Chapter Three

Heddy's shop, Minerals and Magic, is smushed between a used bookstore and do-it-yourself ceramics workshop, one in a collection of businesses nicknamed "Beatnik Alley." This is where you find the weirdos.

I can say that, I'm family to a weirdo. I've dabbled in weirdness myself. I spent some chunk of last night yelling at burnt banana bread so I'm sure that counts.

My sixty-one-year-old surrogate mother can usually be found here, fixing string lights and refreshing the planter boxes. Her shop's exterior brick is forest green, the two bay windows painted black. One of her many ex-husbands made the hanging wooden sign that she takes down every few months for paint touch-ups.

"Heddy!" I call out, the doorbell ringing behind me.

A woman to my right jumps out of her skin and nearly knocks over a rack of greeting cards.

"You scared me," she breathes, flashing her eyes angrily.

"Sorry," I offer.

It's never empty in here, but I always enter as if I'm in Heddy's private home and she's somewhere lost in the fog of incense. Customers don't appreciate my over-familiarity while they peruse vintage jewelry or open apothecary table drawers to sort through collected feathers, seashells, and critter bones.

"Hey, Zander," I offer to the man behind the counter. Sets of carefully curated vintage bowls chatter and low-hanging chandeliers jingle when I cross the wooden floorboards. "Do you know where she is?"

He leans his bare arms over the counter and twirls a single tiger's eye earring. "She's in the back, and she's in a mood."

Well, I'm on the precipice of a mood myself, so we can't both be problematic today.

I pause, craning my neck for her. "What is it this time?"

"Candles." His voice lowers. " Glass ones ."

I thank him and head past the long table of color-organized crystals. Crossing the hazardous wooden threshold into a brick-paved second room painted a deep aubergine, I find my godmother standing on a chair.

She's stacking glass candles on a different chair that balances precariously on a mosaic bistro table. The crown of her head scratches dried flowers hanging from the ceiling.

My feet stop just within her periphery, to not startle her. There's broken glass on the floor behind her.

"Hi Vee Vee," she says without looking at me. She stacks the candles in a pyramid formation. The table sways.

"Heddy, you can't leave glass on the floor of your business unless you want to get sued," I say, walking to the storage closet to collecting a broom.

She argues, "I've done all right so far. I just tell people Harold did it."

I laugh, "Well then the ghost has been busy today."

"He's always busy," she mumbles. "Especially if the kids moved his doll."

I freeze. "Don't do that. You know how I feel about that."

"You can believe what you want, but that doesn't make it any less true," she responds with quiet focus. Her hands slowly and she inches down from her chair to the floor.

Heddy's stringy waist-length grayish-black hair swings with braids and ribbons tied into it. Her tan, dry skin crinkles around a smile of whiter than white teeth. Purplish lipstick, tacky gemstone rings on each finger, low-rise Seven For All Mankind jeans. She wears a hand-painted sleeveless khaki vest portraying a fox and dog playing together.

I stare at the vest, walking a circle around her as I sweep.

It's an entire story in clothing art. The puppy and the fox are friends. There's an old man with a gun. The fox and dog grow up.

"Is that the story of The Fox and the Hound on your top?" I ask.

She twirls around. "Yes. Do you love it? I painted it last night."

Thankfully, she's thinner than a pole, otherwise that vest would not have covered what I know is not a bra.

I sweep the glass into a paper bag. "Did you watch that movie? You hate talking animal stuff. Plus, the dog has, like, these big droopy eyes that make you want to cry. You don't like crying at cartoons."

I'm going to cry just thinking about it.

"It's a book first, my dear," she says, staring up at her tower of candles. "But I know you don't read."

"They wouldn't make TV if they wanted us to read," I argue.

"Who's they ?"

I fold the top of the bag and stand upright. "You know. The people who make things."

She laughs and shakes her head. "Drop that in the closet. Zander will take it on his way out. And if your mother heard you say you prefer television over books, she would disown you."

I do as I'm told and smile internally.

