Reverend Willard had been driven over from the retirement home so that he could officiate the service. There were so many of their shared relations in the town cemetery no one had ever counted them all. The Reverend was crying, even as he spoke. Jet had made it a point to stop by to visit him every day. She brought him oat biscuits on a regular basis, and, occasionally, a slice of her Chocolate Tipsy Cake that he wasn’t allowed to eat. Far too sweet, the doctors said, but life was short and getting shorter, and sometimes a person needed to simply enjoy himself. Jet covered the cake with a handkerchief when she smuggled it in, and brought along a fork and a napkin. She and the Reverend always laughed to think they’d pulled one over on the nurses, who, of course, knew about the deviation in the old man’s dietary regime all along, but who weren’t about to argue with Jet Owens, for as lovely as she was, the family had a reputation, and considering that the Reverend was over a hundred, it was best to let him do as he pleased.
The service after the burial was brief, due to Reverend Willard’s inability to stand for more than a few minutes at a time, and of course there was the appearance of the raindrops, the soft green shower Jet always called Daffodil Rain. And then it happened. The very last speaker, a plain-spoken second cousin from Maine who thought of herself as the family historian, read a letter composed by Faith Owens.
As the rain began, the cousin read Faith’s note in her flat New England speaking voice.
“We who are cursed in love are born to fight that curse in every way we can until the one among us who can break it appears. Until that time, we must love as best we can. Our fates may already be determined, but each day is ours to live as we see fit.”
“What is she talking about? Who’s cursed in love?” Kylie asked her sister. She was wearing the silver locket her mother had given her on her last birthday. Just last night, she had slipped in a small photograph of Jet, taken long ago when her great-aunt was a girl sitting on the rocks beside Leech Lake.
Antonia shrugged. She had been deflecting questions about her pregnancy all morning and was in a foul mood. Why did people want to pat your stomach, as if you were a dog? Why was the identity of the father so fascinating? “Your guess is as good as mine.”
Antonia often didn’t understand Owens family traditions, many of which seemed far more irrational than falling in love, a state of being she’d never experienced. Chasing a sparrow from the house every Midsummer’s Eve instead of simply checking earlier in the day to make certain the windows were closed; concocting soap in the dark of the moon when there was perfectly good bars of the stuff to buy at the pharmacy, brewing Aunt Franny’s special Courage Tea at family get-togethers; when store-bought tea bags were so much more practical; using the greenhouse to grow poisonous seedlings—such as belladonna, hemlock, black nightshade, and henbane, plants so toxic that Antonia didn’t think they should be grown anywhere at all. And now here was this message from an ancestor who was convinced that the reasons for unhappiness lay in the power of a curse.
“The letter was written in the 1700s, when people believed in nonsense,” Antonia told her younger sister. “I wouldn’t pay it the slightest bit of attention.” She knew that Kylie, a sophomore studying classics, was suggestible and sensitive, a reader of novels, which left her a target to wrought-up emotions. Right now, Kylie appeared overheated, her face flushed even though they were standing in the cool spring rain. She never revealed the skills she possessed, for her odd talents made her nervous. Her mother always looked at her sharply from the corner of her eye when Kylie seemed the least bit abnormal. She kept her uncanny abilities to herself, and never told a soul that she could glimpse an aura of color around individuals that revealed their personalities and their fates. Far worse, she could feel the pricking stab of other people’s pain, and therefore avoided crowds.
Kylie had tried to follow Antonia’s lead, for in a town where the Owenses were considered oddities, Antonia had always done her best to be superior. “Take that,” Antonia would say cheerfully when she was at the top of her class. After receiving her acceptance to Harvard as an undergraduate, she’d worn a crimson T-shirt for an entire summer, just to make sure everyone knew where she was headed once autumn rolled around. She had also made certain to write an announcement for the local paper when she was accepted to medical school.