Husband Rehab (2 page)

Josie remembers a summer morning, maybe when she was seven or eight, still a few years before her mother would abandon her for good. Josie was planting a row of annual bicolor caladium already in bloom. Josie knelt along a shale path that led to the cabin, placing each plant into the holes she’d dug. She heard heels clicking on the stone.

She saw a finely dressed woman striding toward her.

She had not met Lady Dooley yet, but she’d heard about the powerful witch. Lady Dooley was wearing pressed slacks, wide in the hips but narrow at the ankle. She looked stylish in a way that Josie wasn’t used to seeing, buried as she was in the north Georgia hills. This was a woman who probably spent time in Atlanta, hobnobbing with the rich and powerful. She wore a shimmering silk shirt the brightest orange Josie had ever seen.

“Where’s Ellie Treadwell?” Lady Dooley said. “I heard she’s living out here like a hermit.”

“Uh …” Josie manages, standing up respectfully, trowel in her gloved hand. With the other she wiped sweat from her eyes. She was skinny to the point people thought she was malnourished, hair always akimbo from playing in the Birchall woods, usually sweaty, sometimes in bare feet. “I think she’s inside—”

“No I’m not,” Lady Treadwell said, stepping onto her front porch.” Josie heard the slat boards creak. Her grandmother appeared with a smock tied around her waist, one stained from all the brewing. She was a slight woman: barely five feet tall. Shriveled up from too much time in the sun, the skin on her arms and neck hung freely. She’d tied the gray strand of her hair into a bun. But she stood straight and walked firm, even at her age, and though she only had a few years left. “What can I do for you, Lady Dooley?”

“You can tell me where my husband is.”

Josie remembers stepping aside as her grandmother met the woman who was already jostling for control of the coven. She didn’t know it at the time, but a crisis was underway that would see the power shift away from Lady Birchall. Still, her grandmother didn’t bend any knee. She looked the younger woman in the eye.

“He was here. I gave him something … that he asked for.”

The incident stuck in Josie’s mind because at that moment the entire orchestra of noise-making critters in the woods stopped. The cicadas, bullfrogs, the crickets and the rodents all stilled at once. The deadening silence chilled her, as if all the lovely things one finds in beautiful gardens like her grandmother’s was wilting away at record speed. Josie expected the air in her lungs to dissipate and the bright sunshine to fade.

“You did what?” Lady Dooley asked.

“You heard me.”

Lady Treadwell placed her old lady’s hands on her hips in tight, compact balls. She kept her chin high, even though she stood before the most powerful witch in the coven. Josie didn’t know it, of course, but she could feel it. The entire woods could feel it.

“My husband …” Lady Dooley said, taking a slow breath, “is the most difficult man on the planet. I hope you gave him something to … help me with him.”

“In fact, he asked for something to clear his head.”

Lady Dooley took a few rapid steps forward. “I’ve spent years making him pliable … and you gave him something to undo all my trouble?”

Lady Treadwell grunted. “I’m not in the business of fashioning slaves.”

Josie remembers her grandmother turning aside, as if weeding the monkey grass behind the caladium her only worry in the world.

“What are you talking about?” Aunt Emma asks, snapping Josie out of her reverie. “Husband Rehab? What is that?”

“I cast a spell on Shawn. But don’t tell Geri. She doesn’t know. He cleaned up the house in record time. My bet, it’ll last for a few months. By then, hopefully, it’ll become habit. Last night, Geri came home late and looked so happy that the house was spotless, I knew I was onto something.”

“He’s a good husband … except for being messy. Loving husband—”

“But lazy. I know. I fixed it. Don’t you see?”

“You’ve always been good at brewing, Josie. Got the nose for it. Just like your mamma.” Outside the window, the first strollers appeared. Aunt Emma moves in close. “Darryl could sure use some fixing.”

“That’s what I was thinking.” Josie grabs her aunt’s hands. “I can help you. I really can. But I think we should do more. I should do more. Imagine how many wives I can help.”

The bell atop the front door dings. In walks Roxy McCall. She’s over six feet in her heels. With her hair, today she’s adding at least five more inches. Josie sneers at the fake boobs nearly popping out of her blouse. She’s also wearing a skirt that shows off her skinny waist and shapely hips. She’s about as tacky as they come around here. She’s the coven’s leading pain-in-the-butt because she can enchant items to do her bidding. Everyone knows not to cross her. She’s got a mean streak a mile wide.

