A Constellation of Roses Page 6

  “You’re staying?” Ember asks, laying down her fork.

  “For now,” I reply.

  Six

  IT’S MORNING WHEN I REALIZE what the stars were telling me last night. All my life I’ve felt unseen, forgotten. But when I gazed up at the stars, they were looking right back down at me. I never felt so visible in my life, as if the universe was telling me, There you are, Trix McCabe. Abandoned. Thief. Drifter. We see you now.

  It’s both beautiful and frightening to feel like you’re being seen, truly, for the first time.

  I don’t think I like it.

  I settle in at the bottom of the attic stairs, the door barely cracked open, to learn the routine of the McCabe women on their day off. From this vantage point, I have a clear view of the staircase that leads to the second floor, and no one can go up or down without me noticing. This attention to detail, to routines, to little quirks, is one of the things that has kept me alive for the last seventeen years.

  Auntie, having retired to her bedroom while Ember and I ate pie last night, rises at seven and goes downstairs wearing a floral robe, her gray hair in two braids down her back. At seven thirty, she goes outside. The rest of the house is silent. They must be sleeping in.

  Thinking the coast is clear, I see my opportunity to sneak down to use the only bathroom near the kitchen, treading carefully on the ancient, creaking staircase. I round the corner and tiptoe through the living room and dining room, to the bathroom that hides neatly behind a narrow door between the dining room and kitchen.

  I nearly jump out of my skin when I see Mia at the kitchen work table, placidly sipping coffee like she’s been waiting there all night for me to have to pee. It’s then that I notice the back staircase that leads down to the kitchen. Damn it, I can’t believe I missed that.

  “Good morning!” Mia chirps, clearly thrilled to have me all to herself.

  I nod, still unsettled by how she got down here without me knowing, and dart into the bathroom.

  As soon as I come out, Mia accosts me about going thrift shopping for some new clothes.

  “I want to stay here,” I reply.

  “Would you like something to eat? Let me make you breakfast.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  If she’s frustrated, Mia doesn’t show it. She keeps smiling, and I back away slowly, as if sudden movement might startle her. Her cheerfulness is unnerving. I creep back up to my hiding place to see what else unfolds.

  When Auntie comes back inside with eggs from their chickens at eight o’clock, she says something to Mia about Mr. Ruiz coming over to harvest the corn on the fields over by Ruger Creek before she settles herself in front of the television, the sound cranked to a deafeningly high volume.

  At exactly nine o’clock, the house phone rings, and Mia answers it before the second ring can wail, hissing at Auntie, “Shhh! Turn the TV down!” So Mia was not just waiting for me, she was waiting for a call.

  I lean as far forward as I dare, barely inching open the attic door farther to hear exactly what’s being said.

  “Hello, Ms. Troy. Yes, I’ve been waiting for your call. Things are great.

  “Uh-huh, we’ll enroll her on Monday like we agreed.

  “She’s all settled in her new room. I thought she’d have more things with her. Clothes and the like.

  “Uh-huh.

  “Uh-huh.

  “No, of course it’s not a problem. We’ll go shopping today.

  “Yes, of course. Yes, I’m aware that shoplifting has been a problem in the past.

  “We’re so happy to have her.

  “Yes, I’ve got the home visit in my calendar. We’ll be glad to see you again.

  “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  When Mia hangs up the phone, she tells Auntie with a forced cheeriness, “I think that went well. I’m a little nervous about the home visit, but I’m sure things will smooth out by then, right?”

  Auntie only grunts in response.

  I don’t blame her.

  By ten o’clock Ember and Mia leave to go shopping, and Auntie is fossilized on the couch for a day of binge-watching made-for-TV movies. I listen absently to the sounds of dramatic montages and commercials for laundry detergent and minivans.

  By noon, I’m bored enough that I return upstairs to wander around the attic bedroom, looking for pieces of Connor. I doubt I’ll ever know why we never met in real life. Mom’s not exactly here to volunteer information, and from what I can gather from Mia, she was as in the dark as I was about our mutual existences up until my social worker found her. But if he was like any of the other men Mom associated with, my guess is he was a loser. Perhaps Mia and Auntie don’t know as much about him as they thought. All I unearth in my search for the real Connor is a worn baseball glove underneath the bed with the initials C.M. inked into it. I file this information away with everything else I’ve gathered so far.

