Julia's Chocolates (23 page)

I felt my blood run cold.

Caroline’s smile was gone, her tiny hands went cold in mine, and she started to shake. “Your mail.”

“What?”

“Your mail. From the post office. The mail that you receive is bad, Julia. And, again, I’m getting the same reading as last time. He’s coming.
He is coming
.”

S
tory Hour was the talk of the town. More and more mothers and grandmothers and their children and grandchildren were coming. Ms. Cutter had been forced to acknowledge that we needed more space, so the children’s area was expanded. Although Ms. Cutter was very upset to lose the tax-law section, none of the townspeople who had volunteered to help me move the books and shelves seemed the slightest bit concerned.

I also insisted on opening the drapes in the children’s area, and I went to the board and received enthusiastic permission to decorate. I thanked them for the check. They thanked me for my outstanding work.

I must say I felt a little proud.

Lara came in and painted a giant jungle scene on one wall of the children’s section. I next bought beanbags and a couple of huge rugs and blue tables and chairs in children’s sizes. I hung mobiles of jungle animals and the planets. And I set up a reward system. Every time a child finished reading five books, he or she got to color a star and put it on the wall. Soon one wall was filled with stars.

Each evening, while helping Aunt Lydia with the chickens, the pigs, and all the other farmwork, I would make out a plan for the next day’s Story Hour.

One time I read three stories on chickens and roosters. One nonfiction and two fiction books. Aunt Lydia came with me and brought in two chickens and a rooster. The chickens did their part to make Story Hour fun by clucking. Not to be outdone, the rooster cockadoodled. Not once, but eight different times. He was a huge hit. The kids loved it when the chickens pooped on the carpet. Story Hour lasted for almost two hours.

Another time I read a story about a giant chocolate cookie filled with candy that got so big the whole town had to come eat it. I did a cooking lesson, showing the children how to make Mint Chocolate Chunk Cookies. At the end, I passed out cookies I had already baked. Almost every mother there asked for the recipe. Some offered to pay me for a batch of them. I told them I would be selling my chocolate, including the cookies, at the fair.

For another Story Hour I had Stash come in, dressed in his farmer’s overalls and plaid shirt. Stash read two books that featured farms. Then he told stories about animals on his farm: the cat who had to sleep with its paws straight up in the air, the cow who always licked his face when he saw Stash, and the cranky goose who came to his pond each year and chased him.

One day, after a rousing parade at Story Hour, Ms. Cutter marched into our little area, and I felt the children stiffen. I stiffened myself, bracing for a cool, cutting comment about how noisy Story Hour had become, how the crowds were wrecking the sanctity and peace of the library.

“Ms. Bennett,” the librarian said, fiddling with the glasses that hung over her skinny bosom, the tie on her dress making her neck look more chickenish than ever. “I want to talk to you about the parade you led the children on today. There are adults in the library, and they did not appreciate all those children with those silly newspaper hats and instruments parading through the library.”

I groaned. It wasn’t true, of course. Ninety percent of the adults in the library at that time were parents or grandparents of the fifty children who had attended Story Hour. Most of them were also wearing “silly newspaper hats” and had paraded along with their children. The other adults in the library, many of them senior citizens, had stood up along the “parade route” and clapped their hands, cheering on the participants. It had been a beautiful moment.

“The library is a sacred place. A place for learning and knowledge and expanding one’s mind. It is not for creating a ruckus.”

“Ms. Cutter, I appreciate your concern,” I said, holding my chin up. Not because I was particularly brave but because I knew that the vice-president of the library board, who was related to half of the rest of the board, had been bringing her grandchildren to Story Hour for weeks now and loved it. “However, Story Hour is one time a day, for an hour—”

“I beg your pardon!” Ms. Cutter’s voice cut through my sentence like a hot knife slices through ice cream. “This Story Hour is getting absolutely out of control. It goes on for almost two full hours! Two hours of noise and cacophony with children everywhere!”

“But that’s the nature of a children’s Story Hour,” I said quietly. “Children come to Story Hour to read, to learn, to play—”

“To play?” Her tone said that I was about one level up from a half-squished slug. “The library is no place to play!”