She also has a husband she’s turned into a slave, the very thing Josie wants to avoid. If wayward husbands can’t remain autonomous human beings and learn to behave properly of their own accord, forcing them isn’t the answer.

“I’m going to help my aunt fix Uncle Darryl,” Josie says. “Fix him the right way.”

“Fix?” Roxy says, shuffling in, forming a circle. “You two finally growing backbones?” She grins, one rule breaker to another. “You gonna make him pop out in boils or something?”

“No!” Aunt Emma says.

“I was thinking something less painful,” Josie says.

“What, exactly, were you thinking?” Aunt Emma asks.
 

Josie winks. “A little unconventional aversion therapy might be necessary.” She glares at Roxy, “But nothing too drastic.”

Roxy snorts. “Good luck. Men are more difficult than that.”

Aunt Emma is hugging Josie. Josie, of course, has big plans in mind. She thinks she can turn this into a profitable business. If she can convince her aunt, she’ll bet she can convince the other members of the coven. But first Uncle Darryl needs to learn how much he really hates the smell of alcohol.

“Please help him,” Aunt Emma says. “Please.”

* * *

Josie spends the rest of the day procuring ingredients. She does have a nose for these things, as her aunt says, and since she’s planning to help Uncle Darryl act right, Josie gets paid to spend the day shopping. Her grandmother’s grimoire full of hand-written notes details how she brewed her spells. Josie is lucky enough to have inherited the same skill, but she prefers to store her spells in the cloud. Yeah, online, where they’re safe if her computer blows up or the house burns down. So she reviews notes on her smartphone and checks off the items one-by-one.

By the time she returns, several shopping bags crowd the backseat of Aunt Emma’s SUV: a roll of hemp twine, four brass pins, a pound of sea salt, two green rubber hoses, a can of sardines, a six pack of Juicy Fruit (she needs an aluminum wrapper), and a genuine silver dollar she had to purchase at the post office. She also had to buy a metal file to shave the silver.
 

“Got it all,” she says as she walks into the store, barely managing all the bags.

Aunt Emma shuffles her bulk around the counter. “Lock it up. Hurry, before someone else comes in.”

“Where’s Roxy? She said she wanted to watch.”

Aunt Emma pauses from peeking inside the shopping bags. “That husband of hers hung up on her. She about lost it. I think she wanted him to do something, and he resisted. He’s in for it now. I bet she’ll wave that magic wand of hers and have him standing with his nose against the wall in their bedroom. Gosh, can you imagine?”

Aunt Emma grabs Josie by the arm and leads her into a back office. It’s a cramped space dominated by a wide desk packed with personal effects. There’s a hot plate on the only metal filing cabinet. A low window looks out on a grassy backyard that runs up to a moss-covered retaining wall. It’s a perfect place for some private brewing.

“Well?” Aunt Emma says. “You gonna get started?”

“What time does Uncle Darryl come home?”

“We have a few hours.”

With a calming breath, Josie begins the mysterious process she’s done since childhood. Like her grandmother taught her, she sets the ingredients on the table. In an organized circle, her eyes roam over them: a handful of salt in a pile, a sliver of aluminum taken from the gum wrapper, and a few pieces of string from the twine. She works by touch, while Aunt Emma watches. She spends several minutes with the file until silver shavings fall in a pyramid the size of a cupcake. It looks like something a toddler might assemble in arts and crafts. She scoops the contents into her hand and presents them to her aunt.

“Where’s that pan?” Josie asks.

“Over here.”

Across from the office, in a small kitchenette, her aunt has heated up a cast-iron cooking pan.
 

“You’re just going to dump it in there?” Aunt Emma asks.

Josie scowls, as if that isn’t all there is to it, although she can’t explain, if pressed, what’s about to happen. She drops everything in the hot pan as if she might fry up some hash browns.
 

“Now, we wait,” Josie says, smiling.

“Until?”

Josie peers into the pan as the material cooks. The noxious smell of burnt twine and rubber fills the kitchen. A small bead, like a red pebble forms. You’d think it’s simply the chemical weathering of one of the objects, but Josie knows better. The proper ingredients brewed by the correct hands invoke a special kind of magic. In some way that she couldn
’
t explain, it works.
 

