Only Saints

« xvii. »

Aunt Etta pulls me and Florie to the side after dinner. It's serious—I can tell that much from the look on her face—but it's nothing she wants to share with the rest of the family. Instead she beckons us to follow her out the front door and into the warm, wet night. The air is thick and humid with the threat of rain, and it reeks of the huge citronella candle that she lights up to keep the mosquitoes away.

I sit upwind from the candle and light a cigarette to keep my hands busy. I don't dislike the smell of citronella; it's just been so long since I thought about it that it feels like an assault on my senses. My nerves are already dancing on end, and unwanted sensory input will only push me over the edge of this precarious little cliff I'm on.

"I wanted to talk to you two," Aunt Etta says softly, "about what will happen when—"

She cuts herself off. Looks between me and Florie. Florie has the most serious look I've ever seen on her face, her eyebrows pulled low over her eyes, her mouth turned down at one side in a deep frown. I feel something like how she looks, but I'm sure it comes across more like anxiety on my face.

It always comes across as anxiety with me.

Aunt Etta sighs and finishes her sentence: "What will happen when I'm gone."

"Mother," Florie protests, "no."

My aunt waves away her concerns. "It's going to happen someday. Hopefully not for many years yet, but when it does, you two are going to have to step up and lead the family, do you understand?"

Me? I want to demand. Why me?

Florie beats me to it: "Isn't Jenna the oldest?"

"If you think I'm going to hand the Chastain family over to—" Aunt Etta cuts herself off with a hard shake of the head. "No. Absolutely not. It has always passed to the eldest daughter, and in turn, that means that you'll be next, Florette. And you," she says before I can ask to know why I'm out here, too, "Apollinaire, are...incredibly important."

"I'm barely even a witch any more," I point out. I keep my voice low, afraid that if I speak too loudly Drew will overhear from inside the house. Even as I know they have the TV on and they're watching reruns of Jeopardy! or something, I'm terrified that the noise will drop at just the right time to cause the worst misunderstanding of my life.

Or the worst understanding.

I just don't want Drew to know. I don't think I could stand it.

Aunt Etta sighs. "Mama put you in her will."

"Oh."

"I didn't want Leda telling you that. She's already...you know. A little bitter about the whole thing. But Mama wanted you to have all of her crafting things, and she desperately wanted you to come back. She was holding onto that hope."

Well, I came back.

I think I'm going to be sick.

Breathe.

"I don't...I can't," I stammer. "I have a job. I have a life."

"I know." Aunt Etta sets her hand on my shoulder to calm me down. "Which is why this is a 'twenty or thirty years from now' thing and not a 'today or tomorrow' thing. You've got plenty of time to figure out what's going to happen when..."

Florie pushes herself off of the railing. "I don't want to think about this," she says simply.

"Well, you can't ignore it. It's going to happen someday, and we need to have a plan. Or else—"

Someone hits the screen door from the inside. Aunt Etta stops dead in her tracks until it shuts again, and then she sighs and looks back at us.

"Or else Angie will get control of everything, and honey, she'll run us into the ground. Worse than we already are." She sits in one of the folding chairs set out on the porch and steeples her fingers in front of her. "I'm not going to lie, this transition has been terrible. Nothing is official until tomorrow, either. I want to make it easier on you two, if—when—it happens. Understand?"