Johnny Cakes (The Rachael O'Brien Chronicles) Read online

  There was a door at the back of the bus, and I watched a man in tux tails over a purple velvet vest roll a keg down the path toward our deck. Behind me, party gawkers lined the deck rail like seagulls facing into the wind.

  “Mom.”

  Peering down at me from on top of the backyard slope, Mom waved to get my attention. “Rachael, Happy Halloween.”

  NOTE TO SELF

  Jet is on my Shit List. Finding her more annoying than Sheila.

  Isn’t there a rule that parents can’t just show up? Who does that without actually talking to their kid?

  CHAPTER 11

  Cock and Bull

  The lecture I planned to deliver to my mother and her entourage fizzled. It was Mom’s face. She seemed so happy to see me. Her eyelids kept blinking to clear the water that moistened the hazelnut tone that surrounded her pupils, and the skin on her face softened around her smile. To my disappointment, she hadn’t tired of Betts McMurtie’s company—a.k.a the head nut-case who’s claim-to-fame was a supposed gift of aura reading. That woman supposedly “saw” colors around people that she “learned” to “interpret” to help clients better know the true being underneath their skin. From a few encounters, I’d learned to keep that woman at a distance. Maybe it was the heavy combo scent of bus fume, hooch, and patchouli that weakened my defenses. Even I was surprised to hear myself saying, “You two look good.”

  Mom and I hugged. I released, but she still squeezed. Loosening her grip, her hands moved up my arms and rested on my bare shoulders. “Thank God, you’re okay.”

  A nervous giggle erupted. I guessed that Jet and my mother had more of a conversation than I’d imagined. “A bit of a scare, that gas station explosion. I’m fine. The Galaxie didn’t fare so well.”

  Her face contorted. “Explosion?” Oops. TMI—too much information.

  “Come on in. See the place. Say hi to my roommates. You already know Katie Lee, Jet, and Francine.”

  Scurrying back onto the bus, Betts shortly returned with a glass sphere. Careful not to drop it, she placed it in a bowling ball bag.

  “New toy?” I asked.

  She handed the bag to Mom. “Maeve has taken to shew stone reading. We were staying on a client’s plantation on the outskirts of Nashville when she had a breakthrough with a scrying pool.”

  “Ah, what?” I asked.

  Catwoman pushed forward. “The visions that scryers see come from the medium.”

  “That’s right,” Betts told Sheila.

  Since when was Sheila into woo-woo prophesy? Her interest in Mom and Betts bristled the hair on my arm.

  Having an interested audience egged Mom on. “My medium of choice is H2O, and my visions come from the color, ebb, and ripples produced by pebbles dropped in a pool.”

  “Is she for real?” Hugh asked.

  “Um-hmm,” Francine said.

  My fingers raked my hairline and I removed my Wonder Woman golden tiara.

  “Has something happened?” My mom asked.

  “Aren’t you psychic?” Katie Lee asked.

  “Can we leave the new age toys on the bus, and have a normal conversation without any otherworldly informational dumps?”

  “Rachael.” My mom’s voice sounded small.

  “Maeve, I told you we shouldn’t have come.”

  “Mom is welcome anytime,” I fired back.

  Betts sneered.

  Tugging my arm, Mom motioned for Betts and me to follow a short distance from the crowd. “Couldn’t you two get along for my sake?”

  I asked the universe, why me? Even though it had been two years since she left my father for her psychic calling. I still had trouble accepting the new her.

  Around the back of the bus, a stout guy with chipmunk cheeks wore a knitted beanie hat. The headwear adorning him was unique, as in there were dangling straws that he placed in his mouth to drink from cans that were duct taped to either side of the beanie. Bending his three middle fingers, he waved his pinky and thumb at me.

  I don’t normally initiate conversations with strangers, but this one wasn’t going away.

  “Who’s the Malihini?”

  Mom piped up. “This is Rachael.”

  “You’re her kaikamahine. I should’ve guessed.” He turned to Mom, then looked at me and repeated. “You two are the spitting image of one another.”

