I doubt magic cookies will be quite so magical if they’re burned black.

  Grammy keeps saying, “I’m going to show you. These magic cookies. They’ll do the trick. You’ll see.”

  “But how will they help? What will the magic do?”

  Grammy wipes her hands on her apron. “Well, we won’t know that until we give the magic away.”

  “Then how do you know it will help?” I still remember all the times Grammy made those cookies and wouldn’t share the recipe with Mom. Mom wouldn’t eat even one. Dad said she was only punishing herself and ate all of them. I think that made Mom even madder.

  “I just do,” says Grammy. “Because I believe.” She turns on the oven light. “Now you sit here and observe and tell me if it isn’t magic.”

  As I watch the balls of dough go from gooey blobs to crumbly cookies, I admit that it does look a bit like magic. But even if there is magic, there’s probably not enough to make Mom forget to ask me if I’m going to sing in the presentation. And I definitely don’t want to tell her I’m not, and see that disappointed look on her face, or hear how much she misses hearing me sing. She was so happy this morning when she thought the music might be coming back.

  I focus extra hard on watching the cookies bake so I don’t have to think about it.

  Mom walks in right after the fourth batch is out of the oven. She stops in the doorway like she’s run into a wall. “Who’s baking?”

  I throw two cookies on a small plate and carry it over, trying to get the magic to her as fast as possible, before she has a chance to talk about school.

  “Peanut-butter cookies,” I say, holding the plate out.

  “Pat’s peanut-butter cookies?”

  I nod and push the plate into her stomach so she has to take them. “Try one, Mom. They’re really good.”

  “I know they are.” She takes the plate but doesn’t eat anything. Instead, she carries it over to the counter, where Grammy is spooning more dough onto another cookie sheet. Mom picks up a warm cookie, flicks off some crumbs, and turns it over to look at the other side. “It looks perfect like always.” But her voice doesn’t sound like she really thinks it’s perfect.

  She finally takes a bite. A tiny one. A nibble. Is it enough magic? If there really are such things as magic cookies, she probably needs to eat a whole one. But she doesn’t. She puts the cookie down, stares at the counter, and gasps. “Pat, is this what I think it is?”

  Grammy turns around. When she sees the magazine clipping with the recipe on it she freezes.

  “Is this your peanut-butter cookie recipe?” Mom asks.

  Grammy slowly wipes her hands on her apron. She looks at the recipe and then at me. She doesn’t look at Mom at all as she says, “Yes. I … um … thought it was time to pull it out again.” She mumbles something, then, “Pass it on,” and more mumbles.

  Mom lays the piece of paper on the counter and reads the whole thing from start to finish. “All this time, I’ve been racking my brains to get my hands on this recipe,” she whispers. “It was in a magazine.”

  “Not just any magazine,” Grammy huffs. “Better Homes and Gardens.”

  “Why?” asks Mom.

  “Have you ever opened a Better Homes and Gardens? They have recipes in every issue.”

  “No. Why are you giving it to me? I’ve been asking for it for years. Last time I asked, you said you’d die before you told me. I believed you.”

  Grammy slides the cookie tray in the oven, sets the timer, and slowly walks around the counter to where Mom is standing. “Family is family, Elizabeth.”

  They’re the same words Mom said when Grammy moved in with us. When Mom said them, it sounded like a duty. But when Grammy says them, it feels like the other half of a twoway promise.

  Mom puts her hand over her heart and whispers, “Thank you.”

  After dinner, Grammy sits at the table with a plate of peanut-butter cookies and doesn’t move. I finish drying a plate and say, “What’s wrong, Grammy?”

  She sighs. “It just doesn’t seem right to have peanut-butter cookies without making some music.”

  I put the plate away. “I thought you never wanted to do that again. Remember?”

  “What?” gasps Grammy. “I love making music. Don’t you remember all those times I played with my Tony? I love it.”

  “But you said …” I stop. Grammy doesn’t remember yelling at Dad and telling him she’s sick of playing the piano and hates singing with him. She doesn’t remember how he was already so sad by that point that he hardly smiled, or how after that, he never smiled.

  A hard, tiny piece of anger that I’d been carrying around with me finally melts away. Because I understand now. She wasn’t the real Grammy when she said those mean things. She was already forgetting. Her anger was to cover up her embarrassment.

  I want to tell her that I forgive her, but if I say that, I’ll have to remind her about what happened a year ago, and I don’t want to do that. When your brain can’t hold all its memories, you should only keep the good ones. Instead I ask, “Do you want to play the piano right now?”