Heddy and my mother, her best friend, were nothing alike outwardly. My mother had no hard edges, no sharp words, and only wore neutral clothing, zero jewelry, and a splatter of makeup on her thirty-seven-year-old face.

Inside, they were the same person.

I think that makes it easy for Heddy to still talk about her, which I love. She's the only one who ever does. Francesca won't anymore, I have no aunts or uncles on that side, my grandparents aren't alive, and I'm not sure my father ever met his wife. We were probably conceived immaculately, Jesus-like.

Heddy waves her short fingers around the room. "I've got a whole idea. Hanging feathers, coffee filter flowers, paper birds careening down from the heavens…" She's got that face. The moody display-is-not-working face.

I stand beside her and rest my head on her shoulder. "You'll figure it out. It always comes together."

She brushes back my hair the way I knew she would, and I follow her to the front desk. She leans her hands on the counter. "So. What's the reason for the season, Puppet?"

I tap my fingers against the marble. "I came for your key to the lake house."

She cocks a brow, picking up a ceramic mug and bringing it to her lips. "Is that so?"

I explain, "I decided to go with Fran this week. They're all going up tomorrow, but I thought I would come tonight and have a night to myself."

"Sure, baby." She reaches around Zander and opens a drawer. Keys jingle. "What's the change of heart?"

I rest my palms flat on the cool surface, listening to the front door open again. "Fran wanted the support."

Heddy moves her head, shaking gold hoop earrings. "That's not what I meant," she says holding the silver house key toward me.

I swallow, taking it.

Heddy knows why I don't go to the lake house anymore. My father does as well, not that he cares. They're the only two people in the world who know what happened on that last day, fourteen years ago. Well, besides me and –

Music rings out from my left.

"Sorry!" A young girl walking through the door giggles, fumbling with her phone. She turns it off and the music stops.

Heddy's mouth drops.

I wonder what she knows about the first five seconds of the song just played. Does she know what I know? Because I only know the first five seconds.

I don't listen to folksy, ruggedly handsome singer-songwriters anymore.

Slowly, drama dripping from every word, she gasps, "The. Universe. Has. Spoken."

Jazz hands.

My stomach clenches painfully. Holding the key in my right hand, I flip my other palm and plant my face in it, leaning into the counter.

"That song is everywhere," I grumble. "What kind of marketing does he have?!"

She goes on, "We were just talking about him!"

"No!" I snap my head up. "We were not talking about him. No one said his name or mentioned him at all."

"I did in my brain," she admits, leaning one on hip, her bangle-laden wrist bending into the other. "I bet you did too. And the universe is listening. It's a sign, Vienna!"

"Of what?" I throw my hands out to her.

"Of going back to the lake house and confronting your past!" She claps her hands together.

" Ew ." I pretend to gag. "I'll tell you what it is: it's a sign that he's a famous and successful musician now and people can't stop listening to his music and playing it everywhere. He was the SNL musical guest last month. Did you know that? He makes millions of dollars writing and playing music, and I leave work every day covered in dry erase marker."

" Vee ." Heddy softens. Her eyes alight with surprise. "What does one have to do with the other?"

"Nothing." I glance away. "You're the one who brought him up."

"You can't even say his name," she notices, waving to a customer who just walked out of the door.

I reply, "No, I can't. Because for years he's just been him ."

I notice Zander's head turning, listening.

Heddy waves a hand and steps out from behind the desk. "Come with me, baby, we've got a woman's group coming in tonight, and I need to get the meditation room ready. Keep talking."

I follow her into the room where she reads Tarot and channels messages for people and holds community moon circles. It's beige and dimly lit, softly wrapped in hanging white curtains. Flat, round cushions are stacked in a heap.

Heddy picks one up by the handle and brushes it off. "Now you can say his name all you want. Adam Kent ," she sings into the rafters. "Adam Kent!"

"Stop it!" I shush her. "Not here in your magic room, you're going to summon him."

She chuckles to herself, dropping the cushion against the wall.

"Please don't burn that," I say, glancing at a bowl of bundled sage on a side table. "It's bad for air quality."

