In the time since Willow had been kicked out, the house had grown colder. Others might blame the wintry weather but Augusta believed their home missed Willow’s warm spirit. In many ways, she’d been the heart of the place, and they’d all tried to keep operating as if they weren’t missing a vital organ. From time to time, Augusta logged into Willow’s Facebook account to see what she’d been up to. Thankfully, there’d been no more messages from Harlowe’s sister, Ramona. She couldn’t risk the truth coming out that way.
As far as she knew, Augusta was the only one who still had a lifeline to Willow. Her granddaughter called reception every couple of days to tell Augusta about how she was doing, what she’d made January for dinner, the great book January recommended, January’s new custom-made suit, a story about how someone had slapped January after mistaking him for someone else. If she could speak, she’d tell Willow quite loudly that she didn’t care to know anything else about January. Not that she didn’t like the guy. She’d enjoyed his company that day at brunch, but by now, she knew more about him than she did any of her own family members. Still, she answered the calls when they came, pleased to hear Willow’s voice.
This morning, she rang a little earlier than usual, and Augusta had to hustle over from the dining room where she’d been drinking her tea and using the laptop. Willow started in about a cocktail she’d learned how to make the night before at the bar and how she’d experimented with some of the drink ingredients, conceiving a potion that made folks with two left feet able to find rhythm and dance well. Eventually, predictably, she turned to January. “I’ve been trying to get him to learn how to play pickleball with me. I guess it’s like the newest thing and a good way for me to get in shape so I can wear some of those dresses still back in my closet. But it takes two of us to play. Who knows? We get good enough, we can enter a tournament, play other couples. I ordered us some equipment. Maybe he’ll take a hint.”
Augusta had never heard of pickleball and wondered what in the world kind of equipment one needed to play it. What she did know was that her granddaughter’s approach was all wrong. Not that she was encouraging it, but if Willow wanted January to do something, she’d have to talk to him about it, gently, while in bed before they drifted off to sleep. Pillow talk had been her specialty with Dudley Lee, the two of them smooshed together in the twin bed they shared. She didn’t have any grand plans for him, however, content with putting her arms around him, gazing into his eyes until the two of them fell asleep, always him first.
A week into their marriage, Dudley Lee got a job as a janitor at a hotel on Canal Street. He wouldn’t make much money, he’d told her, wouldn’t be able to move her into a house like that of her childhood. But she didn’t care. “Silly Dudley Lee. I love you for these dimples. And the way you make me feel. I love you for how you stick it to me, especially when you go in there with your tongue. I don’t care about what you can buy me.”
“But I want you to love me more. And if I buy you a proper house, you will.”
While he was away, she spent her days baking, cooking, perfecting his most beloved dishes, things his mother would make for him—candied yams, crawfish Creole, monkey bread. The kitchen she shared with Charles’s wife, Aletha, who took over the space in the afternoons, so Augusta had to hustle to get his dinners ready in the morning, rewarming them each evening. With the little room available to her in the refrigerator and the cupboards, Augusta shopped daily at the French Market. She knew Bela Nova got her produce, spices, and teas as soon as dawn hit, arriving before even some of the vendors. So she’d wait, send Dudley Lee off with chicory and a pair of warm biscuits spread with butter, then join the crowds that gathered midmorning. Women—housekeepers, nannies, widows, and young girls in their school clothes—she made the rounds with them all, choosy with how she spent her money, knowing the modest stack of cash she’d saved working under Bela Nova wouldn’t last the summer.
One Friday morning while in line to purchase buttermilk and peaches for a pie, Augusta felt herself being watched. When she turned around, she met the steely eyes of a very made-up woman, cheeks stained burnt orange and eyelashes coated with mascara. She wore pink lipstick, though she hardly had any lips on her, and Augusta could smell her department-store perfume.
The woman said nothing, just lifted an eyebrow and squished together what little lips she had, perhaps appalled by Augusta’s nerve to give her the once-over. Turning back around, Augusta paid for her items and started home. Before she made it to the walkway, she heard the soft clack of heels on the hard dirt only a few feet behind her. She was sure it was the woman, though she wouldn’t check this time. The click-clacks matched her own hurried footsteps, and Augusta assumed the woman would soon branch off in a different direction, splitting off into the Quarter somewhere or getting into a parked car.
But a half mile away from the house, the footsteps still followed. It could be simple coincidence, the two of them heading in the same direction, keeping the same pace, but Augusta didn’t think so and wasn’t surprised when, as she reached Royal Street, the footsteps doubled in time until they were right up with her. The woman grabbed hold of her arm.
Augusta stopped, not smiling, not wanting to appease or entertain her. “You need something?”