  “Oh
, Kate.” She picks up a peanut-butter cookie. “I’m not sure my hands remember how.”

  “I’ll help.” I turn around and Mom is standing in the kitchen doorway. She’s holding the songbook with the cover falling off. “I know it’s not the same having me play. But it doesn’t feel right without music, does it?”

  Mom sits next to Grammy at the piano. She curls her fingers over the keys. “You want to try, Pat?”

  “No, dear. I’m good.”

  Mom doesn’t ask me to sing with her. She just starts playing an old Beatles song. I tense up as she finishes the intro, nervous to hear the music without Dad or me singing along. Worried how it will make Mom feel. How it will make me feel. But in the space where there’s supposed to be words and singing, a different sound fills the room.

  Whistling.

  Grammy is whistling the tune instead of singing. “My eyes are so bad I can’t read the dang words anymore,” she says between the first and second verse.

  Part of me wants to join in, mix my guitar and voice with the piano and whistling like the butter, sugar, and eggs in Grammy’s recipe. A couple times, I even take a deep breath and open my mouth. But nothing comes out because the thought of singing makes my throat ache, and I don’t want to ruin the moment with tears. The music still wraps around me like a blanket, though. I curl up on the leather recliner and just listen without feeling guilty that I can’t sing along.

  By the end of the night, the plate of cookies is empty, the house is full of music … and I finally know the magic is real.

  Dear Dad,

  I wish you could see Grammy now, see her forgetting. Maybe you’d come home. Maybe, before all her memories are gone, you could have one last night of music and cookies.

  And maybe that would make you happy again.

  Love,

  Kate

  Chapter 17

  I can’t sleep. All I can do is think about Everyday Magic and that it’s real. I want to shout about the magic, and jump on my bed, and run around and give it to everyone. But it’s past my bedtime, so I can’t.

  Instead, I decide to get a drink of water.

  As I creep past Mom’s room, I peek in her door and see her turning her cell phone over and over in her hands.

  I push the door open a crack more. “You should call him.”

  Mom drops the phone like it’s a billion degrees. “Oh, Katydid. You scared me.”

  I lean my head against the doorway and say it again so she can’t pretend she didn’t hear. “You should call Dad.”

  “No, I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  When it was time for me to break my first board, Sensei wrapped my hand and fingers in tape and told me to visualize breaking the board over and over. And then to strike hard and fast, and most importantly, to trust that he would hold the board completely still for me. Sometimes talking with Mom about Dad is like breaking that first board all over again. And so I visualize and visualize. But a part of me can’t shake the feeling that she’s not holding the board perfectly still.

  “What if he’s waiting?” I ask. “What if he just wants to know we want him home? What if he really needs some peanut-butter cookies?”

  “Katydid.” Mom’s hair falls into her face. “He left us. Not the other way around.”

  “But maybe he—”

  “No.” Mom stands up and walks to the door. “Katydid, no. He asked us to leave him alone.”

  But I know Dad wasn’t thinking about peanut-butter cookies when he told Mom that, or he would have made an exception.

  When I go back to my room, I spot the Harrises’ orange cat prowling around our bushes. I watch him slink between shadows and light, his dusty orange fur against the gravel. My fingers itch for something warm and fuzzy to cuddle.

  The first note of Pathétique crashes through the house. It sends a shaking through my body that makes my hands clench into fists. I throw open the window, lean my head outside and feel the cool breeze on my neck.

  “Fred,” I call. “Here, kitty, kitty.” He jumps up onto my window ledge, purrs as I scratch behind his ears, and then hops down, disappearing back into the orchard.

  I sit on my bed, my insides still filled with the shaking and the up-and-down motion of the piano music. There’s no way I can sleep through this. I grab a piece of paper and dump my box of colored pencils onto my bed. After scattering them around, I find the orange one, twirl it in my hands for a moment, and start drawing.

  My hands don’t move like Jane’s. She makes it look easy. Like drawing is just a bunch of quick strokes and dashes that all of a sudden form into a picture of something. I can’t draw like that. I have to go slowly, carefully. I close my eyes and imagine Fred. The orange face and orange eyes. The way his ears flick at every noise.

  I stop drawing to examine the face on the paper.

  It looks pretty awful, but I keep going anyway. Maybe I just need to color it in. First the bright orange like a sunset. Then the yellowish stripes.

  I stop.

  It’s not quite right.

