I was sitting at the table replenishing water charms when Mary strolled into the kitchen, already a little tan and freckly from her first week of lifeguard duty.
“Where’s Mom?” Mary asked, dropping noisily into a kitchen chair. She closed her eyes, and I knew she was calling Mickey, her own feline familiar, a distant cousin to Mom’s cat Sam. Mickey appeared a moment later and made himself comfortable in Mary’s lap.
“Pedersen’s,” I said as I held up a water charm for inspection.
Mama’s girl flashed through my mind involuntarily, even though I’d told myself I had given up caring about their bond that excluded me long ago. But I was concentrating too hard to be more than mildly annoyed.
Mary nodded and reached for a charm bottle, working beside me seamlessly as we had for years, two parts of a whole. Light and dark, fire and earth, intuition and tactile sense. Water charms were one of the first things Magda had drilled into me. I could make water charms in my sleep, and as if by osmosis, Mary had gotten pretty good at them too.
Mary matched my movements as I filled each three-ounce glass bottle with lake water from a large steel kettle and held it to my lips. Chunsch im Wasser. Wasser, chunsch. Wasser wiff. Wasser, chunsch. With both hands cupping the bottle, I set the molecules humming with the positive power of attraction, sending my life force through the glass into the water. Satisfied with the water rippling with energy, glowing a faint green in my hands, a reflection of my own energy, I stoppered the bottle to trap the kinetic energy and powerful summoning inside. It wasn’t unusual for a rain cloud to gather over our house on those afternoons when we created water charms, the summoning charm hanging in the air as we captured it bit by bit in each bottle.
I knew I belonged to Magda, but I had never fully understood why. From the beginning of my memory, my mother was a husk of a woman. She had some magical abilities but reserved them for the animals of the county. So Magda carried the family business alone and trained me to be her sole heir from the first appearance of my abilities. Magda taught Mary too, but it wasn’t the same. She was stricter with me, more exacting. The bar was higher for me as Magda’s successor. Mary was a two-for-one deal.
Even at age four, I felt chosen in my own household, important enough to do something I had never seen even my mother do, only me and Magda. It hurt my childish pride to have Mary tag along. But even as I was honing more challenging skills, reading energies, making charms, Magda gave Mary only the fun stuff.
“Do it too?” I remembered Mary asking in her still-baby voice as Magda taught me the painstakingly nuanced steps of water charms and beacons at the kitchen table.
“Sure,” Magda said with a shrug, handing her a glass bottle and stopper.
But Magda never bothered to check Mary’s work, her eyes on me and me alone. The more Magda’s attention shone on me, the more I felt a growing sense of pride in what only I could do.
The thing about growing up in such a small town is that everyone knows everyone’s business. And as much as a town could hush up about what services they sought from our kitchen, they sure liked to talk about us Watry-Ridder girls. When I was about five and Mary three, old biddies would eye us at Juba’s Grocery and ask our mother if there were any “signs” yet, raising their eyebrows dramatically as they scanned from Mary to me. Mom said nothing, as was her way in public, just shrugged and pushed her cart down the canned-goods aisle with her mechanical, straight-backed walk. Little did they know I had been levitating since before I could walk.
When a classmate stole my favorite pencil in kindergarten, the whole town knew I tried to curse her. They also knew it sort of worked. A stubborn, persistent rain cloud hung over her family’s house for two days. It wasn’t quite what I was going for—raining toads—but it was a pretty good first attempt.
The next time, when a boy dared to throw mud at me during recess, I got closer. A large box turtle stalked that boy for a week and a half. I was particularly satisfied to see how disconcerting it was for the boy to look up from a math lesson and see that snub-beaked box turtle staring at him from the second-floor grade school window, or know that he’d wake up in the middle of the night with its little turtle feet standing on his chest.
That became a favorite of mine over the years. Magda hated it, and she let me know.
“You have more important things to do,” she’d snap when Mary inevitably tattled.
But there was nothing Magda could do. She needed me as her apprentice, and I learned early on how far I could push the limits, although usually not in my grandmother’s presence to avoid the scolding.
Around the same time, Mary started playing Snow White by summoning all the neighborhood cats and dogs and deer and gophers to our yard to watch her one-woman shows. It was a good party trick but hardly a valuable addition to the family business.
Like our near-silent mother—or maybe because of her—Mary had a way of hearing what was unsaid. She could often taste snow in the air days before the clouds formed. Mom’s and Mary’s tactile senses worked on another level, while Magda and I were all gut, all intuition. Also like Mom, Mary excelled at working with animals. Some extrasensory input allowed them both to hear what a horse or cat or chicken couldn’t say out loud.