When tears began pooling in the woman’s weary eyes, smearing her makeup, Augusta placed her bags on the ground, ready to offer comfort or to block a right hook. She saw despair in the lady, a bloat around her eyes. The most decent thing to do was to hand the woman her handkerchief. After blotting away tears, the woman was finally able to speak, thanking Augusta for her kindness. “You’ll have to excuse me for behaving this way, but I haven’t been myself lately. You see, I’ve got a bad husband.”
Augusta steadied herself, wondering what the woman was implying.
“I’m sure this happens to you a lot. And I apologize for coming up to you in the street like this instead of at the shop.”
“The shop?” asked Augusta. Did Bela Nova have eyes on her from somewhere way off and had sent this person to trap her?
“It’s just that, once I recognized you, it seemed right. I ain’t never believed in hoodoo all my good life. But I don’t know what it is—you got some kind of energy about you. Made me think you can help me.”
The scene remained vivid to Augusta even decades later. It was a purely Southern day, a mist in the air that pressed you down, the heat making you sweat soon as you woke up. Wild iris was in bloom and salt marsh pinks, abundant enough to smell, tangy and bitter. Her feet ached from walking so quickly, her soles worn thin on the gravelly road.
“You the girl that works with Delilah, right?”
Delilah was the name Bela Nova had been given by her parents, a name she stopped answering to once she opened up her shop. By now, she’d separated herself fully from the girl Delilah, a standout student when she’d been at Our Lady of Refuge High School, would no longer humor anyone who called out that name. Perhaps this woman knew Bela Nova from before. But then, how did she know about Augusta?
“I’ve seen you with her in the mornings. Shopping.”
“I used to work for her. Bela Nova,” Augusta said, and the whole of her stomach dropped just saying the name out loud. “But I don’t anymore.”
“Yes, I figured as much seeing you out at the market without her. That Delilah likes to keep her girls under her thumb.” Augusta wouldn’t dwell on those words until later, but she hadn’t reckoned that there were any girls before her. “I’m really looking for some help, but Delilah would laugh if I ever got the nerve to step into her shop.” The two had gone to school together. “I don’t have a lot of money. Not anymore. But I can give you a good little wad if you’d be willing to help me.” The woman, Azalea, would become her first client, asking Augusta to prevent her husband from seeing other women. Her man had said she didn’t have enough meat on her, and he didn’t even try to hide his gallivanting.
At the woman’s home, it was a struggle to remember how to do much of anything. She’d never taken notes. Bela Nova had always insisted Augusta learn by practicing over and over, not by studying. She asked Azalea to collect any coins that her husband might have held in his hand, two bristles from their broom, a cube of sugar, and any gold jewelry she owned. From the market later that day, she purchased essence of rose, which she mixed with red ink to make what Bela Nova called Dove’s Blood. She’d use it to write Azalea’s name on a piece of paper seven times. Augusta would compile these items for a ditty bag to be placed under her husband’s pillow to ensure his head rested there each night. “It ain’t about where he’s sleeping. It’s what he’s doing when he’s not sleeping,” Azalea had sassed. Augusta assured her that the fix would indeed fix his philandering ways.
Despite the woman’s need, Augusta felt thorny about taking her money. Her home was on a good street, shined up from the outside, but it was clear better times had passed the couple by, the rooms inside stark, nothing but a small table and a stool in the front room. “Pay me when things get better.”
Augusta left, wishing she hadn’t indulged the woman. She’d never put together a spell outside of the shop and wasn’t confident she had the chops.
She hadn’t given more thought to Azalea until a couple weeks later when, while searching a pile for a ripe lemon at the market, she felt someone close behind her. She hardly recognized the woman, her face scrubbed clean of all its maquillage, the color in her cheeks natural and seemly. She’d come to the market to compensate Augusta and tell her about the accident. Augusta’s pulse sped up as Azalea recounted what happened.
The husband had been on the assembly line at a meat-packing facility and for once was sober on the job. This made him in the mood to work a little more expeditiously, put a little lightning into it to speed along the day. His newfound fervor, however, brought trouble when he dropped his butcher knife, the sharp blade splitting the leather top of his shoe. Those around him hurried to get off the shoe and wrap up his foot, so much blood it soaked a towel in under a minute. They ran him to the hospital, but they’d left his toes inside the shoe.
Augusta put one hand on the stand’s table, the other to her chest. “You mean he lost his toes?”
“All four of them. Dougie didn’t have a pinky toe. That one got cut off when he was just a kid.”
“Oh, Ms. Azalea. I’m so sorry.”
She shook her head. “You don’t understand. Ever since then, he ain’t been going out at night. Wants me to take care of him, nurse him back to health so he can work as well as he did that day.” Azalea pulled out a thin wad of folded bills. “We done it four times in one week. It’d been months since he touched me.”
Augusta didn’t know what to say. Again, she refused the woman’s money, unwilling to welcome the responsibility for such an event, needing to prevent gossip that she’d maimed a man. Her ditty bag had been assembled wrong, obviously. She’d made some significant error, but what? If only she could refer to Bela Nova’s book.