"You're changing the subject," she says, collecting two more cushions.

I pout, staring at my fingernails.

She stops moving, fiddling with the pendant around her neck, and asks, "Is this about Adam Kent or is this about your job? I'm guessing you don't have dry erase boards at home, unless you've made a new decorating choice."

I lean my back against the wall and exhale. "Both, I think."

"Tell me." Heddy looks at the Cartier watch on her arm. "I've got to pick up Billy from Jui Jitsu in thirty minutes. I've got time."

I laugh softly, thinking of her 70-year-old boyfriend, a former CEO of a water supply company, in his beginner class with ten-year-olds, waiting on his hippy trippy girlfriend to drive up in a Range Rover.

"Just thinking about being in the lake house again makes me think of Adam," I admit. I drop to a cushion. My legs shuffle to different positions, trying to get comfortable on this short, fabric-covered stump.

"Sure," she understands softly, coming to sit beside me.

I close my eyes against those memories flooding back. "I was so young. I wanted to do so many things."

"Like…"

"Open a bakery, like mom. I wanted to live in the city, not in the suburban outskirts. I wanted to learn a new language and be brave and adventurous."

I open my eyes. "Adam wanted to make a living as a musician. He wanted to travel. To write music and meet people and impact the world with all his eco-friendly mumbo jumbo."

"And?" she prompts.

"He did all of that. He did all of the things he said he would do, and I didn't do any of the things I said I would."

Heddy thinks for a moment in this square, quiet room. Her hand plasters atop mine, thumb running back and forth, the comfort of it pinching my nose. A lump forms in my stomach.

I wish my mother could see how Heddy stepped up for us. She could never replace our mom, but in the absence, Heddy became more than just her best friend. In the dark hole of losing a mother, we gained a guardian and a confidant, and the math added up to a gift.

She begins, "What about the Instagram cookie competition thing?"

My cheeks flare with embarrassment. "They didn't pick me. I didn't get in."

"They probably had a million applicants, Vienna. I've seen your cookies and I've tasted your baking. You're talented ."

"Not enough."

"Just because it didn't work out once or twice or twenty times, doesn't mean that it won't work out in the end. That's only if you don't give up. This is the first time you've put yourself out there with your baking."

I sigh and unclip my hair, shaking it out. "I'm not professionally trained."

"Bullshit," she spits. It's off-putting in this calm, spiritual room.

"Don't let the sage hear you use that kind of language."

She says, "You spent years working at that bakery during high school, and that one in Athens. Ingrid propped you up next to her and never talked down to you. I had never seen a five-year-old hold a knife like that and you've still got all your fingers. You've been baking your whole life."

I insist, "I'm not professionally trained. There's a difference."

"Neither are the people on The Great British Baking Show ," she scoffs.

"Well, I wouldn't be able to get into that competition either!"

I exhale. It's easier to not try than to allow yourself to feel stupid and small and defeatist, which is why I don't often put myself in situations where I get rejected.

Heddy twirls a chunk of my hair in her hand. "Then go to culinary school if that's why you want. And just because it didn't work out with one boy when you were a teenager, doesn't mean that you need to give up on all those dreams you had back then."

My jaw clenches. I cast her a sidelong glance. "What if it could have worked out with him?"

She drops her hand.

We don't talk about Adam. We don't talk about that summer, and she's never pressured me into going back to the house, not even when Francesca demands to know why I won't visit anymore. I blamed my father for turning my head when he stopped Adam and me from getting married, but Heddy stood beside him, spinning my dad's wheels.

You're too young.

You don't know him.

He's some loser who thinks he's going to win a Grammy one day. It's a pipe dream. You're going to end up poor and pregnant and back on one of our doorsteps.

"I had my reasons," she says simply. "I won't apologize for them. I didn't then, and I won't now."

When my dad threatened to not pay for my college, I succumbed. I had my car packed with dorm room essentials, my best friends to room with, and a football team to cheer for. I wanted to go to UGA, to study business, and then to cooking school and start a bakery. I didn't want to give up Adam, but I didn't have any other choice.