  Maybe some red. I add red around the yellow stripes.

  Now it looks even worse.

  I groan and pick up the whole piece of paper, ready to throw it away. But then a thought pops into my head. What would Jane do with this picture? It’s not hard to come up with an answer. I pull out each colored pencil and add more stripes. Blue stripes, pink stripes, purple stripes, until my picture is no longer of an orange tabby cat, but a rainbow cat. The kind of cat Jane would love.

  I gently fold it up and put it in my backpack just as Mom plays the last notes of Pathétique.

  Dear Dad,

  Sometimes I wonder why we say you’re the one with depression when Mom and I are the ones being flattened into the ground.

  Kate

  Chapter 18

  In the morning, when I get to school, I search for Jane to give her the picture. But I notice Sofia first. She isn’t standing with Marisa. She’s sitting next to the wall by herself. I don’t know what’s going on, but I can’t let an opportunity like this go to waste.

  I sit down by her, my backpack scraping against the wall. “Hi.”

  “Oh, hi, Kate.” Sofia squirms a little before settling back into her crisscross-applesauce position. The purple patch over her knee points toward me.

  “Where’s Marisa?”

  “She has a dentist appointment.”

  “Cool.”

  Sofia’s eyes dart back and forth between me and the ground. “I’m really sorry I told Marisa about your grandma. I didn’t know it was a secret, or I swear I wouldn’t have told.”

  I sigh. “I know.”

  “How is she?” Sofia asks, leaning forward so she can see my face better. “Your Grammy.”

  “She’s good.” While we talk, everything inside of me feels like a cup of hot chocolate. “You should come and see her. Say hello.” Sofia opens her mouth to respond, but I rush on before she can say no. “I know you have Annie rehearsals today. But maybe on Saturday or Sunday. What do you think?”

  “That sounds nice.”

  That hot-cocoa feeling inside me keeps building. I let part of it out by clicking the toes of my orange tennis shoes together. “I’ve missed you, you know.”

  Sofia leans back against the wall. “I know.”

  I’m sure she’s about to say it, too. It has to be there in her heart just aching to come out. But instead, the bell rings. “Oh, better go in,” says Sofia.

  She gets up and leaves me there with all my words sitting and flopping on the ground, like a fish gasping for air.

  She didn’t say she missed me, too. Was that on purpose? Or did she just forget?

  A hand reaches down. It’s Jane. She stuffs a piece of paper into her back pocket and helps me up. “Going to school today?”

  “I guess.”

  She’s still wearing the orange hat I gave her. “Nice hat,” I say. Jane taps it. “I love it. Parker told me you made it! That’s so cool.”

  “Yeah.
” Then I remember the picture from last night. I swing my backpack off my shoulders and pull it out. “I drew this. I thought maybe …”

  Jane unfolds it like she’s ripping open the wrapping paper on a birthday present. She stares at it for a minute before breaking into a huge smile and turning the picture around. “This is totally what I’d look like as a cat.”

  “It’s not as good as what you can do.”

  Jane shrugs. “It’s just a different style is all. More geometric.”

  “It has lots of mistakes.”

  “That’s what makes it art,” replies Jane. “My mom says that if something looks perfect, it’s not really art. You might as well just take a photograph and not waste all that time. And she would know. She went to art school.”

  For a second I wonder if Jane would say the same thing about mistakes if she could see my life. Would she call it art?

  We walk in the doors and put our backpacks in our lockers. Right before we enter the classroom Jane adds, “So are you still feeling good about karate for the presentation?”

  Sofia waves at me from her desk, and for a moment I wonder if singing would make everything between us the way it used to be again, instead of being as tricky and frustrating as bar chords.

  I laid my pointer finger down as flat and as hard as I could over the guitar strings. My tongue stuck out of my mouth in concentration. Deep breath. Placing my other fingers where they were supposed to go, I closed my eyes. I’d been working on playing this bar chord for three weeks. My hand shook from pushing down so hard. I lifted my pick into the air like a magic wand and strummed the strings.

  The guitar buzzed, half the notes coming out tinny and wrong.

  “Dang it!” I yelled, pushing my guitar off my lap and onto the floor. It fell with a crash that echoed with music. I turned to Dad sitting on the couch. He was going to kill me, treating my guitar like that.

  He was looking at me, but his face didn’t change. He didn’t move, or flinch, or say one word.

  I picked up my guitar from the ground, watching him, and wondered for a moment if he could hear or see me at all.