Enchantment Emporium

“Alysha Catherine Gale!” Age had not stopped Auntie Jane’s voice from carrying clearly up to the second floor. As if age would dare. “If you aren’t out of that bed and downstairs in this kitchen in fifteen minutes, I will make you sorry you were ever born!”

No chance Auntie Jane would leave her alone.

And an even smaller chance that every word she’d said wasn’t to be taken literally.

Sometime in the night, Dmitri had sketched a charm on her right calf. He’d probably thought she wouldn’t notice it down there, but then he was young and still incredibly indulged. Eyes rolling, she erased it, smiled fondly at the old charm Charlie had retraced on her shoulder, and stepped out of the shower to find Samson, one of the family’s four border collies, drinking out of the toilet.

“Don’t tell me you’ve learned to go around the door,” she muttered, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and hauling him back. She hadn’t bothered to stuff the old rusty hook into the equally rusty eye, but the bathroom door was still closed.

Tail slapping into her knees, Samson ignored her.

Allie made it downstairs with twelve and a half seconds to spare, wrapping an elastic band around the end of her hair and tossing the wet braid back over her shoulder. As expected, her mother and Auntie Jane were in the big farmhouse kitchen baking pies, the two of them both working at one end of the old rectangular table. Allie paused on the bottom step.

Gale girls had sisters, that was a given.

There were inevitably four or five girls in the family to every boy.

Her gran, her mother’s mother, Auntie Jane’s youngest sister, had three girls. No boy. That was strange but not unheard of.

Allie had a brother, David. He was four years older and hadn’t that set the aunties to talking. Boys were never born first.

She had no sisters.

“He got the Gale that should have been spread out over half a dozen girls,” Auntie Jane had been heard to sniff, her dark eyes watching David. “What’s he going to do with it, that’s the question.”

This close to ritual, the kitchen should have been full of Gale girls, laughing, talking, making sure the right things went into the pies.

“Your Aunt Ruth will be over later with Katie and Maria,” her mother said, without looking up from the block of shortening she was cutting into the flour. “And your Auntie Ruby has just gone down to the cellar for more apples.”

“Senile old bat’ll probably forget what she’s down there for,” Auntie Jane snorted, expertly flipping the rolled pastry onto a pie plate, a move she’d probably made a million times. The family was big on pie and Auntie Jane admitted to being over eighty—although she got nasty when people tried to be more specific. A minimum of eighty years and say a minimum of a hundred pies a year… “And if you’d hauled your lazy carcass out of bed before noon,” she continued, interrupting Allie’s attempt at math, “there’d have been four of us all along. So, stop seeing the empty places at the table and get over here. The family’s coming home, and pies don’t make themselves.”

Unable to argue with the familiar and clearly inarguable observation, Allie grabbed an apron off the hook by the door but circled the table until she reached the coffeepot over by the big six-burner stove. “You want me caffeinated,” she said before either woman could comment on the delay. “In the interest of only having apples go into the pies.”

“Ruth is bringing rhubarb from her cold frame,” Auntie Jane sniffed, dark eyes disapproving—of her attitude not the rhubarb, Allie assumed. “If you’re sufficiently caffeinated before she arrives, you can start preparing the pastry.”

“Apples, rhubarb…” Allie pulled her favorite mug from the cupboard and filled it. “… either’s better than a helping of ‘I don’t give a flying fuck.’ ”

“Alysha!”

Oh, crap. Had she said that out loud? Had she missed one of Dmitri’s charms? He was still young enough to find putting her on the spot funny. Unfortunately, it turned out she had nothing to blame but her own big mouth.

“Sorry, Mom.” Ears burning she took a long swallow and stared at her reflection in the dark liquid. “It’s just that…”

“You lost your job, and Michael’s in Vancouver with Brian. We know, honey.” The sympathy in her mother’s voice drew Allie’s gaze up off the coffee. “But tomorrow’s May Day, most of the family will be home, so, if you could, get over yourself.”

Were her mother’s eyes a darker gray than they’d been when she’d been home last? Mary Gale was fifty. That was all. Fifty. Allie’d taken a week off work for the big family party back in the fall. Fifty was too young.

“Change happens, Alysha.” Auntie Jane seemed grimly amused by the inevitable. “Although the girl has a point, Mary. Remember what happened when Ruth let her mind wander that time during peach season? We were months sorting out the mess.”