A Snicker of Magic (9 page)

Before I could talk myself out of it, I blurted out, “We can’t leave, because I’m in the talent show.”

I looked up at Mama and Cleo’s shocked faces. “I’m a contestant in the Stoneberry Duel. It’s a big deal; the whole town’s going to be there. And I can’t leave now that I’ve promised to participate. I told Miss Lawson I’d read some of my poems.” I hadn’t actually done that yet, but it sounded like a fairly believable lie.

Cleo cocked her head sideways. Mama’s eyes narrowed, but not in a mean way. She looked like she was trying to figure out what the heck I was up to. “You hate public speaking.”

“But I want to try again anyway.” That was lie number two. “Cleo says the only way to overcome a fear is to tackle it head-on. So that’s what I’m doing.” Cleo hadn’t actually said that about me. She said it about the characters on her favorite soap opera. But I hoped it still counted.

I watched Mama’s face. I waited …

Finally, I saw the shadow of her smile. “You’re in the talent show? I’m so …”

I held my breath.

“Proud.” Her smile bloomed beautiful across her face. “The Duel’s only a couple of weeks away, right? I guess we can wait until after that to leave.” Mama planted a quick kiss on my forehead and said, “I’m so proud of you, June Bug.”

I forced a smile, even though all I wanted to do was crawl under the couch, like my dog, and hide until the Duel and the storm and every other bad thing in the world had blown away.

That night I propped my elbows on the windowsill and stared up at the star-patched sky. If I looked down, I could see the rusty roof of the Pickled Jalapeño parked crooked in the lot. If I looked straight ahead, I could see lights scattered through the dark mountains. They were porch lights, probably. But I imagined they were sleeping stars. I made a wish on every single one of them. Jonah’d be thrilled about me dueling. But I couldn’t summon up even a teaspoonful of happiness. In fact, I had a strange, sinking feeling that I’d just made everything worse.

“I need a miracle, Frannie Jo.”

“Amen!” Frannie yelled. She was bouncing on the inflatable mattress like it was a trampoline. “A big miracle.”

“Exactly,” I groaned. “Pray for a BIG miracle. And pray it turns up lickety-split quick.”

Here’s what I’ve learned about miracles: Sometimes they turn up quick, and sometimes they take their sweet
time getting to you. It’s hard to tell either way because a miracle never looks exactly how you think it should. Some miracles are big and flashy, and others are sweet and simple. Some miracles make you want to shout, and others make you want to sing.

And some miracles, the very best miracles of all, show up wearing cowboy boots.

Jonah the Secret School-Building Beedle Do-Gooder had to help out in his mama’s shop the next afternoon. I offered to help, too, but Jonah told me to go straight to Cleo’s and start picking out some important words I might be able to use in the Duel.

“You told your mom you’d write a poem, right? That’s perfect. That’s a spindiddly talent, Flea. You better write a few of them, though. Miss Lawson says everybody’s talent has to last at least three minutes.”

Jonah must have seen the fear in my eyes, because he quickly added, “Something good will happen at the Duel. Trust me.”

So I sat beside Frannie Jo on the bus ride home, flipping through the blue book in search of awesome words. But thinking about words got me to thinking about standing in front of the entire school at the Duel. And I felt barfy again.

“Hey, Fliss-tee Pickle!” Day Grissom hollered from the front of the bus. “How’s your aunt Cleo doing?”

“She’s fine as frog hair,” I said. “She’s probably either sewing or solving the world’s problems.”

“Don’t I know it!” Day grinned. “I never met a more talented woman in all my days.”

As Day pulled up in front of the Sandcut Apartments, before I stepped off the bus, he said, “Fliss-tee?”

“Yes, sir?”

Day drummed his fingers against the steering wheel, trying to find some sort of rhythm for the words about to come out of his mouth.

Right then is when I realized Day Grissom had a chunk of a doughnut stuck in his beard. I figured it’d be rude to mention it, but I couldn’t help but stare. A beard is a gnarly place for a pastry to reside.

Day must have noticed me staring, because he looked down and said, “Oh!”

And then he untangled the doughnut from his whiskers and started eating it.

“I wondered where that got to!” he said. Crumbs spewed out of his mouth as he spoke. “Will you tell Cleo I said … hi?”

“Sure thing.” I didn’t tell him that I’d delivered that same message, “
Day Grissom says hi
,” five times already and the response was always the same. “
Pffft
,” Cleo’d always say. Or “
Toss me that pack of cigarettes.
”

Frannie Jo and I had no more than opened the door to Cleo’s apartment when Cleo yelled my name.

