Julia's Chocolates (5 page)

“Julia, honey—” she began.

“Just tell me. It can’t be worse than what I have now.”

“I see blackness. A rim of black around the purple. All around you. It’s a warning.”

“A warning?” Fear danced its way from my toes to neck, and I felt my heart start to palpitate again, my hands filling with blood that was filled with chunks of ice. My unknown disease, triggered by stress.

I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get a breath.

“Someone hates you.”

I nodded.

“Be careful.”

I nodded again. “But what about the purple you’re seeing?”

“It has something to do with chocolate,” Caroline said seriously. “When the chocolate comes, your whole life will change. It’s the impetus.”

Suddenly my breathing stopped, then started again. Had she said “chocolate”? My heart stopped rushing, stopped racing, the ice melted in my veins, the curious blackness that often obscured the edges of my vision when this mystery disease attacked started to clear.

“You’re on the road to chocolate,” she told me, her mouth grim. “And there is no way to veer off course.”

“Got it,” I breathed, trying not to laugh. “Watch out for chocolate.”

“That’s right,” Caroline said, holding my hands in hers, her eyes serious. “Watch out for chocolate.”

I
f I could jump into the sunrise I’m sure all my problems would be solved.

I thought about this while I watched the sun peek above the row of blue mountains in the distance. The sun was the color of egg yolks, the pinks and oranges around it like cotton candy and squished oranges.

Part of me knows that I am losing my mind, but I am proud in a weird sort of way that I can lose it while still appreciating nature’s beauty.

I pushed my hand over my hat, squishing it down on my curls. It was the crack of dawn, and I was feeding Aunt Lydia’s chickens. I hadn’t showered yet, and I was positive I stunk like chicken shit. I also had wet mud sliming down my legs and hay all over my plaid shirt, which hung almost to my knees, because I slipped when I was petting the piglets. They’d all gathered around at once, and I’d lost my balance.

Although I slept well the night of Breast Power Psychic Night, I did not sleep the next two nights for more than a few hours, and when I did, I dreamed of Robert chasing me with a pickax.

A pickax is an unusual object. It looks mean and nasty. But there it was. I was not surprised in my dream to see Robert holding that pickax. Nor did it particularly frighten me. What frightened me was that Robert was smiling. A smile that was so gentle, so endearing, it made me feel sick with high-octane panic.

In my dream I started running. You know how in your dreams when you run, you just can’t move, and the person who is chasing you catches up with lightning speed, and the reason you can’t run is because your legs are all tangled up in your sheet, and you’re sweating, a river of water gushing down your face?

It was not like that at all. In these pickax dreams, I ran. So fast, so hard, so long. I hid around buildings and waited. Robert would appear, pickax above his head, and grinning. I would turn at the last minute before my imminent death, run again, this time hiding behind a bridge, and there he would come again. Smiling. So gentle. So endearing. And he’d swing. He’d miss me by inches, and I would sprint at high speed to the country, and there, behind a tractor, he’d find me, and he’d still be smiling.

This went on until he finally got me. I saw my mother laughing in the distance, her dyed blond hair flying behind her. My father was on his motorcycle. He sped away.

I woke up cold—freezing, in fact—my whole body shaking so hard I grabbed the pink comforter on the bed and wrapped myself up like a caterpillar. A very scared caterpillar.

After ascertaining he was not near, that this was not another hiding place, I willed myself to breathe again, in and out. Then, when that didn’t work, I gave up. I picked up a book on tending roses next to my bed and read. I read every single word. Forcing myself to concentrate. I learned about fertilizers, traditional versus organic, and all kinds of rose bugs, and different types of soil, and how to water your roses.

At some point I fell asleep, and in my next dream Robert was chasing me through a rose garden with that same pickax in his hand. In his other hand he carried a book on roses. I woke up with the rose book on my chest, the sunrise peeking through the wooden slats of my bedroom window.

Deciding I had had enough nightmares, I got up, dressed in a couple of old shirts Aunt Lydia kept in the white wicker furniture chests in the room, and headed out to the barns.

I knew Aunt Lydia was there already. She needed only a few hours of sleep a night, said sleeping was boring and she could get absolutely nothing done in bed. “After I’m dead I’ll have plenty of time to sleep. Right now I’m alive, and I’ve got things to do.”

Plus, 370 hungry chickens.

