“Um, well, what time does the shop close?” I decided to think about everything else later, my usual response to problematic situations.
“Eleven, honey. We are open from four to eleven.” Sven leaned on the counter, waiting.
“Well, could you come back at about eight-thirty, then? I could take Vickie over to stay the night at my mom’s, I guess.”
“Yes!” Vickie pumped a fist in the air. She adored her grandmother almost as much as I loathed the old bat.
“Better yet…” Sven paused, tapping his chin. “Mia has the spare room done over for Miss Vickie. She planned to put you in the guest room, but you could stay in Mia’s room and I could stay in the guest room tonight. Then you might have a shot at a few hours of beauty sleep before facing the norms at the school.”
I smiled at him gratefully, relieved I would not have to face my mother yet. Not to mention sleep. Sleep would be good. I hadn’t been sleeping well since my husband and I split, which got even worse since the actual divorce. Maybe running around a graveyard in the middle of the night with some loonies would wear me out. “That works for me, Sven.”
“Want me to hang around a few, so you can get the little one settled in upstairs?”
Again, I gave him my attempt at a grateful smile. Using the key ring with the heavy chunk of quartz, I unlocked the door in the back of the shop marked Employees Only in large red block letters. The spiraling stair behind the door, I knew from visiting Mia once a few years ago, led to her apartment above the store. I ushered Vickie up the stairs, pulling her small suitcase behind me and listening to its plastic wheels screech on the iron steps.
Now that we were here, I had some apprehension about the move. I’m very good at second guessing myself and, as usual, I questioned my wisdom. Should I have yanked up our roots and moved us three hundred miles north, smack dab into the middle of the snow belt? Scanning my daughter, I searched Vickie’s face for signs of nerves, fear, or exaustion. She clung to her stuffed animal pillow and tablet case and began to complain as if she realized she had my full attention.
“Mom, why can’t I stay at Grandma’s tonight? It’s only fair that since you have to… we’ll call it
work
, I guess, that I go someplace that makes me happy. I vote you send me to Grandma’s rather than leave me with Big and Hairy. I mean, really, do we know he is not an axe murderer? What about a kidnapper? What if he kidnaps me?”
“Lock your bedroom door and keep a phone in your room. This is the least we can do for Mia for putting us up until I get a job.” I didn’t mention that I’d rather pry out my own teeth with a spork than call my mom.
“Mom, this is silly. We left a perfectly good house and perfectly good school to come here to
what
?”
I bit my lip. Looking over my shoulder, I caught the telltale glitter of tears in her cobalt eyes. “This is hard for me, too, sweetie. But we needed a fresh start.”
She glared at me and her tears turned to ice. “Did we? Or did you?”
Ah, the little ones learn quick how to stab deep. I was pretty sure this decision was the best for both of us. Her grades were slipping, and she had dropped out of softball and cheerleading. Everyone locally knew about our ‘troubles’ and she had to face the kids at school—far crueler than adults, or at least more open about attacking when they saw blood in the water, the little sharks. She’d been struggling back in Pennsylvania, too. Still, it was hard to leave friends behind and start a whole new life. If this didn’t work out, the house back in Connellsville was paid for another six months through my divorce settlement, so we
could
go back.
But if we didn’t move, we would never know if we
could
leave. I would have to find work and start saving immediately to make the mortgage payments. No one back there would help us if we failed. Here, we had my mom—much as I would hate to ask her for help. Here we had
all
my friends and family if we needed them.
Back there we only had Vickie’s dad. He had told me, in no uncertain terms, that it would be better if we left. Apparently, starting a new family was complicated if the old one hung around like stale leftovers. He had mentioned, as if he was being a pal by offering, that I couldn’t take care of Vickie, then he and the happy foot doctor would be happy to let her use the spare room.
I was not giving up my daughter to be raised by Fluffy. Or Susie. Or whatever the hell her name was. My daughter didn’t need to ‘use’ a room in her father’s home like a lingering house guest. We were going to make it on our own if it killed me.