With a dozen water charms shimmering green and gold between us, Mary ventured to ask, “So, how was it?”
I paused, considering. How was it? Mary’s expression was eager. She was genuinely dying to hear about it, and her enthusiasm annoyed me.
Mary widened her eyes at me, an expression she had picked up from our mother. Even though she easily could have read me without permission, Mary knew better. That was an ultimate boundary in our household. Precisely because we had the skills to read each other’s thoughts and secrets, there had to be a firm line that could be crossed only with invitation—which we had learned, as sisters often do, the hard way.
“It’s strange, you know,” I started slowly. “We’ve been doing this our whole lives. I’ve been preparing for this since forever. But today still surprised me. Sink or swim, you know? I guess I didn’t really believe it until I was reading Mr. Lindsey.”
“I’m sure you were great today,” Mary said, covering my hand in a way that made me feel like the younger sister.
I pressed my lips together. “I mean, sure. I did fine. My readings have been precise lately,” I told her, which was true. But I told her about Mr. Lindsey, his broken heart, his liver like Swiss cheese. She was quiet as I spoke, studying the table beneath her splayed fingers.
“Today was the first day I doubted that what we do here is really helpful. What if we’re giving people false hope?” I asked her.
“We can’t fix everything,” Mary said after a long pause, oblivious that she was echoing Magda. “But you know that what we do is real. Our water charms have saved nearly every farm in town at some point or another. That’s real. That makes a difference.”
We sat in comfortable silence as the potatoes burbled on the stovetop. I shook my head finally and stood.
“I don’t know, Mare. You don’t know what it’s like,” I said, more harshly than I intended.
Mary shot me a lopsided smile from under the curtain of her long, raven curls, a dimple appearing under unsmiling Dutch blue eyes. “Focus on the good,” she said. “I’m sure it was tough, but you must have brought some peace to Mr. Lindsey today.”
Annoyed at being lectured by my little sister, I turned my back to strain the potatoes over the sink. Who does she think she is, Jiminy Cricket? As I added fresh cream and butter and started to mash, Mary spoke again.
“I know, Lisbett,” she said quietly. “But look who I was raised by.”
Mom, I thought. You got Mom, and I got stuck with Magda. But I didn’t say that.
“Sure,” I said, to avoid a fight.
I glanced back to see my long-legged, dark-haired beauty of a little sister disappearing up the back stairs to change her clothes for supper. I stood dumbfounded as I realized she had read me outright without asking.
What ever happened to privacy in this house? I wondered as I overmashed the potatoes to a gummy oblivion.
As the heat of the day burned off, Mom crept back into the kitchen, washed her hands, and took the chicken from the warm oven. Dad arrived home from the mill and announced to anyone within earshot, “I’m starving. What’s for supper?”
I set the round table with five settings—all equals, no head—then retrieved warm dishes of mashed potatoes and green beans from the oven and delivered them to Mom’s pewter trivets. Dad took his place nearest the fridge, and I sat opposite him, nearest the side door. Mary, long legs bared in pleated shorts, charged back into the kitchen to sit between me and Dad. Magda wandered into the kitchen, likely having felt the presence of a Ridder man upsetting the feminine energy in the house.
“Ooh, look at that,” Dad marveled as my mother served him first, an empty honorarium reserved for the men tied to Watry women. Mom plated a thigh and drummy, golden-brown skin perfectly intact, and smothered the plate in piping-hot gravy.
When everyone was served, we folded our hands in our laps, and Dad led us in a perfunctory grace. Once the Lord was thanked and our chests crossed, the room fell silent.
“Mm, what a treat.” Dad eventually broke the silence.
Mary and I made eyes at each other, and my earlier annoyance with her instantly fell away. Dad’s love of food, any food, even a plain old chicken dinner, was one of the constants in the Watry-Ridder household, and it delighted us to no end.
“Look at that,” I said, admiring a green bean.
“Simply divine,” Mary crooned to a forkful of potatoes.
We giggled into our napkins.
“All right, all right,” Dad said. “That’s enough.” But he was smiling, blue eyes crinkling with mischief as he looked from me to Mary and back again.
I caught my mother’s eye over a bite of chicken, and she rolled her eyes, making fun of my father and his love of gravy in her own way.
“So you saw Mr. Sayre yesterday, Helene?” Dad asked Mom after swallowing a large bite.
Mom nodded.
