Tami Hoag - Magic

“You need to have a little patience,” Bryan insisted. “Something will turn up.”

Rachel felt as if a switch had been flipped inside her, letting anger pour forth unchecked. Something will turn up. That had always been Terence’s line. He’d forever been telling her to lighten up, loosen up, that the future would take care of itself. She’d seen firsthand that wasn’t the case. Nothing ever just “turned up.” She had learned the hard way that the world had two kinds of people: People like Terence who believed in rainbows, and people like her who accepted responsibility.

It made her angry to think that Bryan belonged to the first group, the group she knew better than to get tangled up with. And deeper down it made her angry that she had to belong to the second group. Her life would have been a whole lot brighter with a rainbow in it, but she couldn’t have one, and she didn’t have time to go chasing it, at any rate. She had responsibilities.

She was angry with him. Bryan could feel the heat of it, he could see it burning in her eyes. He had stepped on a nerve. He opened his mouth to smooth things over, but Rachel didn’t give him the chance.

“It must be nice to be able to coast through life believing everything takes care of itself,” she said bitterly. “But I wouldn’t know, because I’ve always been one of those people destined to pick up after dreamers and shoulder the realities they can never seem to face.”

Bryan shot up out of his chair and grabbed her by the wrist as she turned to storm out. “Rachel, wait-”

“I can’t wait, Mr. Hennessy,” she snapped, glaring at him. “I’ve got work to do.” She jerked her arm from his grasp and rubbed at it as if to erase the memory of his touch. “I’ll let you get back to your juggling,” she said with a sneer.

Bryan closed his eyes and heaved a long sigh. Each click of her heels on the wooden floor made him wince until the sound faded away. He turned to stare up at the portrait that hung on the paneled wall.

“Got any bright suggestions?” he asked.

The pleasantly pudgy man in the painting was Arthur Drake III, the last Drake to own the house. He merely went on staring straight ahead, a secretive smile on his small mouth, one hand raised, palm up, as if gesturing to the viewer to behold the room around them. A badly tarnished brass plaque fastened to the bottom molding of the frame was engraved with a quote by Seneca: Gold is tried by fire, brave men by adversity.

“I guess this is adversity,” Bryan muttered. “Well see how acceptable I am.”

He sank slowly into the chair and swiveled around, letting his gaze take in the gracious room: the cherry paneling, the built-in bookshelves crowded with musty old leatherbound volumes, the fireplace, which had apparently been renovated at some point because the brick was newer than any other in the house.

What was he going to do about Rachel?

Kissing her seemed like a good idea .

“Right,” he murmured wryly in answer to his inner voice. “I’ll do it again next time she lets me get within a hundred yards of her.”Rachel finally found the books for her mother’s antiques business squirreled away inside an oak icebox in what was supposed to be Addie’s office. It was a sunny room at the front of the house, cluttered with stacks and stacks of old newspapers, and wastebaskets full of splintered glass figurines. The desk contained hundreds of old lace doilies. One drawer was brim full of ballpoint pens. But not one scrap of relevant business information had been housed there. Inside a file cabinet she had found cigar boxes full of buttons of every description, but not until she checked the icebox and looked beneath three dozen old Life magazines did she find what she’d been looking for.

She realized, as she eased down into the chair behind the desk, that while she had been looking for this financial information, she had been dreading actually finding it. It had become obvious to her that Addie was in no condition to run a business with anything remotely resembling efficiency. She feared the books on Lindquist Antiques would only confirm what she already knew to be true.

Shoring up her resolve with a deep breath, she brushed the dust from the cover of the old ledger and turned it back. The first few pages of columns were written in her mother’s neat, brisk hand. Sales and acquisitions were noted with proper care and detail. The columns of figures added up to the penny.

Rachel checked their accuracy with her calculator, feeling slightly inferior. Addie had always done math in her head as quickly and unerringly as any machine. She had always expected Rachel to be able to as well, and she had always seemed let down when Rachel hadn’t been able to live up to that standard. Rachel recalled with a pang the nights she had sat up in her bed with her covers over her head to hide the brightness of the flashlight as she worked on her math tables, determined to make her mother proud of her.

The only thing about Rachel that had unfailingly pleased Addie had been her voice. Addie had been a demanding taskmaster, forcing her to practice, practice, practice; correcting her slightest error; critiquing every note. But when Addie had sat and listened to a performance, a look of rapturous longing had stolen over her face. Pride and love had shone in her eyes. And afterward Addie had always roused herself, as if from a dream, and said, “You have the voice of an angel, Rachel. I am so very very proud of you.”

Rachel shook herself now from the bittersweet memory. She had fought against that pride in an attempt to gain her mother’s understanding, and she had lost. It had been a foolish thing to do, but she’d been young and rebellious and longing to have her mother love her for who she was, not how she sang. She rubbed at her temples now as she thought of how it had all backfired on her, how all her pretty rainbows had melted into grayness.

Maybe if Bryan had had to deal with a harsh reality or two, he wouldn’t be so quick to believe in magic either, she thought.

A relationship with Bryan Hennessy. She shuddered at the thought, though whether it was out of fear or anticipation she couldn’t have honestly said. She told herself it was righteous indignation. The nerve of the man insinuating that she had been pursuing him!

Turning another page in the ledger, she noticed that the handwriting had changed subtly. It wasn’t quite as neat or strong. A figure or two had been scratched out and written over. The penmanship worsened with every page, until she began to find words misspelled, letters transposed, mistakes in the math. And Rachel realized that what she was seeing was documentation of Addie’s decline.

Nearly a year had passed since the last entry had been made in the book, and that final column of figures had never been tallied. The page was wrinkled and dark from a coffee stain, as if Addie had perhaps become upset with her inability and had spilled the cup in her haste to escape the written evidence of the illness that was progressively stealing her mind.

Rachel set the ledger aside and picked up the inventory book, hoping against hope that it was more up-to-date. But what she found was a repeat performance. The entries started out logical and legible, and gradually declined to the point that what little she could make out made no sense. The book was no more up-to-date than the ledger had been, and it was too much to hope that nothing had been purchased or sold in the interim. She was going to have to inventory everything in the house, then they would have to have a sale of some kind to dispose of the bulk of the merchandise.

They would be able to take only Addie’s most personal possessions and a few antiques to San Francisco. Rachel knew they would not be able to afford much in the way of an apartment. There certainly wouldn’t be room for the hundreds of pieces of furniture Addie had accumulated, or the bric-a-brac… or the bird cages.