With all of that in mind, I bit back any sarcasm I might normally have replied with, instead reaching to touch her hair. “Look, could you try to like it here? Give it a shot. If it doesn’t work out, then, fine, we will go back to Pennsylvania, but try while we
are
here. Make the best of it, for me, okay?”
Rolling her eyes, she pushed past me and opened the pink door that led to Mia’s apartment.
Well, at least she isn’t near tears anymore.
Mia’s apartment was…eclectic. Jewel tone paints of ruby and sapphire coated her walls, dotted with varied works of art leaning, of course, toward Gothic. Oversized furniture made the room comfortable while candles and statues of mythical creatures decorated her tables. Thick, soft carpet muffled our steps as we invaded.
Slate tile floors drew my eye to notice that, in the kitchen, Mia had all the modern conveniences. True to her Gothic taste, though, she’d painted the walls black, dotting them with star-like white specks—even on the ceilings. I think they may have actually represented constellations, but I didn’t know any constellations well enough, other than the Big Dipper, to tell for sure. The dark wood finished the room off making it all warm and inviting somehow. I opened the black refrigerator to peer inside curiously.
I found milk, granola, fruit, vegetables and an array of other healthy foods.
Blech.
But Vickie would not go hungry. This was, like, Vickie
heaven
.
One of the drawers, of course in black, was locked and I looked on my key ring for an appropriate key.
Ah-ha, fridge.
Hospital bags of blood lay in the locked drawer, looking horribly out of place in the pretty kitchen. I poked one with my finger and it sloshed like you might expect a bag of blood to slosh while being stored in a refrigerator drawer. Why did Mia have blood bags in her fridge? Oh,
please
.
Let me guess.
For her vampire friend. The freak couldn’t actually
drink
human blood? I stuck my tounge out at it in distaste, as if the bag of blood could see my derision. I was tempted to pitch the bags in the garbage, when Vickie called, “Mom!” and I changed my mind.
I did not want her to know we were staying with someone who kept blood in their refrigerator. If I threw it away, she might see it
. Okay, so I lock it back up and get rid of it tomorrow
, I told myself. I also made a mental note to have a conversation with Mia about the keeping of blood in one’s refrigerator…
Satisfied I would not have to shop until tomorrow, since I could just order a pizza for me and Vickie would eat most anything that Mia had, I followed Vickie’s voice down a hall done in big prints of Greek goddesses.
The room on the end was Mia’s, which meant that the other three doors were the bathroom and the two bedrooms. I opened one and found a huge black sunken tub.
Nice
. Candles were plentiful in here, too, near bowls full of potpourri and I remembered Mia was a scent freak. She loved anything smelly. I smiled again at being back in her world, even if she wasn’t here to share it with me. Her towels hung neatly, all maroon, fluffy and looking like they had never been used.
There must be good money in the freakishly weird market.
Next was the guest room and I could see Mia had cleaned and redecorated just for me. She painted the small space in blues, the color of my eyes, and had placed fresh flowers in a creamy white vase on the windowsill. Tears threatened again.
The next room, by process of elimination, had to be the spare room and the origin of Vickie’s calls. I opened the door and grinned.
Also redone, but a little off in nailing the attempt to make Vickie feel at home. Mia repainted the room soft pink and decorated heavily with teddy bears and ballerinas. The quilt even had A-B-C blocks on it spelling Victoria. I smirked at Vickie.
“Mom, this is a
baby
room. I can’t bring people in here.”
I laughed. “But you couldn’t possibly make new friends, or so
you
said, anyway.”
“Mom, seriously.”
I forced down the rest of my laughter. “We can move some stuff from your old room in and hang some posters and you won’t even notice till we get a place of our own. We can put Naked Jonas’s—”
“Naked
Brothers
and
Jonas
Brothers, Mom.”
“Whatever, we put him over the teddy bears and we put Aaron McCartney—”
“Jesse McCartney, Mom, god, you have
no
taste in music—”
“Whatever, Vickie. We put his big blond head over the kittens and it will be fine.”
She thumped back on the bed. “Just go work. I’ll come down if I need something.”