Returning home that evening, she found Dudley Lee in the kitchen drinking a tall glass of sweet tea. “I lost my job,” he told her, apologetic but skipping the specifics.
As he explained his plan for finding something new and better, Augusta untied the crimson scarf from around her neck, unpacked her grocery bags. Her hand hit something coarse near the bell peppers and onions—the folded stack of bills Azalea had flashed earlier. She must have slipped the money in while Augusta was occupied. When Dudley Lee saw the cash, he wanted to know where it came from. Years later, she wished she would have just lied, said that she’d gone to visit her parents and they’d given it to her. Or that she’d picked up some work washing and folding clothes. But she told him most of the truth, omitting only the part about Dougie’s missing toes.
Dudley Lee was amazed, proud of his new bride for having her own hustle.
“Dudley Lee, this was a one-time thing. A favor. I can’t keep doing this.”
“Of course you can. You gotta have something worth money, the way my mama put all that work into you.”
“But... I never did things all by myself.”
But he was insistent, backpedaling some, admitting now that he’d be hard pressed to get another gig soon. Later, after he was dead, she’d discover that he’d been let go for playing craps in the alley behind the hotel. “I’ll get you your clients. You can meet them here. We’ll fix up the front room. Or even our bedroom. Save up some money until we can get our own shop. Just like Mom’s.”
The concept wouldn’t work if she relied on just the few snippets of spells she’d come to memorize. She couldn’t risk leaving a good number of people in the parish without toes, hands, feet. So Dudley Lee would have to go steal his mother’s book of spells from the workshop. Theft wasn’t an easy thing for Augusta, but she rationalized it, telling herself they wouldn’t be in their situation had Bela Nova just granted the two of them her blessing. Besides, Bela Nova had written that book herself, collecting hexes, chants, ingredients for powders, tinctures for years. Most of its contents the woman could recall without blinking, simply pulling down the book for good measure. The harm in taking it would be minor. And hadn’t Bela Nova planned on giving it to Augusta at some point as her chosen successor of the shop and everything in it? If that was the fate she’d been ascribed according to Bela Nova, why not be assertive in chasing after it, face her future head-on? How else could she be a helper to the world, as Lanora desired of her daughters?
The next day, not soon after he’d left, Dudley Lee returned home, an impish grin on his face. It was easier than cheese to snag the book, he’d said. He’d also lifted a few dollars from his mother’s tip jar. “Well, I ain’t gonna put it back now,” he said when Augusta protested, tucking the money in his pocket, telling her he’d be back in a few hours.
The rain outside was falling more like snow, buoyant and soft, bits of sun sneaking left and right from the clouds. By now, the best of the market pickings would be gone. And though it was late, she didn’t want to chance a run-in with Bela Nova so soon after Dudley Lee had pilfered the book. She’d have to find a new place to shop. Luckily, there was still a bit of pork sausage left from the day before and some okra and corn, the makings of a sweet celebration dinner. She began to chop the vegetables, giddy and exhilarated that she’d made such an impact on Azalea’s life and now could do even more.
The sizzle from working Azalea’s trick remained in her body from that day forward and took hold of her like nothing else ever had, not even her love for Dudley Lee. Her fears about Bela Nova wilted away with time, and she continued pushing miracles out of impossible situations, though the spark had waned as she aged. Which was fine, because Victoria had been there to step in her place.
Augusta felt a similar sizzle coming through the line as she listened to Willow, who’d miraculously stopped jabbering away about January and returned to the potion, spouting out dozens of possibilities—peeling maraschino cherries and drying the skin and crushing it into a powder, of burning sanding sugar, of macerating berries. As Willow described her work, Augusta recognized her energy, her excitement, her persistence, matching her own from decades before.
“You still there, Nana? The reason I didn’t try olives is because they’re stone fruits and will probably center a person’s gravity, not what you want when dancing, you know?” She knew Willow still played around with recipes in the old book, studying the ingredients and processes so that she could reformulate spells, make them better. Willow had barely passed her English literature class but had years before become a student of Zora Neale Hurston’s, reading and rereading both Mules and Men and Tell My Horse, texts that served as foundational for her understanding of how to craft a spell. Unlike Augusta, her granddaughter had approached the act of working tricks scientifically, grounding herself in theory so she could take hexes apart and put them back together, or rearrange them, far more than the pedestrian ways she’d remixed or altered recipes in her day.
January was clearly alive and well, and though she had dismissed Willow’s feelings for the man as lust, not love, perhaps something else was at play. All these men over the years, yet the curse hadn’t touched Willow. Could it be that Willow had found a way to protect herself against it? For a brief moment, Augusta wondered if maybe they’d gotten it wrong all these years. That Willow was the one who’d inherited Lanora’s gift.