“The library is, however, a place to learn to love books….”

“Your insolence knows no bounds, does it, Ms. Bennett? You’re determined to ruin this library for everyone else—”

“I like your pin.”

The small voice, coming from sweet, impossibly quiet Carrie Lynn, stopped both me and Ms. Cutter in our tracks.

“Wh-what?” Ms. Cutter leaned closer to Carrie Lynn. “What did you say, young lady?” She said “young lady” in that intimidating, I-wish-you-would-shut-up tone of voice that adults sometimes used with children.

Carrie Lynn suddenly looked panicked, her little fingers knotting together nervously. “I—” She swallowed hard, her eyes meeting Ms. Cutter’s, then skittering away. She leaned into my side. “I…I like your pin.”

The words came out in a whisper. A tiny, high-pitched, scared little whisper, and then the whole room went as quiet as the inside of a sunken ship. For once, Ms. Cutter was speechless, her mouth opening and shutting, then opening again, like a blowfish, as she stared at Carrie Lynn.

“My pin?”

Carrie Lynn flushed, her face turning red. She turned toward me and wrapped an arm around my waist, cowering behind me as if expecting a blow.

“What pin, Carrie Lynn?” I asked, putting an arm around her bony shoulders.

She pointed.

As if in slow motion, I followed the direction of her little finger to the flowered metal broach on the older woman’s left shoulder. She wore it every day. Inside the middle of the broach were bright blue and purple stones.

Ms. Cutter’s eyes seemed to grow to the size of oranges as she looked through the lens of her glasses.

Then she straightened up. Sniffed. Coughed. Sniffed again.

“I like the flower,” Carrie Lynn whispered, her voice shaking.

I again felt a rush of impotent fury. Why did Ms. Cutter have to scare children? If she didn’t say something nice to sweet, beaten-down Carrie Lynn pretty soon, I might just take it upon myself to knock shelves of books filled with the classics right to the floor.

“I like your pin, too, Ms. Cutter,” Shawn said quietly, now at my other side. “Carrie Lynn and I think it reminds us of this field we saw one time that had a bunch of flowers in it. We saw a rabbit in the field. It was real pretty.”

“Well…I…” The librarian looked even more flustered than before. Again, we saw the blowfish: mouth open, mouth shut; mouth open, mouth shut.

“Well…well…” she fluttered again. “Thank you, Carrie Lynn. Thank you, Shawn.” I saw her neck muscles moving spasmodically. “My mother gave me this broach thirty years ago. She died two weeks after that. It’s my favorite pin, as it was her favorite pin.”

We stood in an awkward circle then, me, Carrie Lynn, Shawn, and Ms. Cutter.

“Put the chairs away when you’re done,” Ms. Cutter ordered, then turned quickly away, her dress swishing behind her. I did not miss the fact that she wiped a tear from her cheek as she walked off, her back ramrod-straight, her low, sensible heels making hardly a tap-tap on the floor, the hairs ripped back in the bun she wore at the back of her head perfectly aligned, as usual.

Later I dropped the kids off at their apartment and waited until I saw them go in, feeling sick at the sight of the black hole they had to live in. I remembered Caroline’s warning. But I had no idea what to do. I had called Children’s Services. They had done nothing, refused to do anything. If I took the kids, the mother would call the police.

I had bought Shawn a sweatshirt and Carrie Lynn a sweater. Carrie Lynn actually dropped her blanket to finger the sweater. I made them wait to put them on until the next day as I didn’t want Ms. Cutter to know I was giving the kids gifts. I had also packed them their dinner.

I worried about what their mother would say about the gifts, but my guess was that she wouldn’t even notice.

The very thought of these children being in danger brought on a minor attack of the Dread Disease. When it was over and I could breathe again, I drove home.

Caroline called the next day, and asked if I wanted to go with her to a neighboring town about an hour away. They had a Goodwill there, and Caroline wanted to shop.