  Then I sit on the staircase and draw with a plain number-two pencil I found in my new desk. Mostly loose, pale sketches of roses and my feet in the grass. One of a fat orange cat who I have discovered is named Bacon. I wish I had some other pencils, though, and maybe some charcoal, and some pastels. But I make do with what I have—like I always do.

  At one o’clock, I scurry down the stairs, pass a napping Auntie, and steal some leftover chocolate-chip pancakes from the refrigerator. On my way back upstairs, I pause and examine the shrine on the mantel, photographs of Ember at every stage of life. Some include Mia. They go back to the day Ember was born, and all the way up to what’s clearly a recent selfie they took in front of the roses. As I scan the photographs, I realize that I am looking for Connor’s face. I am looking for a picture to add to my small collection of facts about him. Pictures, sketches, even scribbled drawings have always been a way for me to build stories and memories even when something is gone. But then Auntie snorts in her sleep, and I scurry back to the attic steps.

  Mia and Ember return around four in the afternoon, giggling together at some private joke. Auntie’s been sniffling at some melodramatic scene in one of her movies, but when they get home she claims she’s not crying; it’s just that those gluten-free muffins Mia made this morning smell so damn bad.

  I laugh, and then shut my door before they can hear me.

  When everything gets quiet after dinner, which I also rejected attending, I come downstairs to get something to eat on my own. I have that tight feeling in my chest again, and another slice of that Never-Lonely Lemon sounds pretty good right about now. I freeze in the kitchen doorway, though, realizing that Mia and Ember are still in there, whispering and snickering together. Mia is finishing a braid in Ember’s freshly washed hair, pinning it up so it makes a crown in front of her cloud of curls. They’re both in their pajamas, and if they hadn’t seen me, I would’ve backed right out of there before I interrupted their mother-daughter moment.

  But Mia’s eyes latch on to my shadow in the doorway, “Trix!” she calls as I attempt to back away. “I’m glad you came down. Are you hungry?”

  “No,” I lie. I can’t stop myself. It’s like I say the exact opposite thing she wants to hear just because I can.

  “Why don’t you let me give you a trim?” Mia asks, undaunted. Ember slides off the tall kitchen stool and gestures for me to take it. There are combs and scissors and hair creams on the kitchen work table. The air smells of coconut.

  “I don’t need a trim,” I say automatically, though even as I do, I remember the bangs that I cut myself. How they’d been crooked, but Mom had loved them anyway. I touch the ends of my hair, dry and brittle. How long has it been since I had a haircut?

  “Okay,” Mia says, moving to put the stool away.

  “Just a trim,” I say quickly. “Nothing weird.”

  Mia presses her lips together, like she’s trying not to smile. “Okay,” she agrees. “Just a trim.”

  I climb up on the old stool and let her comb through my hair. She uses a plastic spray bottle to dampen it and continues to brush
with a steady rhythm, gentle enough that it makes me close my eyes and enjoy the sensation of someone taking care of me. I listen to the steady snick of the scissors as she trims my long hair.

  Ember leaves while Mia is trimming, her footsteps light and brisk. I wonder if she is pissed I interrupted them.

  “You know,” Mia says quietly, her voice just as gentle as her brushing, “Connor cut his own hair once. It was awful. He had this thick, dark hair, but it stuck out over his ears when it got too long. So one day, when he was about nine, Auntie was gone, and he cut it himself with an old pair of school scissors. You know, the safety ones?” She laughs.

  I listen, my shoulders growing tight now that she’s interrupted the quiet I was enjoying.

  “Anyway, it was a total hack job. He’d gotten nearly down to the scalp in the front but there were these awful wisps in the back. I laughed until I cried when I saw him. So when Auntie got home, she had no choice but to buzz it all off so it would grow back evenly. But you know Auntie, she couldn’t let a joke die, and every time his hair got too long, she’d yell, ‘Hide the safety scissors!’”