“Now,” she leans over the forming material, “we wait until it’s just right …”
 

* * *

An hour later, Josie stands in Aunt Emma and Uncle Darryl’s kitchen. It’s one of those new ones with wide counters (granite, of course) and two stainless-steel Kohler sinks, a Bosch washing machine, even a serving cart. Uncle Darryl runs a successful automotive franchise, with five shops in the Piedmont. Their house is big enough to fit two families, although they only have the three kids, two dogs, six parakeets, and an armadillo that keeps visiting the back yard.
 

Uncle Darryl has fallen asleep in his Lazy Boy in front of his huge flat screen TV. He’s just gotten home from work and hasn’t changed out of his blue chambray shirt and tattered khaki pants. He apparently takes a nap before dinner … and his first beer.

Josie pulls the bead from her pocket. It’s soft, like a bit of gum, but not sticky.
 

Aunt Emma hands her a bottle of cold Budweiser with condensation dripping from it.

“He won’t drink it in a glass,” she says, trying to smile, but acting as if she’s about to poison the man she loves.

Josie takes the bottle. “It’s for his own good.”

Aunt Emma nods furiously. Uncle Darryl’s not a bad man, not at all, Josie knows. He does like to have around six beers a night
—
sometimes less, sometimes more. Josie has seen him happily drunk and yelling at the liberal news casters on MSNBC, or whatever shows he watches. He makes jokes too. He’s talkative
—
and argumentative. Lately, it’s been about stem-cell research. Josie guesses he learned that latest bit of information from AM radio, and now he thinks he’s an expert on stem cells and how those liberals out there just want to kill babies to harvest their DNA. Josie’s no science expert, but she foolishly suggested that Uncle Darryl may have it wrong, that some people want stem cells for legitimate medical purposes. For suggesting that bit of heresy, she took an earful.

“Yeah,” she says, “for everyone’s good.”

She drops the concoction in the bottle, which she lifts up into the light. It settles on the bottom and dissolves.

Aunt Emma accepts the bottle. As if she’s carrying a holy relic, she walks to her husband. She gently wakes him and hands over the beer. The ritual appears to be mechanized, as if each one of them has done this a thousand times.

Uncle Darryl takes a big chug, almost finishing a quarter of the bottle. A few minutes later, he sits up as a Fox news show plays about the evils of multiculturalism. He’s talking to the TV in no time.

Aunt Emma waits with Josie in the kitchen. “It’ll work?”
 

Josie nods.

I hope so.

Both women pretend to busy themselves over dinner. The first trip to the bathroom for Uncle Darryl seems innocent enough. He comes back without saying a word. Within an hour, though, he has “puked and crapped” (at the same time), moaning that he must have “eaten something rotten for lunch.” When he feels better, he asks for another beer. He puts it to his nose and jumps out of his chair. He runs for the bathroom, spilling his beer all over the carpet.

“The best form of aversion therapy,” Josie says. “He’ll hate the smell and taste of alcohol for a year. I suggest making him some lemon aid in the evenings.”
 

Both women giggle as Uncle Darryl stumbles out of the bathroom and into his chair. He burps once, then picks up the clicker and switches to the History Channel.
 

Josie feels a wrenching in her gut as she watches him settle into a peaceful relaxation. She can imagine the ghost of her grandmother at her neck, whispering, “Is he a man or machine?” Josie knows the admonition against what her grandmother called strong brewing is still important. Josie just wants to help both of these men and their wives; she wants to provide a helpful kick in the butt. That’s it. She doesn’t want to make men into robots. She wants to take men who love their wives and show them what they do that hurts their wives. That’s it, she thinks. That’s why I never enthrall a boyfriend, never forced one to act right, she thinks. When my last boyfriend cheated, I walk away instead of making him love me. But, we weren’t married …
 

 
Aunt Emma pats Josie on the back. “I can’t believe it. He never switches until he’s done drinking.” She spins Josie around like a top. “Success!”

* * *

Josie waits on the front porch of her sister’s home. It’s late enough that the street is quiet and dark. All the houses on both sides are shut up, cars in the drives or garages, sprinklers off. The sidewalks are empty. The street lights cast yellow cones of illumination, enough that she could walk around the block and feel safe.