“And you saw Mr. Sayre after Helene did, apparently?” Magda asked loudly, knowing full well that Mr. Sayre, the owner of a decent-sized egg production operation, must have stopped by the mill and talked up Mom’s services.
Dad watched my mother patiently for a response.
“Coyotes,” Mom said quietly.
“How was output today?” Magda asked my father, guiding the conversation toward the other family business, the Ridder Family Company mills and grain elevators.
My mother closed her mouth with a small sigh and studied her plate.
You interrupted her, I had the sudden impulse to scream at Magda, sympathizing with my mother as she wilted under Magda’s gaze. I knew all too well how domineering my grandmother could be. But as always, I said nothing against her.
“Oh, fine,” Dad said with a smile. He rarely said more, unless it was to complain about one of his “pigheaded” brothers. “Big production day, for June anyway.”
No matter how much the men in town talked or what gossip Dad heard, Magda would say as little as possible in front of my father, the outlier Ridder man, to avoid confirming who we had seen that day, just enough to corroborate rumors from the mill. Even though Dad knew as well as anyone who came to our side door, he played along.
We chewed in silence for a few minutes, lost in our own thoughts and the pleasant, filling meal.
“Pop called the office today. He and Mother would like to come by for Sunday supper,” Dad said after a few minutes.
Mom winced, then rearranged her face into a neutral expression and set down her fork.
When the Watrys arrived in Minnesota territory, my grandmothers made quick work of blending in with the locals. The town had been there since the Friedrich family first put down roots in the 1850s. The first Friedrichs were farmers and merchants, and a small community started to form around the Friedrich General Store—including the mill, which had a wheel turned by the inlet on the east side of Clear Lake and was eventually bought by my grandpa Ridder. As in many frontier towns, German and Dutch relatives followed soon after to fill the surrounding farmlands tucked between the lakes that dotted the flat western Minnesota landscape.
My great-grandmother many times over helped to start the Catholic church on a hill on the west side of town. Magic tends to be looked down upon in polite society, so church became our way of disappearing into the crowd. History had proved it was the solo hags on the edge of town thumbing their noses at the church who were hauled away to burn first in the witch hunts over the years, and we learned from those Puritan escapades. The Watrys and all of our grandmothers before us had slipped by unscathed, the innocent lambs in the front pew among the faithful in Minnesota territory.
That first good deed by my forward-thinking Urgroßmuedere gave our family the goodwill of the small community clinging to life alongside Clear Lake, and my grandmothers started to see clients quietly in the old barn that once stood on the edge of our property or by the light of the original kitchen’s wood-burning stove. When they saved the town during the flu outbreak in 1890, including both of the grandsons of William Friedrich, the Watrys forever earned their place in the fabric of the community. Generations of children of Friedrich grew up respecting the Watry women and our abilities.
But there were those in town who feared us, who didn’t understand our work. And my Grandma Ridder was one such skeptic. She had grown up in neighboring St. Agnes, and after moving to town to marry Grandpa Ridder, she was suspicious of Magda and Great-Grandma Dorothy. I wondered how much Grandma Ridder had known about my mother and Magda before my parents were married, or if Great-Grandma Dorothy might even have charmed Grandma Ridder for convenience in the beginning. But years after Jacob Ridder fell for and married Helene, Grandma Ridder still questioned our business and “all that nonsense.”
I watched Mom intently, but I knew she would never object. Part of her duty to her husband, who so carefully kept up appearances in town so we could continue practicing with scarcely a glance from the people of Friedrich, was to entertain his unbelieving parents from time to time. It was never a fun visit for my mother or Magda, but thankfully, Grandpa and Grandma Ridder had retired to a small hobby farm outside Olivia, several counties away, and didn’t visit often.
Mom nodded twice, signaling her acquiescence, some private language having passed between my parents.
“Thank you, Helene,” Dad said.
At this display of practiced Dutch and German stoicism, Mary and I rolled our eyes in unison. Typical, I thought. Yep, her eyes blinked back at me. Magda caught my eye over this exchange and winked at me, never one to miss the rare opportunity to make fun of my mother’s in-laws. Mary and I thought she secretly enjoyed making Grandma Ridder uncomfortable during those visits.
I glanced at the clock above the kitchen sink and shoveled the last bites of supper into my mouth. The Watry-Ridders were a Clean Plate Club family.
“John’s picking me up soon. May I be excused?”
“Go on, then,” Dad said. “Have fun and give our best to the Weselohs.”
As I dashed off up the kitchen stairs to tame my hair, I heard Dad musing behind me, “Just wait, Mare. Soon enough you’ll be running off on dates too, and I won’t have any of my girls left.”