As a child, I had loved Goodwill. I could walk up and down the aisles and think about what I would buy if I had money, how I would combine this or that skirt with this shirt and those heels and that purse. I could not remember getting any new clothing at all until I was in high school and could work and pay for them myself.

I happily agreed to go with Caroline. I had received another check from both the library and the paper route. I always wrote a check out to Aunt Lydia when I got paid. The first time, she refused to take any money, telling me that I had wounded her inner rose, the flower of protection. I left the money on the counter and told her I would tell Stash that in her dream last night she shouted his name.

“You are a pain in the butt, Julia,” she told me, giving me a hug. I hugged her back, grateful that no matter how long I was away from her she always smelled the same. Like vanilla and lavender. “I don’t need the money.”

“And I don’t need the guilt I would feel if you didn’t take it, so take it, Aunt Lydia.”

She hugged me tighter. “You inherited the honest gene from your Great-Great-Uncle Ace. Everyone in town knew that if they gave Ace a dollar, he’d give it back. Any time. Any day. Any year. He grew turnips, and all deals were made with a shake of the hand. Lived to be a hundred and six. Turnips are good for you, girl—now, don’t you forget it. Your little flower will love you for it.”

So I was actually feeling quite wealthy, comparatively, as Caroline and I sped along in her old car to Goodwill. It sputtered and clanked and rattled, but otherwise the ride was smooth. We inserted a CD and sang along with a female country singer about how girls can lie, too. They learned from the experts: men.

I loved that song. Caroline did, too, and we sang as loud as we could, the windows rolled all the way down to the summer sun as we ventured forth on our shopping trip. The next song was about redneck women keeping their Christmas lights on all year long who ain’t no high-class broads. We loved that one, too.

As the Goodwill was about an hour away, we had plenty of time to sing.

When our throats were raw, we pulled over at a local store and bought some pop. “So what is it like to be able to see the future?” I asked, as the car sputtered back to life with a burp and something that sounded much like a fart.

Caroline didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, “Horrifying.”

Yep. That would be a good word for it. I couldn’t imagine having a gift like that, although I don’t really think “gift” is the word for it.

Her hands tightened on the steering wheel, and I was back to wishing we were singing about redneck women.

“I see the future often, but I can rarely place where it’s happening. Sometimes I read about the things I’ve seen in the news, and I feel so ineffectual, so helpless. If I could only warn people, so many lives would be saved, but I can’t.”

“What do you see?”

Her lips tightened before she spoke. “Actually, Julia, I try not to see too much. One reason I do the readings for us each week at our dinners is because it seems when I look ahead on a regular basis, it sneaks up on me less. If I don’t do someone’s readings—like yours, Lydia’s, Katie’s, and Lara’s—if I miss the evening, then I can expect that at least two to three times in the next week, I’ll see something. I’ll see the future.”

“Is it always bad? The visions you see when you haven’t been using your gifts enough?”

“No, it isn’t. Sometimes I see good. I’ll see a child being rescued from a river, the child is crying, but alive. Or I’ll see a man emerging from an operation alive and his wife crying with relief, or I’ll watch a person walking away from a hideous car accident. Those visions all engender huge emotions in people, which is what I think carries them to me. But I see much more negative. Probably because those emotions are so enormously strong, it’s all the layers of civilization stripped away to reveal pain or loss or grief or hate or violence. I get sent those visions so much more.”

“Do you know any of the people you see?”

She was quiet. “Yes. But very rarely. Often I can tell that what I’m seeing is happening in another country. I’ll see Chinese people or Africans or a town that looks like it’s in the South.”

The wind whipped through my hair, and I pushed it back. “Why do you think you get these visions? Why you?”

“My mother can sometimes read minds. My grandmother and her mother could both see people’s past lives. My grandmother told me that I’ve been a peasant, a servant in a castle, a warrior, a hooker, a factory worker, a wealthy socialite, a fortune-teller, a witch, and a nurse in past lives. One of my aunts can move certain things across the room, like lamps and silverware, just by thinking about it. Comes in handy when she’s cooking. One time she lifted a table. She didn’t like one of the women sitting at it, apparently.”