Mulberry Wands (8 page)

Finally, they reached the final turn, and the
Allies declared victory.

A collective sigh escaped, then laughs and
grins as they all replayed the game. Al asked if she wouldn’t mind
coming back next week, and she said “perhaps,” one word which
pretty much guaranteed that the place would be full.

Griff drifted reluctantly towards the door
with the other men, wondering if he would see her again and how he
could possibly ask her with all the other guys around chatting her
up. He was just about to give it up for lost when she pinched his
sleeve with her fingers and pulled him aside.

“Come have coffee with me?”

“Coffee?” he asked. He didn’t drink coffee
late at night, but he thought he might start, if that was what she
was into.

“You don’t drink?” she asked. “You are
Mormon?” When she said it, it sounded like “maaarmun?”

“I like coffee. Let’s go.” He offered her his
arm, regretted it as being dorky a second later, then was glad he
did as she laid her slim fingers over his elbow.

They walked across the street to the Black
Bean, a coffee shop that had been converted from an old bank. The
drive-thru was still intact, and used as such, the vault had been
converted into a study room, and a breezeway connecting the offices
held tables for a makeshift patio. He was a little too slow to open
the door for her as she walked inside. She ordered a double
espresso, and he ordered the same thing, and then finagled it so
that he paid for both of them so it would feel a little more like
he’d asked her out on a date.

They sat at a table with their espressos.
Someone had left a newspaper on the table, but Griff moved it
because he couldn’t look at words without reading them (the way
some people were with television.) He wasn’t very good at small
talk, and hoped that Fallon would say something, but she just
stared at him with her dark eyes and sipped her espresso.

Griff waited. Then he cleared his throat and
searched for something to say, but found nothing. His gaze wandered
towards the discarded newspaper. Come on, man, think of
something.

He cleared his throat. “So, um, that was
really great tonight. Where do you usually play games?”

“There is no usual.” Fallon sipped her
espresso.

“Oh.” Griff felt his palms sweat. “I go there
every week, if I have the time. It’s nice to see new faces now and
then.”

Fallon was silent, as if she was waiting for
him to finish. She didn’t smile, but she didn’t seem like she was
unhappy either.

Griff felt his face freeze into a dumb grin.
He didn’t feel like he was talking to a friend of a friend, trying
to sell a wand. That, he could do. Being with Fallon also didn’t
feel like talking with customers about where they wanted their
shelf installed. He could do that too. Being with Fallon felt like
trying to lecture in front of a crowded auditorium, something he
had done once and never again. It was her silence that made it
difficult. Conversations were easy. Monologues were not.

“So, um, what kind of television shows do you
like to watch?’

“I do not watch television.”

Pause. Smile. Sip. Silence.

“I must know information about Susan
Stillwater,” Fallon said.

“Who?”

“A mage. She lives not far from you. You deal
with mages.”

Griff shook his head. “Never heard of
her.”

Fallon frowned, and that was the end of the
conversation.

Pause. Smile. Sip. Silence. Griff decided to
call it off.

“Well, maybe I should go.” He got up and
gathered his trash. “Maybe I’ll see you around sometime.”

“I am sorry to see you go.” Fallon laid a
hand on his arm. “I have enjoyed your company. I am new to town,
and want to meet new friends, but it is difficult. Humans are
difficult for me.”

“No, no, you’re fine,” he said.

“When I’m playing the games, I see my armies
and everything is clear, but when I’m trying to read a man’s face,
I don’t understand.”

“I think you’re cute,” he said. “And I want
to see you again soon. May I have your phone number?”

“I don’t have a phone yet.”

“I’ll give you mine.” He tore a slip off the
newspaper and fumbled for a pen. “Some friends of mine are getting
together next week to play the new Halo. You would certainly be
welcome. Thursday, sevenish. I could pick you up?”

“Meet me at the game store,” she said.

“Great. Yeah.”