Adam wouldn't answer the door when I knocked to tell him I was leaving with my dad. He wouldn't answer my calls or texts. He didn't come out of the house at all. I cried the whole way home, not knowing how I was going to soothe myself alone after spending two months wrapped up in the arms of a boy I came to love so fast and so much.

I failed my first semester. I barely went to class. Heddy tried to get me into therapy, but I refused to talk about it. Eventually, when the dark skies parted and my lungs could to breathe again, I decided everything needed to change. My dreams were wrapped up in Adam. I couldn't have him, so I couldn't have them.

I followed my friend Tiffany into education, and I gave up all other plans, it just seemed easier that way. I wanted to be a completely different person than the one who fell in love with Adam Kent that summer. Which I did. Only, I'm not sure she's me. And I've been punishing myself ever since.

"I made my own choice," I admit. "I knew Adam and I weren't being realistic."

Heddy runs the back of her hand along my cheekbone. "Go to the house tonight and get reacquainted with yourself. There's some reason you never went back there."

A knife twists in my heart. "Yeah, because I was afraid I'd see him there and he'd have forgotten I existed. That he'd look at me and say, um, Veronica, right? Like I was just some girl he knew for a few months. I figured after we ended things that he went off to Nashville immediately and started having random sex with girls on bachelorette weekends like I didn't matter."

"Maybe he did," she brushes off nonchalantly.

My jaw drops. "Why would you say that to me?"

"Because you can't put off going to your family home because you're afraid."

I say, "It's not my family home."

"It will be – yours and Fran's, when I die. Which, according to the cards, will be in twenty years, on a full moon sometime in the Spring." She smiles, knowing I don't believe in any of this gibberish, and she made that up just to tease me.

This time last year I was two years deep into a relationship with Justin, the very nice guy who I met when he rear-ended my car, and I spent Thanksgiving with his family in Charleston. When I broke it off two months later, he didn't seem all that surprised. In fact, that's exactly what he said.

"I can't say I'm surprised, Vienna," he told me. "You were never going to let me in."

I didn't know what that meant.

He elaborated, "You hold parts of yourself at arm's length. Like, one day you'll do this and one day you'll have that . Like you're not good enough right now, as you are. What happened to make you think happiness doesn't happen right now?"

As harmless as he was, I didn't regret breaking up with him, but I did regret not getting more clarity on his breakdown of my psyche. Because he was right. I did do those things, to the point of exhaustion.

I want to stop pretending that I am separate from my past. It needs to come with me if I'm going to move forward.

Biting my lip, my eyes read the soft, comforting gaze of the person who loves me most in the world. She smiles back, nodding, knowing the words before I utter them.

"I feel stupid even thinking about it," I mumble.

"I know."

"I wish I didn't make it so heavy ."

"I know that, too."

I twist my hair, gathering it back in my clip.

Before I can get up, Heddy clutches my hand, holding me down. She offers, "One thing I learned in my years of internal reflection is that what you fear isn't usually the big scary thing. It's just the bug caught in a spiderweb. The invisible stickiness on the outside makes it look bigger. That's the stuff that's scary. You've got to wade through the cobwebs to clean up the problem."

That's quite the analogy.

"I don't know what that means," I say.

"I think maybe you're afraid to go back to the house, to confront your career and maybe other stuff I don't know about, because you left so much of yourself behind when you were eighteen."

She has a point.

I haven't spent enough time dissecting why I'm still so bothered about what went wrong with Adam. If he hadn't become famous, I wouldn't feel as bad about my lackluster career. If I wasn't single, I wouldn't regret that lost love. If I had a good relationship with my father, I wouldn't feel angry at being persuaded to give up Adam entirely.

If Adam hadn't touched me with a gentleness I hadn't felt since my mother or loved me without me giving me a reason to, then I could move past it. Past him. Past the future plans we attempted to make in rushed, youthful fear.

I have a lot of cobwebs to clear out.