Enchantment Emporium

“I was sixteen, Auntie Jane. Let it go.” The screen door slammed and Allie’s Aunt Ruth pushed past her to dump an enormous armload of rhubarb in the sink. Her eyes were still Gale gray, but then Aunt Ruth was three years younger than her sister and…

“Allie!”

She managed to slide her mug to safety on the counter in time to return her cousin Katie’s hug. “Shouldn’t you be out flogging swamp land to unsuspecting city folk?”

Katie grinned. “I took a personal day. Pies won’t bake themselves.”

Impossible not to grin back. “So I keep hearing.”

“And I thought you were friendless,” Auntie Jane snorted as the two girls giggled together over the inevitability of family.

“Is Michael still out west?” Katie asked sympathetically, snagging Allie’s mug and draining it.

Keeping one arm linked with her cousin, Allie grabbed another apron and dropped it over Katie’s head. “Apparently he loves his job, and he and Brian are disgustingly happy.”

“That sucks.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I’ll send him a pie.”

They turned together to stare at Auntie Jane.

“What?” Upending the big earthenware bowl, she dumped the mass of pastry out onto the table. “Michael’s as much as family, and he loves my blueberry pie.”

“We don’t have any blueberries.”

Dark eyes narrowed. “We do if I’m making blueberry pie.”

That was also inarguable.

“You gave him a charm?” Allie asked as Aunt Ruth, clearly assuming they’d never get to it on their own, deposited Katie at the sink and shoved her toward the huge scarred cutting board beside it.

Auntie Jane sniffed as she separated the dough into fist-sized balls. “Why not?”

“Because he moved away.” Allie chopped the flared end off a piece of freshly washed rhubarb with more force than was strictly necessary.

“No reason to give him a charm if he’d stayed in Darsden.” A round of dough slapped down onto the table hard enough that it continued to quiver for moments after. “You let him leave when you refused to change his mind.”

Sure, she could have changed his mind, made him believe what she wanted him to believe, but that would have changed Michael. Made him not! Michael. And what would have been the point in that?

He wouldn’t be in Vancouver with Brian right now.

Shut up.

“I stood by him.” And occasionally in front of him, shoulder to shoulder with her cousins. Gale girls protected their own. Not that Michael, smart, handsome, and on every sports team Darsden East High School offered had needed a lot of protection. “I let him be who he was.”

“He was fifteen. He wouldn’t have even noticed.”

“He’s not family, Auntie Jane.”

Things were done for the sake of family that weren’t done to an outsider no matter how close to family he was.

“He could have been, Alysha Catherine!”

Everyone had adored Michael—still adored Michael—and the aunties, all expecting a chance to integrate Michael’s line, blamed Allie for his absence.

Allie scooped the could haves away into the bowl with the cut rhubarb—the could haves of her and Michael and a life she could see so clearly she sometimes forgot which life she was waking into—and gave thanks, not for the first time, that she hadn’t inherited her gran’s ability. In a family that drew an arbitrarily adjustable line between maintaining the status quo and interfering with the outside world, foresight was a curse. She totally understood why Gran had gone wild, leaving home and the nagging of the aunties. The other aunties.

Because, of course, Gran was also an auntie.

Although not hers.

Sometimes family life got complicated.

The screen door slammed again and Katie’s younger sister Maria backed into the kitchen, the top of a stack of aluminum pie plates tucked in under the prominent curve of her breasts. She wasn’t as tall as either Katie or Allie but was definitely curvier. A distinction the scoop-necked T-shirt had been clearly chosen to emphasize. “Delilah’s in the apple tree again, Aunt Mary.”

Muttering about the damned dog, Allie’s mother wiped her hands on her apron and headed out into the yard.

Maria dropped the pie plates on the table. “Still don’t see why it matters.”

“Best to stop it before it matters; border collies can cause a lot of blossom damage.” Auntie Jane glared a spinning plate to a stop just at the table’s edge. “And she’ll knock the young apples off later in the season. Are these all Christie had?”

“They’re all Auntie Christie said she had,” Maria told her. Then she turned to face the counter, full upper lip curled. “Allie.”

Allie blinked. That had sounded like a challenge.

“Ignore her.” Katie dropped the last of the cleaned rhubarb onto the cutting board and dried her hands on her apron. “She’s just being a bitch because Dmitri slept here last night.”

Aunt Ruth glanced up from setting wrapped dough balls in the fridge to rest. “Don’t call your sister a bitch, Katie.”

“Sorry. She’s being a cow because Dmitri slept here last night. She has plans for him.”