“I’m uber-healthy,” Antonia told her aunt. “No sugar, no coffee, no alcohol.”
“You don’t wish there was someone to help you when the baby comes?” Jet wanted to know.
“Women have been having babies on their own since the beginning of time, Jetty. And besides, I have Scott and Joel. We’re in this together, and they’re constantly on my case. I don’t eat enough, apparently.” Antonia took note of the worry on Jet’s face. “I don’t need someone special, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m too busy to fall in love. Besides, I’m not even sure I believe in it.”
“You will,” Jet assured her. “It will make a mess of things and your life will never be the same, but it will happen. No one is immune.”
It was lovely to all be together, but as time wore on, Jet realized that the beetle had followed her and was now directly beneath her chair. She could hear it chirping, more softly now, as if it barely had any energy. The time had nearly come.
Jet would never know the end of Kylie’s story, her darling great-niece who had been such a charming, awkward child, who loved to work in the garden and get dirty, who borrowed Jet’s novels and sprawled out on the window seat below Maria Owens’s portrait to read Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre. She would never get to meet Antonia’s child, or spend summer afternoons with her beloved Gillian, canning tomatoes or making soap as they did every year in the old cauldron they set up at the rear of the garden. She wouldn’t get to see Sally fall in love, the sort of love that would take up her whole heart, so that she didn’t hold anything back the way she had even with that wonderful Gary, the kind of love Jet had found with Rafael, despite the fact that they were forced to hide from the curse. Life was like a book, Jet thought, but one you would never finish. You would never know how people would wind up; the good often suffered and the wicked prospered and there was no explanation for the way in which fate was meted out as there was in novels. Fiction made sense of the world, perhaps that was why Jet had been a fanatical reader as a girl. When Levi Willard died, so tragically and before his time, novels had saved her. Sometimes, when the world looked especially gloomy, Jet returned to the ones that had helped her through her darkest hours. Wuthering Heights, The Scarlet Letter, and Fahrenheit 451, her favorite, a love letter to books.
“I’m tired.” Jet explained as she called for the check. “We’ve had a long day.”
Franny paled when she heard this. It was the evening of the seventh day, the time she had dreaded ever since the bees appeared. They left through the bar and perhaps Jet couldn’t quite bear for their night to end. She stopped to order a whiskey. For what was to come, she needed strength.
“Good idea,” Gillian said, calling over the bartender, a fellow named Jed who swore they had dated in high school, though Gillian, for the life of her, couldn’t remember him.
“Seriously?” Sally said to Jet, disbelieving. “You don’t drink.”
“Now and then.” Jet shrugged. “It helps me sleep.” As a matter of fact, the whiskey was delightful, tasting of smoke and wood.
“Why not?” Franny, who had never once ordered anything at the bar of the Black Rabbit, relented and joined her sister in a toast. It was their last night after all. They might as well do as they pleased. “To us,” Franny said.
Jet nodded. “Always and forever.”
Antonia and Kylie stood at the bar, Antonia because her belly wouldn’t fit in the space allotted when perched on a barstool, and Kylie to keep her company.
“Something for you, ladies?” Jed the bartender asked, though he was still gazing at Gillian.
“I’m pregnant and she’s underage,” Antonia answered. “So, no.”
“Thanks,” Kylie said to her sister. “I was just about to get my first Black Rabbit martini.”