Only Saints

« iii »

The funeral home is brightly lit. The doors stand open, and it shouldn't feel like I'm trespassing in someone else's home, but it does. My shoes click on the lacquered hardwood floor, lit by a half-dozen fluorescent lights that flicker and buzz and build pressure in my head. Couldn't they have picked someplace with incandescent bulbs instead?

A dry-erase board is propped up in the entry hall. A hastily-drawn arrow points to the left under the name Chastain. I draw to a stop, but Drew comes in behind me and loops his arm through mine and pulls me to the left and I don't want to go sit in the chapel hall—I don't want to listen to other family members talk for hours about someone I should have known better, someone I should have been closer to, in the end.

But I wasn't.

I should have been.

The chapel is only half full; Drew wants to pull me up towards the front, but I sit in the far-back pew, well-worn vinyl creaking under me. I don't want to look up at the other people here. I don't want to catch their sideways glances. Their whispers.

I already saw my mother up front, her gray hair twisted up into a tight bun. I don't think I'd be able to meet her eyes.

A hymnal, bound in green fabric with the name long worn off, stares at me from the back of the bench in front of me. I pull it from its resting place and start flipping through the gossamer-thin pages to distract myself. The words should make sense, but I can't read any of them.

All I can think about is the body in the cedar box on the dais. Old Mère—but it's not her, not any more. She's long gone.

Breathe.

My grandmother taught me how to quilt when I was just old enough to thread a needle. She was a creator before she was anything else, her weathered hands always busy at the sewing machine, the pottery wheel, the black soil garden in front of her trailer. She sat me down on warm summer afternoons while my mother went to town and showed me stitches, seeds, skill, and she taught me the art of magic-making.

My hands itch at the thought.

The thing about magic-making is that it works in patterns. One word is not a spell, not on its own. Two words, repeated, with force—that's a different matter.

Breathe.

"Grow and thrive," Old Mère whispered to her plants in her low, accented voice. She held my hand and showed me how to tell if the garden was thirsty or drowning, to check for aphids, for caterpillars and their chrysalises in the deep heart of summer, and she whispered, "Grow and thrive."

And they did, for her.

She held me steady as we fed fabric through the sewing machine together. "You must be deliberate," she lectured me when, more than once, my stitches turned out rushed and sloppy. I only ever wanted to make her happy. "Witches do not throw magic around without thinking like that. And you want to be a witch, don't you?"

And I did, for her. My heart clenches at the thought even now, even after knowing for the last ten years that it was never a future meant for me.

Witches don't have futures. Witches aren't doctors, or professors, or judges; witches live in broken-down trailers in shoddy trailer parks in Central Florida, and their lives have no higher purpose beyond the little magic that they do.

Dad never believed me when I told him Old Mère was a witch. He sent me to three different elite schools to knock that idea out of my head.

But I was the first boy born in her family for three hundred years. She had a list of mothers and sisters and aunts that I could read through and pick from to hear stories about their lives. They were commanding women, compelling women, and they did such powerful things that I wanted to follow in their footsteps so badly it ached. I dreamed of being one of them. Of joining that list.