“All you need is patience,” Jet told Sally when she threw up her hands each time she was faced with disruptive behavior from middle-school visitors who gathered in groups, lounging at the tables as if they were in their own homes.
Sally had been an excellent mother, but nowadays she was strict and rarely smiled anymore, and children are always put off by a rigid sensibility. Her own daughters had chafed under the household rules, but the rules were the rules, and Sally would not have them be broken. She’d taped up a laminated list at the reference desk in the library. No running, no shouting, no gathering in groups, no pets, no bare feet, no crying when you didn’t get the book you most wanted to read. She didn’t blame the children for avoiding her, preferring Jet or Miss Hardwick. She had turned away from the world and its sorrows and there were times when she walked past a mirror and could have sworn she saw the image of her aunt Franny rather than her own. Those cold gray eyes; that frown. Surely, she had inherited Frances Owens’s no-nonsense attitude; she was curt and didn’t easily suffer fools. She sometimes heard Franny’s voice inside her head, or worse, she heard herself speaking phrases Franny had long ago imparted to her, blunt advice that pulled no punches. Courage or caution? Why on earth would you want to be normal? What fun would that be?
When their parents had died, and Sally and Gillian had come to the house on Magnolia Street, they’d both been terrified of Franny, intimidated by her wild hair and her red boots and her freckled complexion and her clipped conversation, and they’d secretly called her the mean aunt. But when Sally wept in bed at night, it was Franny who came upstairs to sit beside her. She didn’t offer silly, meaningless words of comfort, but instead stroked Sally’s long, dark hair and told her that in the morning they would have chocolate cake for breakfast, and they always did.
* * *
Although Sally considered herself to be a logical woman, she knew there was more to this world than could be seen with the naked eye. Ever since childhood she’d been convinced that a dark brand of bad luck followed at her heels, a wicked spell she couldn’t diffuse, not with sage or garlic or salt. It was after her, there was no doubt about it. The Owens curse stalked her even though she was determined to avoid magic. Oh, she had tried, but no matter how ordinary her life might be, the curse hung on as if it were an obstinate dog that refused to loosen its bite even when she tried to shake it off. Now, as Sally and Jet walked through town, Sally realized that a little dog was, indeed, pursuing them, as though it had read her mind, validating her theory that a hex and a wild dog were equally difficult to be rid of. The one following them was a scraggly white thing with sharp black eyes. Sally soon recognized it as the stray that had been hanging around trash barrels behind the library for several days, one wily enough to escape every time animal control was called in.
“I can’t seem to catch that dog,” Sally said. Now that her girls were grown, with Kylie a sophomore and Antonia in her second year of medical school, both at Harvard, and with Antonia pregnant, nearly a mother herself, Sally often stayed at the library after hours. What was the point of leaving? She would have preferred to eat a sandwich at her desk and would likely have forgotten to come home entirely, choosing to work through the night, had Jet not come for her at the end of the day.
“I think it’s Daisy,” Jet said thoughtfully as she observed the dog.
Once you knew that death was walking alongside you, things came into focus, as they now did for Jet. With only seven days left she had best pay attention to every detail. She had already taken note that the lines on her right palm, showing the fate that she’d been given, and those on the left hand, the fate she had made for herself, were exactly the same; they had converged, as they always do at the end of a life. Jet’s gift of the sight had intensified. She could envision the dog’s heart beating under its tangled fur, just as she saw the slow unfolding of black leaves on the last surviving elm trees in Essex County. The Reverend Willard had owned a dog resembling this one before he’d been forced into residing at the retirement home on Endicott Street. The Willards and the Owenses were all descendants of a witch-finder and a witch, John Hathorne and Maria Owens on the Owens’ side, and a granddaughter of Hathorne and a relation of John Proctor, hanged as a witch when he tried to protect an innocent woman brought to trial, on the Willards’ side. Although there had been centuries of distrust, Jet had managed to change that after her beloved Levi Willard’s death when she knocked at the Reverend’s door, refusing to allow him to turn her away until they set the situation right. The Reverend had passed his hundredth birthday and could no longer care for himself, let alone a dog, and it was said that his little Maltese had run off and was now dodging around town, eating from garbage cans, sleeping on porches, begging for food from children exiting the school bus. Wary, the dog ducked beneath the thickets, but Jet stopped and waved cheerfully. “Come here, Daisy,” she called. “I think she belongs to the Reverend.”