“Felicity Juniper Pickle!”

“I’m right here!” I kicked the door shut with my heel.

Aunt Cleo’s hands were propped on her hips … or at least the vicinity of the region her hips probably were under her long, flowing dress. Cleo’s eyebrows were knit so close together that it looked as if somebody’d taken a Magic Marker and drawn a squiggly black line across her forehead.

Biscuit sat on the floor, staring up at Aunt Cleo, cocking her head from one side to the other, trying to figure out whether or not she was in trouble.

“Felicity,” Cleo heaved. “You take this dog on a walk. A
long
walk. She’s been chewing up my quilt squares, running circles on my carpet. She’s stir-crazy today, and that’s making
me
crazy. I gotta finish this wedding quilt for the Slavens and I can’t have it smelling like puppy slobber. I’ll never get another job if it does.”

Cleo’s real job, when she wasn’t fixing the world’s problems, was quilt making. Cleo says people used to ask her for nursery quilts — hedgehog patterns were her specialty. The hedgehog quilts were all the rage for a few years, but then people got tired of those.

So Cleo started making wedding quilts instead. Those were easy, she said, because people always wanted the same pattern: wedding rings.

The rings on Cleo’s quilts are way prettier than real wedding rings, though. All the wedding rings I’ve seen are plain gold, boring and simple and round. But the rings on Cleo’s quilts were shaped like gigantic onion rings. And
they were packed full of colors, all the pieces and patches she’d saved up over the years. Cleo collects fabric the same as I collect words.

“Here.” Cleo tossed me Biscuit’s leash. “Go explore down around the picnic tables, but don’t go any farther than that, understand? And take your sister walking with you.”

“Yay!” Frannie squealed. “I’ll go get my hat!” A few minutes later, she scampered back into the living room, wearing a paper pirate hat with
ROWDY RANDY’S PANCAKE HOUSE
stamped across the front. She was also wearing a baseball mitt over her hand.

“What’s the mitt for?” I asked.

Frannie shrugged.

“Get on out!” Cleo waved us toward the door. “Go have fun!”

“Wait!” I hollered. “I nearly forgot to tell you! Day Grissom says hi.”

Cleo sighed. “Toss me that pack of cigarettes before you head out.”

I probably should have clipped on Biscuit’s leash as soon as we walked out the door so she could scamper around and stretch her legs. But I decided to carry her down the stairs instead. Sometimes I like to cuddle her as close to my heart as I can. Biscuit never seems to mind. She nuzzled her soft face against my cheek and licked me on the nose.

“Can I walk her now?” Frannie asked, as we reached the last flight of stairs.

I clipped the leash on to the dog collar, settled Biscuit on the ground, and then passed the leash to Frannie.

But Frannie tried to grab on to the leash with her baseball mitt instead of her hand. So the next thing I saw was a streak of white as my dog barked and took off in a speedy run.

Frannie screamed. Screaming is Frannie’s involuntary reaction to most things. “Felicity! My dog!”

“Don’t worry! I’ll get her!” I was already chasing after Biscuit, jumping down the stairs three at a time. “Stay right there, Frannie Jo!”

I leaped from the last step and ran as hard as I could down the hillside, hollering for Biscuit every step of the way. My sneakers pounded dust-colored words out of the ground:

Zippity

Velocity

Dash-away

Boundless

“Biscuit!” I yelled. “What the hayseed are you running after?” But Biscuit never looked back. She sprinted past some picnic tables with her leash trailing along behind her.

I swung my arms and pumped my legs as hard as I could and then I jumped — arms straight out in front of me so I could grab on to Biscuit’s leash.

I heard somebody yell, “I got her!” at exactly the same time that I slammed into the ground and yelled, “
OOMPF!
”

When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was the tip of a tan cowboy boot. As I glanced higher up, I could see jeans and a plaid shirt, too, the silhouette of a tall man standing against the sunlight. He was laughing while my dog climbed all over his shoulders, licking his face and his ears.

“You okay?” the man asked as he reached down to pull me up off the ground. “This is some guard dog you’ve got here.”

Biscuit licked his face in agreement and he laughed again.

I dusted the grass and dirt off my pants and shielded my eyes and tried to get a better look at the dog saver. He was as thin as a zipper, with scruffy blond hair and stubble along his jawline. He was smiling big while he petted Biscuit, but the dark circles under his eyes made him look kinda tired. Kinda sad, too. I smiled up at him and thanked him for catching our dog.

