But once when there was an unexpected ripple in the water, Hay had startled and fell off his chair and they had laughed themselves silly. They had loved each other madly for their whole lives, only Franny’s life had been longer, and now here she was, walking home alone, with a single crazy wish, that she would spy Hay on the lane, waiting for her, calling out for her to hurry. As a girl, before Haylin, she’d been a loner, a defiant outsider, but now her aloneness haunted her; even when she was in a crowd at the bake sale to raise funds for the library, or in the kitchen with Sally and Kylie and Antonia at Sunday evening supper, she might as well have been locked in a room by herself. When you had a familiar you had a soul mate, but she’d never had another after her beloved crow, Lewis, had passed on. Their family had a passion for crows, creatures who were as intelligent as most men and smarter than many. Franny often wished that one would choose her again, but it had never happened. There are some things you have only once in a lifetime, and then only if you’re lucky.
* * *
Franny’s route home led her through a damp field where swamp cabbage grew in the ditches and celandine bloomed blue on tiny, wavering stems. The lake was in the migration path of scarlet tanagers who had recently returned to Massachusetts and there were flecks of red in the hedges, as if each branch had a beating heart. It was the time of year when the magnolias were fully abloom and the distance was riddled with a pink haze. The trees had been brought here for Maria Owens by the man who loved her, and some were now thirty feet tall, with lustrous black-green leaves. Franny made her way out of the woods, the green scent of the ferns clinging to her skirts. She walked past houses whose residents had come to see her and Jet for help over the years. Mostly they searched out Jet, it was true, for she was kinder and more compassionate. Franny often told people the harsh truth without any fudging or fabrications. Are you sure? she would say. Everything has a cost. Why on earth did so many of them want love charms to trick people who wanted nothing to do with them into falling head over heels? Ridiculous, Franny thought. If that’s being normal, then normal is madness.
Franny rounded the corner onto Magnolia Street. Here the flowers on the trees were all a lustrous creamy white and there were sparrows in the branches, already nesting. There was mud on the soles of Franny’s red boots, not very proper for someone of her age, as if she cared. What mattered now that so many of the people she loved were gone? Very little, it seemed, for it was more and more punishing to get out of bed in the morning and face the day.
But this was not a day like any other. Franny saw the mail truck and she knew. She could feel the thrum of her pulse. She would have run if she still could do so. Instead she walked at a brisker pace, carrying the umbrella that everyone knew was used as a cane, her coat flaring out behind her. She went up to the truck and pounded on the door, insisting that the flustered postman prop open his window, which he did immediately, though he was clearly nervous in her presence, as he always was, his large hands clammy.
“Well, come on,” Franny said, impatient. “What do you have for me?”
“I already delivered the mail,” the postman said. He was a big fellow, but he sounded like a boy who dreaded that his teacher had just discovered he’d made an error in his homework. “Was I not supposed to?”
In the past, the postman had dealt with Jet Owens, who was a lovely person no matter what people said about the family. He’d delivered boxes of herbs from India and seeds from Maine and once he’d brought a crate that had arrived airmail from Tennessee, in which there was a small black cat that had been abused, rescued from a shelter. Jet had run out to claim the poor creature while still in her bathrobe. “Oh, you’ll be happy here!” the postman had remembered Jet saying to the little cat. She’d tipped him twenty dollars and told him to go to the Black Rabbit and have a drink on her, but of course she had been the cheerful aunt, and Franny was the one everyone feared.
Franny clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “You most certainly are supposed to deliver the mail,” she said. “Isn’t that your job?” She shook her head at the fellow’s foolishness, then went up to the gate, in a hurry. She opened the black mailbox knowing what she would find. She could almost hear her brother’s voice. A message from Vincent. Thrilled despite the black border around the envelope, she took the letter into the garden where she would have some privacy without Sally buzzing around.