  My mom had gone gray, and her face had filled out since I last saw her.

  “Rachael, this is Hiwalani.”

  “Hiwalani?” I repeated, trashing the pronunciation.

  Seeping out of the bus windows were voices. A few of Mom and Betts’s crew that hadn’t yet exited. “Hawaiian. Hiwalani means the attractive one,” he said.

  Suppressing a giggle, I reached to shake his hand.

  He cupped both his hands over mine. “I was a cute baby. Good coloring.” He said, and traced the lines on the underside of my hand with his finger. “You’ve been in an accident.”

  “Palm reader?” I asked.

  “I wish.”

  “What made you think I was in an accident?”

  “You have stitches in your leg.”

  My mom nudged Betts.

  I wished they’d communicate their thoughts telepathically.

  “My gift,” Hiwalani said, “leans more toward nonhuman communication.”

  I pulled my hand back and couldn’t help rolling my eyes. “Extraterrestrials, MUFON, and the galaxy beyond?”

  He stepped back. “Whoa, that’s trippy stuff.”

  I’d left Stone behind and caught sight of him as he tipped the contents of a shot glass into the back of his throat. Shit.

  “Rachael, can we talk?” My mom asked.

  I looked to Betts.

  “Privately.”

  “Of course,” she said, and I followed her onto the bus.

  OUTSIDE, A GUST OF wind gathered momentum and tossed the leaf tips of a neighboring tree into one another and bounced the branches on a wild ride as they scratched the upper deck of the bus. I’d checked the weather forecast. Clear skies, pleasant evening. The inside of the bus had been converted and most of the seats were gone. The front behind the driver seat stayed original, with rows of bus-bench seating. Above my head, the bus’s roof had been covered in tie-dye sheets, and two chandeliers with dangly crystals and partially melted candles glowed. The back had been tricked into a shag-carpeted, sofa lounge. I peeked upstairs and found the source of hooch and patchouli aromas. The furnishings weren’t first class, but a mishmash of futons and a makeshift kitchen. My mom settled into a bus seat and I plunked my weary Wonder Woman butt down behind her. Mom draped her elbows across the leather seatback.

  “Have you been well?” she asked.

  That was a loaded question. And I wondered if she really cared.

  “Fine.”

  “You seem angry.”

  I’d been so distraught when she left Dad and me. Now when she popped in and out of my life, I felt conflicted and wasn’t sure what, if anything, I wanted from her anymore. “I didn’t know you and your cult were coming. It would have been nice if we’d spoken, personally.”

  “Oh, I see.” She sucked in her bottom lip. “Your father and Edmond. Are they doing well?”

  The elastic that held my costume in place felt loose and I hiked my Wonder Woman swimsuit upward. “As far as I know.”

  “How are classes?” she asked.

  Some of the seats were piled with trunks and luggage. Overhead metal racks were stuffed full and I flinched when I saw something coiled in a corner of a glass aquarium.

  “Is that a snake up there, and why are you here?”

  Gazing upward she flicked her wrist, seemingly waving my questions into the air. “That’s Hiwalani’s pet racer, Onyx.”

  Wings, feathers, fins, and fur I’m fine with. Anything serpent like—basically the entire reptile family—not so much, so I stood and moved to the seat in front of her, keeping a better distance between the aquarium and myself.

  “Rachael, I’m he
re to see you.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  “You’re my daughter. Do I need a reason?”

  “I realize that. I mean, why now? On Halloween?”

  “I want you to promise that you’ll hear me out.”

  “Here we go!”

  She torqued her head. “Promise me.”

  I raised my fingers in a Girl Scout salute. “Promise.”

  “As Betts mentioned, we were staying as guests at a plantation on the outskirts of Nashville. Really lovely this time of year. I felt so at peace. We’ve been so busy arranging the tours, it was nice to relax. I think it helped honing my gifts.”

  “Honing your gifts sounds like whittling or throwing clay on a wheel.”

  Her finger toyed with a wayward thread on her Merlin satin sleeve. “There was a pond on the property fed by a fresh spring. It was tranquil and I’d mediate there every evening at sundown. I began seeing things.”