  Ember returns at the end of the story, carrying a bright-pink laundry basket loaded with folded clothes and a generic plastic bag with a pair of brown leather boots inside. She sets them on the work table in front of me.

  “We found some great deals at the vintage stores,” Mia says. “Next time you should come with us so you can try things on. I’m just glad Ember was there to pick things out. She’s the one with the eye for fashion.” She sets the scissors down on the work table next to the basket. “All done. Give us a turn so we can see how I did.”

  I can’t stop looking at the basket of clothes, freshly washed and folded. Things I never asked for. Just kindness, freely given, like the gentle stroke of a brush on my hair. It makes my throat tight like my shoulders, and I bolt out of the kitchen, abandoning the new clothes and boots before I do something embarrassing like cry.

  Later that night when I creep back down the attic stairs to look for the pie I’d forgotten earlier when I had my impromptu haircut, I find the basket of clothes and the pair of boots outside the attic door, waiting for me.

  As I step over them, I can hear classic rock playing on the radio downstairs in the kitchen. There, I find Mia rolling out dough for pie crusts, her face smudged with flour and one long red curl hanging down by her cheek. Damn, this woman never sleeps. I would retreat again, but I haven’t eaten since those leftover pancakes, so I press on.

  “Hungry?” Mia asks, smiling at me. She doesn’t mention that I ran away earlier, or that my haircut, nearly three inches off the ends and some gentle layers, makes me look ten times better than I did when I arrived. For once I don’t have the urge to cover it up with a hood. “I just finished a batch of muffins. Apple-cinnamon.” She studies my face a moment longer. “Or there’s plenty of pie. A slice of lemon, maybe?”

  Some obstinate part of me twinges, and even though it’s what I really wanted, I ignore the offer of pie and cross to the cooling racks by the sink that hold row after row of enormous, fat, fluffy muffins. “Why are you baking so late?” I ask, my stomach rumbling loud enough that I’m willing to brave another conversation.

  She beams again, probably because I actually instigated some kind of conversation. “I usually get up around four and make the muffins and the scones, and then do the pies late morning in the shop kitchen while Auntie watches the dining room. But Auntie’s going to take you to school tomorrow morning to get you enrolled because I’ve got some bakery orders that I can’t put off, and I need the industrial-grade oven to finish them. I thought if I got a head start on the muffins and pies tonight, tomorrow would be a little less chaotic.” She smiles at me. “Besides, I couldn’t sleep, anyway. It’s been an exciting couple of days. How about you? What are you still doing up?”

  “I was hungry.”

  “You should’ve come down when we had supper,” Mia says, and though it ought to sound like a scolding, it sounds more like a gentle worry. “Or let me reheat something for you when I cut your hair.”

  “I was tired at suppertime,” I tell her, which is mostly true. I’d napped after she and Ember returned from shopping. It’s as if after six months of tossing and turning and checking and rechecking lonely motel-room locks, my body finally decided that it’s time to catch up on all that missed sleep.

  Mia smiles sympathetically. “Sure. Teenagers need a lot of sleep. Connor used to sleep till noon every weekend when he was your age.” When she’s rolled out the pie dough to a thin, pale circle like a moon, she lays it out on a piece of wax paper, and then puts another sheet of wax paper on top of it.

  I lean against the kitchen counter and pick up one of the muffins, blowing on it a little. I’ve noticed that while the rest of the farmhouse is dusty and covered in piles of various objects, the kitchen is spotless. I wonder if this is a difference in Auntie’s and Mia’s personalities. The rest of the farmhouse is Auntie’s, but the kitchen belongs to Mia.

  “Your dad was really great,” Mia continues as I take a bite out of the muffin. “Everybody loved him. He was so funny. And he had this laugh that was just infectious. You’ve probably got his sense of humor.” She scoops out another big handful of pie dough from her mixing bowl and molds it into a ball on the work table.

  I shrug. I wait for her to tell me something more about him, some story that will bring him closer to me, to the McCabes that I am supposedly a part of. But she does not. She turns her questions back to me.

