FRIES WITH THAT?

The next day, Tonya sat in a packed lecture hall. Professor Rudolph was Tonya’s favorite, ever since he’d invited his students to go for a drink, after their first class. His humorous rants against the “narrow, cabbage-eating island,” he emigrated from also endeared him to Tonya. She had grown up in the shadow of Toronto, a “world-class city,” according to self-important Torontonians. Compare that to an Englishman who’d left legendary London and moved to Loon Lake by choice. Professor Rudolph not only knew history, but he shared Tonya’s excellent taste in geography.

As he paced back and forth lecturing, his stomach protruded over his waistband like a wobbly shelf. While he was teaching, Tonya didn’t normally notice his weight. She was too busy taking notes or looking up his erudite references on her phone. But eating and weight had become major preoccupations since she’d started dieting this past summer. Seeing the way his hips strained his pants, Tonya could see he’d gotten heavier since orientation in September.

Rudolph’s lectures unraveled the complicated causes behind historical movements. Today, he was asking students what utopia meant, but Tonya was having trouble following the discussion. Priya kept pinging her phone with panicky texts. The art installation depended on cameras and lighting, but the Digital Ninjas had changed their minds about loaning her equipment overnight.

Tonya texted back: What’s wrong?

Priya responded: Paranoia their cameras will get stolen.

Professor Rudolph ducked behind his lectern to grab something. Without pausing in his citation from The Communist Manifesto, Doctor Rudolph lifted a giant fistful of fries and shoved them into his mouth.

With a bundle of fries protruding, his face looked like he’d sprouted a deep-fried anemone. Poor man. Since September there had been whispers before class about his wife dying that spring. Some students were outraged that he posted excuses on his door and skipped office hours. Tonya agreed that it was unfortunate for the students, but the Professor had lost his wife. He needed time to grieve, although the fry thing was strange, even for an academic.

Her phone vibrated again but Tonya turned it off. Professor Rudolph’s mouth was empty again and he was talking about Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. From what Tonya understood, communal living under More’s rules would afford her no privacy, no personal possessions, and very few rights, but it would be much easier than living with Lynette.

Outside the lecture hall, Priya was waiting. “Why weren’t you answering my texts? This is a disaster!”

“Halloween isn’t till the weekend. You have time to figure this out. C’mon, I’ll skip my afternoon class and help you find materials.”

Priya raised an eyebrow. “Okay. First we have to steal some lights.”

When she saw Tonya’s reaction she patted her shoulder. “Kidding. OK, Ms. Goody-Goody, let’s check the hardware store.”

#

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A FEW HOURS LATER, Priya and Tonya were in the forested southern end of Loon Lake Cemetery, scouting sites for the installation. In town maps, Tonya thought the cemetery looked like a T-bone steak or a bull’s head. The broadest section was the top, which ran in an almost straight line along the southern shore of the lake. The sides of the bull’s face tapered gently to the rounded muzzle at the southern tip, where the oldest section of the cemetery stood. Just left of the center, stood an abandoned chapel at a crossroads of four paved pathways, large enough for cars. The grounds were also crisscrossed by smaller paths between the treed sections of the cemetery, each with its own era and flavor. There were a couple of pine-topped hills on the otherwise flat grounds, a round one to the south, and a lozenge-shaped one that ran down into the water to the north. Excluding the shoreline, the rest of the grounds were bordered by a tall, wrought iron fence. “To keep the living out or the dead in?” her father used to joke.

She felt less like laughing now. Her friend wanted to set up her installation in the cemetery, which was bad enough, but as they passed the chapel and continued south past the round hill, Priya noticed the most sacred site of all.

“What about that tree?” She pointed to a tall ash tree, just inside the old section of the cemetery. “Do you think we could climb it?”

“I climbed it, when I was too young to know better. We should leave it alone.”

“Why? Look how big it is.” Priya craned her neck up to look at the top. “The leaves have turned gold and started to fall off. It’s the perfect creepy focal point for my installation.”

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“No, it’s the Three-Century Ash.”

“Wait, did you say you climbed it?”

“Yeah.” Tonya shrugged.

“I don’t believe you. The trunk must go up two stories before there’s a branch to grab hold of. I can’t even get my arms around it.”

“You have to find a better place.” Tonya wasn’t allowed to explain to outsiders what the tree meant to the Old Families, and their ancestors buried nearby.

Priya walked around the trunk. “Hey, what’s this?”

“Never mind. Let’s go.”

“What are these for?” She pointed to slats of wood, nailed into the bark.

“They look unstable,” Tonya lied.

Priya tested them with her hand, then stepped onto the bottom rung. “Somebody built a ladder right into the tree.”

“A stupid kid. Aunt Helen punished me for doing it.” Mostly with long lectures on how the Ash protected them from lingering magic released by their buried ancestors.

“Why didn’t you take the boards off?”