  My behind slid across the seat toward the aisle. “You freak me out when you talk like this.”

  She placed her hand on mine and squeezed. “You promised.”

  I settled back in.

  “Your image kept appearing.”

  Maybe it was guilt speaking to you for leaving Dad and me without a word.

  “It hovered above the rocks. I kept focus and over the weeks more details materialized. A piece of lit paper that grew into an inferno.”

  I looked out the bus window and onto the deck. Francine and Roger stood with Stone. They watched as Cheech and Chong lit sparklers that were attached to paper airplanes. Sheila had her hand on a hose nozzle that she pointed at the two of them. Nash, Hugh, and Katie Lee were near the keg and listened as the guy in the tight “L” sweater told some tale in between cigar puffs.

  “Are you trying to scare me? Did Betts put you up to it?”

  “Rachael, please, I love you and I’d never purposely frighten or harm you. These visions unnerved me. Betts coached me to see them through to get the full picture. The ripples in the water became clear as glass. I had a second, partial apparition.”

  “What do you mean partial? Did you pass out or something?” I guessed Mom was taking something to “aid” her “sightings.”

  As she spoke, her voice quivered. “I only saw your back. You and others, hands bound. Then there was a pair of scissors, and you were so angry.”

  “Let me get this straight, you sat by a pond for weeks and saw me in scenarios?”

  “Rach …”

  I raised a hand like a stop sign. Gathering inner calm, I continued. “Concerned, you took a detour and drove your cemetery tour to Greensboro to visit me and relay a warning?” I patted her arm. “Don’t worry, Mom, I haven’t played rock, paper, scissors in a decade. I’m safe.”

  “It’s just…I…”

  “I reached out a hand. It’s Halloween, come on inside, say hi to my roommates. I have a friend I’d like you to meet.”

  “What kind of friend?”

  “A friend who’s a guy.”

  She sat up straight.

  “Promise not to scare him off with any premonitions.”

  “I’ll try and keep my visions to myself.”

  NOTE TO SELF

  What is it with surprise visitors in my life?

  Nash is a stinker and dollars to donuts he’s up to something.

  Haven’t forgotten that it was a year ago, exactly, that Stone and I first slept together. Guessing he remembers, too. Must celebrate.

  NOVEMBER 1988

  CHAPTER 12

  Jar Your Preserves

  Gazing out of my bedroom window, I rested my elbows on the marble sill and pressed my nose to the cool glass. A dim streetlight cast a yellow glow and I watched as the wind blew the rain in a diagonal across the pavement in the one-lane back alley. A gust redirected the storm and droplets pinged the glass. Then, just as rapidly as the rain had begun, it faded into the night, leaving me to listen to Francine’s breath as it flowed in her rhythmic slumber.

  Initially, I’d been somewhat spiteful of being the one to share a room, but as the fall semester rolled on, I became accustomed to having a roommate, and liked it when she and Roger took a break from one another. Another body in the room, one that took no crap, made me feel safe. Although nothing out of the ordinary had happened since the Halloween parental visit, inside I felt twitchy. Lately, I had trouble sleeping. Partly because over the first two months of school, I’d become trained to doze off to the air-conditioner hum, which we no longer ran, and partly because Mom and her entourage’s visit whittled at something inside my core. As much as I tried to compartmentalize her visit and place the recollection in a remote storage facility, her woo-woo prophecy scratched at my memory bank. Rock, Paper, Scissors? What kind of mom tells her child about visions? She’d probably read some psychology article in some periodical, and was using a bunch of imaginative gobbledygook meant to keep me focused on my studies and out of trouble.

  The unexpected encounter had been the highlight of the party for everyone but me. Students I didn’t know stopped me on campus to say what a blast they had and how it was so cool to have their fortunes read on the double-decker bus. Even worse, my roommates had the psychic spell cast upon them. Sheila couldn’t stop babbling about Betts’s aura reading. We all repeatedly heard the play-by-play of how my mom’s friend stared into Sheila’s “third eye”— the one between her eyebrows—and “claimed” to “see” a clean, dominating orange.