Aunt Lydia sold the eggs to the local store in town and to two stores in neighboring towns. People often called her “The Egg Lady.” She loved it. Every day, for hours and hours, she would work with her chickens. Picking up their eggs, cleaning out the barns, making sure “the ladies” had time to run and play in special areas she had gated off for them.

She sent me to the smaller barn at first when she saw me. She simply pointed, and I knew where to go, and I trudged through to the barn after a short detour to the pigpen. Melissa Lynn snorted her way over and licked my hand. I bent down and put my hands around her neck. She nuzzled my face, snorting happily. The piglets snorted, too, and I laughed.

The laughter felt good, freeing, as if it had been held down by a lead lid and chains for years. I gave them all another hug, fell on my butt in the puddle, and the piglets snorted away, already busy with their day, things to do, troughs to eat out of, mud to roll in. The life of a pig is very busy, you know.

When I stood outside the barn—painted purple, of course, for good luck and good sex, Aunt Lydia had said—I could hear “the ladies” clucking, soft and comfortable, as if they were snoozing.

Then, as if they had a sixth sense and knew I was there and freedom and food were only seconds away, their clucking took a new turn, sounding shrill and strident, as if someone were dropping their bottoms into a pail full of ice and giving them a little shake.

I opened the barn door.

Shocked, I could only stare at what seemed like a million chickens flying out the door, their mellow clucking changing to high-pitched squawking. When one flew at my head, I ducked, stood again, then had to lean to my right to avoid another chicken, then to my left, then back down again.

Chicken after chicken flew out of that barn. I could almost hear their commentary: “Who the hell is that? She didn’t open the door right! Where’s Lydia? What is this barn coming to, when the servants quit?”

When the stampede was over, the ladies settled and pecked at the ground, I ventured into their domain. Lydia had told me the night before where many of the eggs would be. She had painted different bookshelves bright colors and lined them up against the walls or laid them flat against the wood chips and hay. She always put a golf ball on the shelves so the chickens would think they were looking at a real egg and, as she said, feel comfortable about dropping their insides.

The chickens loved it, laying eggs every day. When the chickens were too old and not laying anymore, Lydia gave them away to a group that would send fresh chicken breasts out to women’s shelters and homeless places in the city. She hated sending chickens away and often kept them long after they were good for egg-laying.

On the day her friend Albert brought his truck around to transport the older chickens to the Chicken Slice and Dice business, as she called it, she would always help load the chickens, blowing them kisses, hugging them tightly, then go to bed for the rest of the day and cry and grieve as if she’d given away her best friends.

But the next day, it was business as usual. Did I mention that Aunt Lydia is a hard-core businesswoman?

So I went through the bookshelves and the nests, then looked for the “secret piles,” as Lydia calls them—places where the chickens all like to lay their eggs. Every so often, she’ll find a new “secret pile.”

This, I think, is the ladies’ way of keeping secrets. They all lay their eggs in some nook or cranny—between the bookshelves, behind them, anywhere—and finally Aunt Lydia will find the hoard. Usually there’s about seventy eggs by that time, and even as she’s pulling them out and putting them in her baskets, the ladies will wander over and lay more eggs.

So the secret gig is up, but the ladies know it’s a good place to relieve themselves, so they carry on a bit more.

I heard Aunt Lydia come in the barn.

“Darlin,’ Julia,” she yelled. “Saw the chickens flying at your face a bit ago. Too bad I didn’t have my camera. Now wouldn’t that be dandy? We could win a million dollars on one of those TV shows.”

“The ladies were a little anxious to get out today.”

“The ladies are always anxious to get out. They don’t do much, but what they do they’re used to doing. They like routines. Oh, now”—a chicken pecked at her hand when Lydia reached in to get the egg—“don’t be hormonal, Tizzy.”

Lydia names all the chickens as she goes. Who could remember all those names anyhow?

“There ya go, Jessalynn,” she soothed as she took another egg from yet another late-morning riser, not so eager to get outside today. “This one is much kinder than the other, but I prefer Tizzy.”

“You prefer Tizzy?” I saw a white egg sticking out of hay bunched together in a small cubbyhole created by a miniature bookshelf. I dug through the hay and found another “secret loot” area. I popped fifteen eggs into my basket.

“Yes, I do. Tizzy has spirit. She has a temper. She knows what she wants and what she doesn’t. When she doesn’t like what’s going on, she snaps. Yep. I like her.”