  “How about your mom? Ms. Troy said her name was Allison. Allison Fiorello?” The way she says Mom’s name with that hesitancy reveals a lot to me. She must not know a lot about my mom or my past, other than the warnings Ms. Troy gave her. Mia doesn’t look at me when she asks, “Did she have a good sense of humor?” Mia picks up the rolling pin and begins to roll out another crust. She’s too casual. It’s obvious that she’s dying for any bit of information I’ll throw her way.

  “Yeah, she played this funny prank where she left one day and didn’t come back.”

  Mia glances up at me.

  “Funny, huh?”

  She stacks her new crust on top of the wax paper from the one before, then layers another sheet of wax paper over it. “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to be. You didn’t do it,” I reply, finishing off the muffin. I can’t say that I think Mom left because she could never believe that I would forgive her. And she could never forgive herself for everything she’d done. I’m still hungry, so I reach for another muffin, figuring Mia will probably feel guilty enough for prying that she won’t mention I’m eating what’s supposed to be sold in the shop tomorrow.

  “But you haven’t heard from her or anything?” Mia prods. “Ms. Troy said—”

  “Can we not talk about it?” I ask.

  Mia grabs another ball of dough from her mixing bowl. “Sure. Of course. We’ve got all the time in the world to get to know each other, right?”

  I take a bite of muffin. Damn, these are good. I can see why the bakery is popular, even for people not looking for magic pie.

  “So what would you like to talk about?” she asks.

  I inspect the muffin more closely. “What’s in these? They’re not going to make me fall in love with a cow or anything, are they?”

  Mia laughs. “The muffins are safe. So are the scones and the cakes.”

  “Just the pies are funny?” I ask.

  “Just the pies.”

  “So what do you put in them?”

  “When I was little, my grandma had the same gift. And she told me, just think of the flavors. How do they make you feel? Lemon, it’s kind of sour, kind of tangy, like that lonesome feeling you get when you feel left out, like everyone’s life is moving around you but you’re just standing still, alone. And blueberry, well it’s got that heavy sweetness that you feel after your heart breaks. It hurts like hell, and it slows you down, but there’s still that sweetness of the love you had underneath.”<
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  “Yeah, but what do you put in them?” I ask. “Are you like the happy feelings dealer of Rocksaw? Am I going to get addicted if I have another piece?”

  Mia makes a face like the question stings. “I swear there’s nothing in them but a little bit of magic. Nothing that could hurt you. Just regular pie ingredients. There’s no fairy dust or anything,” she says.

  “But you said yesterday at the tea shop that they had a secret ingredient.”

  “The secret ingredient is being a McCabe. I just put that feeling in them, and a little bit of hope that they might make things better for someone. I suppose I could do it with anything, but I like making pies the best.”

  I eye the crusts suspiciously. I’d seen that crying woman, Ella, perk up after eating three pieces of Bracing Blueberry, and I’d felt quite a bit better myself after the Never-Lonely Lemon on the front steps with Ember. So I believe that they work. I’ve just never met anyone else who has such a peculiar gift. And the idea of it being hereditary, some strange gene running down generations of McCabe women who were only fictitious creatures to me before yesterday morning, well, that’s pretty damn weird to think about. My family has only ever been me and Mom, so this sudden connection to other women feels strange.

  “So are we witches, or what?”

  Mia laughs. “Probably somewhere along the line people thought we were. But now we’re called gifted. Or just a little odd. Even if you’re not technically born a McCabe, the women who marry into the family tend to be a little . . . different. Quite a few of them have been from Cottonwood Hollow, a few towns away. They’re known for their strange talents. And the even stranger things that seem to happen around them.”

  “Ella said the town was skeptical until they ate your pies.”

  Mia gives a small smile, as if I’ve given her a compliment. “What about you?” she asks. “I bet there’s something special about you, some talent you’ve had since you were born. Auntie tells fortunes. Ember, the poor dear, she can read more of people than she wants to. Your great-great-grandma could tell a lie so good she could make it come true. She won the talent lottery, if you ask me.”