  Duh. It takes any moron two seconds max to notice Sheila is a controlling redhead who fancies herself.

  Now Sheila had ordered a subscription to the daily Greensboro News Record and had taken to reading her horoscope, out loud. And just the other day, I noticed a dream catcher suction-cupped to the sliding glass door and a stack of tarot cards spread out on the coffee table.

  I’d seen Betts in action before. She was a practiced showman. With hands waving and eyeballs rolling, she translated Sheila’s orange aura as “absorbing” and “inspiring.”

  Sheila bought into the load of crap, hook, line, and sinker. Last night in the kitchen, she cornered Francine and told her, “Face it, I’m more spiritually advanced and my coloring is more pure than yours.”

  Stirring a spatula in a chocolate batter, Francine spouted back “You can put your boots in the oven, but that don’t make them biscuits. And by the way, white isn’t a color.”

  She reached for the mixing bowl, but a swift kick from Francine’s fuzzy-slippered foot to Sheila’s unsuspecting ankle kiboshed the girl fight before it began.

  In an overly dramatic fashion, Sheila hogged the corner of the sofa and futzed around with an ice bag that she held to her ankle, all the while giving a play-by-play on the dimension and color of her tender bruise. I told Sheila that her energy flow was in conflict with her sign and she believed me.

  I tried to watch Moonlighting, but Katie Lee now felt obliged to recount her tealeaf reading. “Y’all, I’m right-handed and they asked me to sip the tea, holding the cup with my left.

  “Why?” Sheila asked.

  “To clear my mind.”

  Not an easy task, I imagined.

  “After I drank most all the tea, I swirled the wet leaves at the bottom of the cup and gave it to the man.”

  Jet had been engrossed in a car manual that was spread open on the dining room table. “The one in the tux tails?”

  “Fletcher,” Francine remarked from across the room.

  “Yeah, him. He read my fortune and all.”

  “What was your fortune?” Sheila asked, competitively, then shared, “Cheech said I’m a natural lover.”

  “TMI!” I shouted.

  Katie Lee swatted my shoulder with a Cosmopolitan magazine. “Since you insist, I’ll continue. He said my feelings for the men in my life are conflicted.”

  Momentarily popping her head up, Jet asked, “Are they?”

  “There’s only one man in my life and he and I know where we stand,” Katie Lee said.

  “Really
. Just one? That’s depressing.” Sheila asked.

  Oh boy!

  Francine, being a Baptist, pretended to be disinterested by the psychic menagerie that had shown up, and concentrated on pouring her batter into a bundt pan, but I’d noticed how she and Roger huddled next to Mom at the Halloween party. With their heads butted and eyes transfixed, it wasn’t hard to figure out that they weren’t swapping recipes. None of my roommates bothered to use sensitivity toward my tangled feelings for my mother and her new lifestyle. They all thought my family matters were a great source of entertainment. So much so, that no one noticed Nash’s uncharacteristic hospitality that night. From past encounters, I knew his crooked smile cloaked a system of unorthodox rationale. And although he acted easy-going with his and Katie Lee’s “renewed friendship,” I wasn’t buying it. He was up to something and I would’ve bet money that he purposely kept the shots flowing fast to use Hugh, Stone, and Roger as drinking decoys to clear the playing field for himself.

  The night of the party, near midnight, there was a crash on the second floor. Jet and I were in the hallway and legged upstairs to investigate. There were a lot of strangers in the house and someone could’ve been going through our personal belongings. Upstairs, we found Hugh face down, wearing only black bikini undies and cowboy boots. Like a piece of timber, he bridged the space between Katie Lee’s bedroom and the bathroom. To my chagrin, Roger settled into Francine’s bed, which put a serious crimp on my previously agreed upon room-to-myself with Stone. With Mom’s bus out back and the house at capacity, Stone and I had to be creative and managed to escape to his parked car. A Subaru Leone GL 4x4, filled with fishing nets, birdcages, and outdoor gear can be challenging to maneuver around even when both parties are enthusiastic.