Fallon lapsed into silence again.

Griff mumbled some goodbyes and walked
outside.

He’d bought an umbrella, a large black one
that created an octagonal shadow just deep enough for him to walk
down the street under, if he concentrated. He’d been back in
society for a month.

He’d managed to find a job as a janitor. He’d
never had a problem with hard work, having worked more or less
continuously since he was sixteen. He’d seen school as a waste of
time, and had only graduated high school because his mother forced
him to.

His family had come to Phoenix when Paul was
a child because they heard there was work there and the living was
cheap. Before that they’d lived in Michigan, but he didn’t remember
it at all. His mom was a nurse, and she openly resented being a
working mother. She dressed him, she cut his hair, she made sure he
got baths and good food and did his homework and had a present
under the tree and a cake on his birthday. She took care of him
like he was one of her patients, capably, effiiciently, with no
hint of affection. Paul knew why. He had disappointed her. She saw
in him all the faults of his father, with none of the charm.

His father was a handsome, charismatic man,
and when he talked to you he convinced you he was capable of
anything, even well past the point at which he failed to prove it.
He broke promises to everyone but Mom, and even to her he broke
one. Dad called himself a musician, but what that meant was that he
played the guitar on street corners when he wasn’t taking odd jobs
or hustling for cash.

Mom once said that she was blissfully
grateful that Dad chose her from among all the girls who adored
him. He hadn’t quite understood that, because it seemed his dad
liked to choose a lot of girls when one of them happened into his
life. But Mom explained that it didn’t matter, because it was her
that Dad always came home to, no matter how long he’d been gone. He
didn’t go home to those other girls.

“Going to Flag to play for a couple nights
with the band,” he’d say, guitar slung over his shoulder. “I’ll
come home to you.”

“See that you do,” Mom would always reply.
She never told him not to go, even though Mom always got angry when
he was “touring” as he put it. The gigs never paid much, and
sometimes Mom would have to look for extra work to pay off the tab
in some bar in Prescott or Tucson he’d run up while performing
there, but she never complained about him once he was back. When he
was home, everything was fine. She didn’t resent the bills so much
as she resented him leaving.

One time he was gone for two weeks. Mom’s
friends and Dad’s bar buddies whispered that they thought maybe
he’d met some showgirl and gone to try his luck in Vegas. Mom just
pressed her lips together and said nothing.

He thought she was angry then, but when the
trooper showed her the crumpled license plate and asked her to
identify the body, she got angrier than he’d ever seen her. She
stayed angry for years. Dad wasn’t ever coming back, when he said
he would. A man who didn’t keep his word wasn’t worth spit.

Paul didn’t get along with his mom very well
after that. She’d taken out an insurance policy on Dad, which was
generous enough that it meant she didn’t have to work for a few
years. That had been a mistake, as the structure of getting up and
putting on her public face was the only thing keeping grief and
anger from hollowing her out. She stopped going out, just sat at
home and watched soaps and game shows all day.

In just a year, it ruined what was left of
her personality. She became bitter, gloomy, difficult to live with
even if one were kind and sympathetic. Impossible to live with if
you were a shallow and angry young man with better things to do
than hang around with his old lady, getting into fight after fight
that started with a sardonic word and ended with screaming and
slammed doors.

Paul and Carlos were nearly inseparable in
those days, and he stayed at Carlos’ house as often as he could.
Paul took jobs whenever he could find them, and when he couldn’t,
he hung out in the bar with friends, drinking slowly so that his
pay would last a little longer. He didn’t touch his half of the
insurance money. He’d already planned on using that money for
something big, he wasn’t sure what yet. He’d been thinking
something like a car and a trip around the world, until the war
started to loom large in their television and he decided to buy a
one-man college ticket out of the draft.