“By the time Aunt Helen discovered the rungs, the tree had stopped leaking sap and started to heal. She told me to leave them for fear of causing more damage.” Her Aunt had also warned that if the tree died, the town would be in danger.

“You’re making a lot of fuss over a tree.”

“You hurt the tree, you hurt the town.”

Priya’s eyebrows shot up.

“According to my Mom. As punishment, I had to work for free in my aunt’s store all summer.”

“Too bad.”

“It was fine. On my first day, my aunt showed me the secret merchandise, locked under the counter.”

Priya quirked an eyebrow. “Your aunt’s a drug dealer?”

“No. She keeps little drawstring bags, reserved for the regulars.”

“What was she selling?”

“Nothing. Herbs and dried roots.” In fact, they were charms, but her explanation seemed to satisfy Priya, who wandered farther into the cemetery, seemingly forgetting about the tree. Tonya couldn’t get that summer out of her mind. Her aunt had made her sew sachet after sachet using an antique treadle-powered sewing machine.

“Why can’t we use a modern sewing machine?” Tonya had wondered.

“Electricity interferes with the magic.”

At first, sewing little bags and hanging herbs to dry was annoying because her aunt made her do and redo things until they were perfect. It wasn’t until she had been working there for a couple of weeks that Tonya realized she was having fun. Something about her aunt was completely comforting in a way her parents weren’t. Before long, she found herself finishing Aunt Helen’s sentences, which would have irritated her mother, but just made Aunt Helen laugh.

“What are we, twins?” Tonya asked one day when it happened again.

“We’re family . . .” Aunt Helen’s words seemed to catch in her throat and rather than continue she pulled Tonya in for a hug. “These days, working with you, have been some of the happiest in my life.”

Despite the log cabin exterior, the renovated shop was bright and airy with large modern windows. Her aunt hummed as she polished every pane of glass, as well as the long counter over the display cases lining the wall. This insistence on a clean and bright environment belied her reputation as a woman with a dark past.

Tonya could never forget the high school taunts she had endured because she defended her aunt’s choices. The Herbal Healing Shop was her aunt’s livelihood and her independence. So what if she was born into a Pure family who disapproved? Helen hurt no one. She kept the secret of magic from the Mundanes and mostly sold to Old Families. Tonya’s mother, and a gaggle of Pure family gossips, had no right to judge her for embracing magic.

They were probably jealous of the handsome, middle-aged men who occasionally came to pick up Aunt Helen after work. It made Tonya proud when Aunt Helen trusted her to close up the shop, so she could go out.

One day that summer, Tonya got up the courage to ask, “How did you get so popular?”

Aunt Helen was threading ribbon through one of her herb bags. She put down her work and looked Tonya in the eye. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m seventeen but I still haven’t had a boyfriend.”

“Oh honey, don’t rush it. Young love is a curse.”

After each workday, Tonya found herself defending Aunt Helen to her parents. Her aunt was an infrequent visitor to their house and any impending visit caused her father to rush around putting away their valuables as if preparing for the arrival of some unpredictable animal. When Tonya was younger, this reaction simply added to her aunt’s mystique, but now that they were on friendly terms, her father’s behavior seemed bizarre.

“Why are you putting everything away?”

“I’m making things tidy.”

As if. Her father worked long hours without tiring or complaining. He had lost jobs, buried a parent, married young. Nothing seemed to faze him, except Helen.

“She’s just Mom’s sister. Why do you always fuss when she comes?”

“Ask your mother.”

Tonya tried to probe further but he went out to mow the lawn.

How was it Aunt Helen’s presence made Tonya feel so relaxed when she made her cool-headed father jumpy as a fawn?

In the years since, his attitude had mellowed but only slightly. Why would her parents move to Toronto to care for Aunt Helen?

It gave Tonya a pang of sadness to think of Aunt Helen cooped up under fluorescent lights in a sterile hospital, all because of a so-called routine condition nobody would discuss. Did she ingest one of her own concoctions by mistake? Was she keeping a serious ailment secret? It seemed incredible that her parents refused to let Tonya visit or even know where she was being treated. Tonya took a moment to call her aunt again, but the inbox was full.

Priya came back and led Tonya to the oldest section of the graveyard. “Do you have any idea who’s buried here? The names are worn off.”

“The Old Families came here hundreds of years ago. I’d have to look up the records at City Hall. You can’t be thinking of using burial sites in your installation?”

“Why do you think I’m here?”

“You can’t put fake monsters on my ancestor’s graves.”

“So, it’s back to the big tree then.”

“Not if my aunt’s opinion counts.”

Priya sighed. “Let’s walk over to the store. I’d love to meet her.”

“She’s in hospital.” Probably, maybe. Tonya wished she knew.

“Oh. Sorry to hear that.”

“Let me know if you’re driving to Toronto some weekend? We can visit her together.” Once Tonya confirmed her whereabouts.