He passed Biscuit back to me and chuckled. “I think your dog’s the one who caught me.”

That’s when I realized he had a guitar case slung behind his back. As soon as he let my dog go, he clutched tightly to the strap across his chest. The way he held it reminded me of the picture of Oliver’s grandfather. I thought about how Berry Weatherly held his banjo over his heart like it was a shield, the only protection he had between him and the world.

I nodded to the man and turned to wander off when I heard him yell, “Hey! I’m looking for Cleo Harness and I hear she lives in this apartment complex now. Do you know her?”

I spun around and narrowed my eyes to try and assess whether or not he had any criminal potential. He didn’t
look
mean. He looked like a regular grown-up with sad, sky-colored eyes. He was handsome. But I wasn’t stupid, and I didn’t let that fool me. I figure the witch that took Hansel and Gretel probably looked like a prom queen. He was awfully sweet to my dog, though. And Biscuit’s a good judge of character.

“What do you want with Cleo Harness?” I asked.

He looked down at the ground and dragged the tip of his boot back and forth across the grass. “I’m an old friend of hers. Just wanted to say hello.”

I had two instincts building up inside me right then. The first was to say,
No, sir. You keep right on walking.
Because I didn’t want this handsome grown-up to go rob Aunt Cleo blind, shove all her quilt patches and tabloid magazines and porcelain hedgehogs into his guitar case and dash out of town.

But my other instinct was
YES.
Because what if this man was the answer to my prayer? I’d prayed for a man for Cleo and now a man was standing in front of me. He looked a lot younger than Cleo, but maybe age doesn’t matter as long as you’re already old. Even the Beedle couldn’t have put together an opportunity so fine.

So what I settled on saying was, “You wait
right
here, mister.”

I tucked Biscuit underneath my arm again and ran for the apartment.

Almost no time had passed before me and Cleo were back down by the picnic tables. The man hadn’t moved an inch. I saw words of cities shining all around him:

Nashville

Roanoke

Kalamazoo

Bakersfield

Burnside

Home again

Home again
was the color of ashes.

The man with the guitar looked at Cleo. His mouth smiled, but his eyes stayed sad. “Good to see you, sister.”

Sister?

Cleo said nothing. She kept her cigarette in her mouth and had Frannie Jo on her hip. I still had Biscuit perched on my hip. And we stared that man down like two outlaws in a Western cartoon about to have us a showdown.

Frannie Jo pointed to the man’s case. “I like guitars,” she said.

“It’s a banjo, actually,” the man said. But his voice wasn’t as strong as when he first spoke to me. He looked at Cleo, hoping she’d give him some answers.

“Are you a famous musician or something?” I asked.

“No,” he said. And his smile turned so sad that I wished I hadn’t even asked.

“Ain’t for lack of talent, though,” Cleo spoke up. “Girls, this here is my brother, your uncle Boone.”

“You’re my uncle Boone?” I grinned ear to ear. “Mama told us about you! She says you have songs on the radio!”

Boone stared down at his shoes again. “I had one song on the radio. That was a long time ago. Nothing since then.”

“What are you doing back in Midnight Gulch?” I asked.

Aunt Cleo was the one who answered me. “If I had to guess three reasons he’s back in town, I’d say one, he’s run out of money and two, he needs a place to stay and three, some floozy out in Nashville broke his heart again.”

“And four” — Boone swallowed — “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”

“All I got’s potato chips and ice cream,” Cleo said.

“We have an uncle!” Frannie squealed. Biscuit wiggled her tail.

Boone nodded. “Y’all are a lot bigger than I thought you’d be. I thought you were babies.”

“People grow up,” Cleo said. “People change.” I could hear a rasp in her voice that I’d never heard before.

Boone kept staring at his boots. I’d never seen somebody stare at the ground so long. “I never really knew how to contact Holly. Is she here, too?”

“Cleo got her a job at the ice-cream factory,” I answered, taking a step closer to him. “She’ll be home tonight, though.”

His eyes flickered up to meet mine. “She and I don’t talk much these days.”

“Holly probably don’t know how to get in touch with you,” Cleo said. “Since Boone
Harness
ain’t appropriate for
Nashville. He goes by Boone
Taylor
out there, girls. Because he says Boone
Taylor
sounds better on a stage.”