We stared at the two ladies. Tizzy shook her head a bit, Jessalynn settled down in her nest. “Anyone who thinks chickens don’t have personalities is wrong. We got the mean ones, the nice ones, and everyone in between in this barn. It’s a microcosm of a woman’s life, only the ladies shit out in the open and human women don’t drop the eggs from their ovaries on the floor each morning.”

I nodded. “We women generally like to keep our eggs close to home.”

“Darn right we do.”

We continued digging through the barn, silence settling on us, familiar and warm. I brushed hay and, undoubtedly, chicken shit out of my hair as I bent under a shelf to grab more eggs.

“I’ve had to get more roosters out here since you came last. But not
too
many. I learned my lesson years ago about roosters. Don’t get enough chickens, and those roosters will run the ladies into the ground with all the matin’ they do. They hop on the ladies’ backs, hump around, and when they’re through, they walk right over them. Almost every rooster will stomp on the lady’s head on his way out and not think a thing of it.”

“That’s so like a man,” I muttered.

“Damn straight it is. Some men will do the foreplay, but most of ’em don’t really want to. They just want to be like roosters. Hump ’em, walk out the door.”

“Personally, I don’t want any more roosters in my life. I’ve been stepped on the head once too often.”

“Yes, you have, but your head is done getting stomped on!” Aunt Lydia spread her arms out wide. “The world is sending you good karma, darlin’, and a head stompin’ is not in your future.”

“Always nice to hear. Thank you, Aunt Lydia.”

“Now, take a look at these eggs.” Lydia pointed behind a bookshelf painted blue at a hoard of eggs. About twenty of them.

“Chickens hide things. They like to keep secrets. Like these here eggs in their little secret hiding places. Chickens are like women in that respect. We all have secrets, some small ones that aren’t really a big deal. Some we’re ashamed about.” She bent down and hugged a chicken to her like it was a baby. “Some we love having because we can visit them when we’re having a rotten day and remember something we shouldn’t have done but did anyhow. Those are the most interesting. We
know
we should feel guilty, so guilty that our insides should be burning up and smoke should be rightfully spewing from our ears, but at that moment in our lives, what we did was right. It was wrong, too, of course, deliciously wrong, or it wouldn’t be a secret, but deep in the heart we don’t regret it.”

I didn’t know exactly what she was referring to, but I knew about secrets. I wish I didn’t. I’ve known all about the worst type of secrets since I was four. Secrets always hurt. When I was a child, anytime a man told me he wanted to share a secret with me I knew I was gonna get hurt. No other way out. The boyfriends who paid a lot of attention to me from the start were always the worst.

When I was older, I got smarter. When one of my mother’s boyfriends said he wanted to share a secret with me, I’d leave. Anytime my mother took on a new boyfriend, I’d start looking around for places to sleep. I found out where the shelters were, looked for hiding places in parks under trees that I could safely sleep under, and figured out ways to stay in the town’s library after hours, which was never too hard. I’d read books all night. I’d get to know the neighbors, too—feel out where I could go in case of emergency.

“Speaking of secrets, Julia, my dear…” Lydia turned toward me. She was wearing the same type of flannel shirt as me, her gray braids piled under her cap, the tilt of her head proud and strong, as always.

“Whenever you’re ready to talk, I’m here.”

I swallowed hard. Swallowed hard again. Looked down. I felt like a kid. Felt as I always had when I’d come to Lydia’s farm for the summer, relieved beyond belief that I was with her, that I had escaped, if only for a while. I moved the egg basket from one hand to another as emotions roiled through me—fear, worry, pain, more fear.

“Jellybean Julia,” Lydia said my nickname as soft as chicken feathers, and pulled me into her arms.

Jellybean Julia bent her head and cried.

He was huge.

Absolutely huge.

Not fat at all, but huge.

Tall, with shoulders as big as a car and a chest wider than a pillow.

And he smiled at me.

From the start I gave Dean Garrett a lot of credit. That huge man with his gold and white hair and his weathered, tanned skin, and his bright blue eyes that actually looked right at me instead of skittering away like most men who lose interest in me as soon as they’re done marveling at my boobs.

He didn’t laugh when he saw me in all my muddy glory, which was another point in his favor, but the sight of a man that big, that strong-looking, made my heart leap a bit with fear. I have never been comfortable with men, except for Stash, and after my experience with Robert and my mother’s “friends,” any man who looked like he could squish my face into gel made me particularly nervous.