Mom said he used her home like a flophouse,
crashing there just long enough to get back on his feet and go out
again. That was true. She said other things too, equally true and
more unkind, until Paul realized he was too old to live under a
roof that wasn’t his. One night after a long and bitter spat, he
packed his things and left, swearing that he was going to go away
and never come back.

“See that you do,” she said.

It took him almost two decades to break that
promise.

In 1984 the city had changed so much as to be
unrecognizable, and so had Mom. She had altered the course of her
life while he was in the light, gone down further and bounced back
up on her own. When he came back into the darkness again and looked
up her new address, she was living with another man, newly married,
with a couple step-kids. He’d been wearing the exact same clothes,
which is why he wasn’t surprised she thought he was a ghost.

Apologizing cost less than he thought it
would.

She forgave him, and apologized for being
less of a mother than he needed, and suddenly, they were like two
strangers on a bus saying sorry for bumping into each other. The
emotions that had bound them had been severed so completely that he
didn’t even feel regret anymore. He said goodbye, for good this
time. She went back to her new life, and he went back into the
light.

Mom died a few years later. There were
hundreds of people at her funeral, none of whom he knew.

He had left the earth, and the earth had
healed itself of his passing. It was a frightening, exhilarating
freedom to know that your loose ends have been tied and that you
never had to leave the light ever again if you didn’t want to. The
owls had a name for when that happens. They called it “the day when
the shell and the nest that comforted you were crushed and
scattered like the bones of a mouse.”

At least, that was how the translators said
it in English. Maybe it sounded different in owl.

It was Saturday, and he spent it the way he
had spent every other free day: wandering around downtown hoping
against hope that he would run into Susan again. He’d even gotten a
charm to help him, a little bundle of mouse fur and bones that one
of his senpai had given him. It looked like something she coughed
up, but it must have had some magic in it, because as he crossed
Fifth Avenue he saw Susan crossing the street.

“Susan!” he shouted, almost dropping his
umbrella in his excitement to see her again.

Susan turned and saw him. A quick flicker of
joy played over her features, but almost immediately after that her
face closed into disgruntled irritation. She’d been carrying a
backpack slung over one shoulder, and she angled her body so it
shielded her from him. Paul was surprised by how much that
stung.

Susan was not the sort of woman he would have
dated, had he been able to choose anyone. He liked lighthearted,
fun girls, especially those who were hip to the concept of free
love. Susan dressed like a schoolmarm, and she was one of the most
cynical people he’d ever met. She had a great figure, with curves
in all the right places, but she hardly smiled at all. Still, he
knew that to win his way into her confidence, he’d have to pretend
to like her. And in order to pretend to like her, he had to find
the things he actually did like about her, and focus on those.

First of all, he liked that she was shy about
being a mage. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who could
practice magic, but he’d never met anyone who could do anything
that looked like real mage-craft before he’d seen his senpai turn
from a woman into an owl. He’d met people in high school who said
that they could cast spells to make their grades higher, and when
he and Carlos had the job baling alfalfa, there was a woman among
the work crew whom everyone said was a brujera. She had smoldering
eyes and the ability to make men stop working and stare at her.
He’d never seen her curse anyone, or seen anyone get healed either,
though a few men got into fights over her and one got fired.

The owls insisted that Susan wasn’t just a
one-spell Annie, selling her anti-mosquito charms at a flea market
table, she was a hereditary mage, a witch and thaumaturge from a
long line. Why hadn’t she said anything about that at the bar?
Instead of bragging about it, or threatening him with it, she hid
this ability of hers, even going so far as to pretend she didn’t
see a bramblemae when it turned invisible. Was she ashamed of this
ability? Maybe mage-craft had become unpopular in the past few
decades. People had changed in so many other ways.

“Susan, I’m sorry I didn’t call you. I
accidentally washed your number off my arm.”

“Uh huh,” she said, as though she didn’t
believe him.

“I’m so glad I ran into you again!” He
grasped her arm. She started to pull away, then stopped. “Let’s go
have a drink.”