She proceeded to plug in her iPod and tune me out to some fluffy boy band and the ever present hand-held video games on the tablet. I hated that stupid toy. She played that thing more than she read, lately. I could punch her dad for getting a tablet for a ten year old. Besides, I wanted one.
I kissed her forehead and headed down the hall to dump my backpack onto Mia’s huge bed. Black silk sheets and a red silken spread were covered with at least ten pillows, and I giggled a little at the thought of sleeping in such a suggestive bed. James, my ex-husband, was a lawyer. We had not shared a suggestive bed. We had a sensible bedroom, tans and neutral tones for a calming environment,
blah blah blah
. He and the podiatrist probably had handcuffs and a torture chamber.
Men
. Disgusted with myself for traveling down that well-worn trail of thought again, I turned to leave the room.
Shutting the door, I could have sworn I heard something in the room, and I opened it again to look.
Nope, nothing.
Writing it off as exhaustion, I stepped back toward Vickie’s room. “Brat child,” I called.
She looked up and took her earbud out of one ear.
“Here. Do
not
use up all the minutes.” I tossed her my spare cell phone, the one that had belonged to her dad. Guilt was an excellent parental motivator. Dr. Phil would hit me right about now.
“No way! You said there was no way you would give me my own phone!”
“Yeah, well, no calling back to Pennsylvania after nine, and use it to get a hold of me.”
She leaped off the bed and hurled herself at me. “You are the greatest mom ever, you know that? We will make this work, I swear. I will do
so
good at school, and I will—”
“Okay, okay, enough with the promises that you’ll never keep. You run the minutes up or eat all the data on my plan, and you won’t have a phone. Not kidding, young lady.”
“Yes, mom!”
She bounced back to her bed and began playing with the ring tones.
I bounced a little myself as I jogged back down the stairs. Who knew? Give a kid a cell phone and become a hero for a day.
Eat me, Phil
.
Walking back into the shop, I curled up with the spiral notebook and waited for customers to come pouring in.
And waited.
By seven-thirty that evening, I had read the entire notebook. I knew nothing about anything I had read. I think I could have read a VCR manual and understood more about what I was reading than this mish-mash Mia had left me. Tonight, I had the ghost hunting thing and I needed to stop at the Natural Foods store and pick up some iron supplements for someone named Marcus.
Tomorrow, I needed to get some munchies for the “circle.” What was the circle anyway? There were long lists of things like “the circle” that Mia assumed I would understand without explanation. She was wrong. I was trying not to become annoyed with Mia, but it was increasingly hard not to become frustrated with the void of information she left by disappearing.
She mentioned I should try to steer clear of Vance because I was his type. As if it mattered to me if I were some jerk’s type! Newly divorced after a
year
of divorce court—a man was the
last
thing on my mind. Kind of like giving birth makes you okay with not having sex for six weeks…divorce made me okay with avoiding males for at least six years.
One couple came in while I read, looking for books on astral projection. I pointed to the shelves, having no idea what astral projection was or why anyone needed a book on it. After browsing for a few minutes, they held the book and a white candle out to me. “Is this a good candle for projection?” the woman wanted to know.
I sniffed the candle, which smelled like vanilla and spice.
Nice
. I flipped it over and looked at the tag on the bottom.
Ten bucks for a freaking votive candle!
Besides that, the tag read,
Astral Projection Candle.
I handed it back. “Yup.”
“Harv, go grab another one.”
Harv did, and I rang up the candles and the book, which came to a whopping forty-six dollars.
Good grief.
No wonder Mia’s apartment was so nice.
By nine, I had fed Vickie and had her in bed. I was waiting on Sven, but surprisingly the coma I had been considering—to make the time go by faster—was forestalled by a rush of customers.
First, three teenage girls came in and dumped fifty-eight seventy-five on some rocks and incense. Then, two very creepy men bought a crystal ball and four wands for four-eighty-eight. Like four-hundred-eighty-eight
dollars
. Finally, Sven showed up, just as a woman asked me about our jade selection.