The sky is car-matching blue, dotted by puffy clouds. Flowers bloom along the drive and the front walkway, splotches of yellow and pink marking the path from the car to the porch that is festooned with chimes and prisms dangling from strings, casting rainbows over the monochrome house.
The front door is open but the screen door is closed and latched. A sign hangs next to the door, a fading, hand-painted sign with stars and letters formed from steam rising in curls from a tiny coffee cup: Spiritual Adviser. There is no doorbell. The young woman knocks on the doorframe.
“Hello?” she calls. “Hello? Mrs. Rawlins? It’s Kat Hawkins, you said I could come by today?”
Kat takes a step back and looks around. It must be the right house. There can’t be many Spiritual Adviser farms. She looks out toward the barn and spots a rabbit’s tail as it hops away through the flowers. She is wondering if she should try around the back when the door opens.
“Hello, Miss Kitty Kat,” the woman at the door says. Kat has pictured Zachary’s mother a number of times but never properly conjured the person standing in the doorway: a small curvy woman in overalls, her hair an inordinate amount of tight curls tied up in a paisley scarf. Her face is wrinkled yet young and round with large eyes lined with glittering green eyeliner. A tattoo of a sun is partially visible on one forearm, a triple moon on the other.
She swoops Kat into a bigger hug than she expected from such a small person.
“It’s nice to finally meet you, Mrs. Rawlins,” Kat says but Madame Love Rawlins shakes her head.
“That’s Ms., and not to you, honeychild,” she corrects. “You call me Love or Madame or Momma or whatever else you please.”
“I brought cookies,” Kat says, holding up a box and Madame Love Rawlins laughs and leads her into the house. The front hall is lined with art and photographs and Kat pauses at a photo of a young boy with dark curls wearing a serious expression and too-big eyeglasses. The following rooms are painted in Technicolor and stuffed with mismatched furniture. Crystals of every color are arranged in patterns on tables and walls. They pass under a sign that reads as above, so below and through a beaded curtain into a kitchen with an antique stove and a sleeping borzoi who is introduced as Horatio.
Madame Love Rawlins settles Kat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and transfers the honeybee-shaped lemon cookies from their box to a floral-patterned china plate.
“Aren’t you…” Kat stops, not certain whether the question is appropriate or not but since she’s already started she might as well say it. “Aren’t you worried?”
Madame Love Rawlins takes a sip of her coffee and looks at Kat over the rim of her mug. It is a pointed look, a look that means more than the words that she says after. Kat can read it. It’s a warning. Apparently it’s still not safe to talk about, not really. Kat wonders if anyone told Madame Love Rawlins that it was all over and if it sounded like a lie when she heard it, too.
“Whatever happens will happen whether I worry about it or not,?
?? Madame Love Rawlins says once she puts her mug down again. “It will happen whether or not you worry about it, too.”
Kat does worry, though. Of course she worries. She wears her worry like a coat she never takes off. She worries about Zachary and she worries about other things that clearly cannot be discussed even here, tucked away in the hills amongst the trees surrounded by protection spells and crystals and an inattentive guard dog. Kat picks up a honeybee cookie from the plate and looks at it, wondering if Madame Love Rawlins knows about the bees as she chews on a honey-lemon wing. Then she tells her something she has not yet admitted to anyone.
“I wrote a game for him,” Kat says. “For my thesis. You know how sometimes authors say they write a book for a single reader? It was like I wrote a game for a single player. A lot of people have played it now but I don’t think anyone gets it, not like he would.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “I started writing it like a choose-your-own-adventure thing in a notebook, all these mini-myths and stories within stories with multiple endings. Then I turned it into a text game, so it’s more complicated and has more options, that’s where it is now but the company that hired me wants me to maybe develop it further, do a full-blown version of it.”
Kat stops, gazing into the depths of her coffee cup and thinking about choices and movement and fate.
“You don’t think he’s ever going to get to play it,” Madame Love Rawlins says.
Kat shrugs.
“He’ll want to play it when he comes back.”
“I was going to ask how you know he’ll be back but then I remembered what your job is,” Kat says, and Madame Love Rawlins laughs.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I feel. It’s not the same. I could be wrong, but we’ll have to wait and see. Last time I talked to Zachary I could tell he was going somewhere to clear his head. It’s been longer than I thought it would be.” She looks out the window, thoughtful, for so long Kat wonders if she’s forgotten that she has company, but then she continues. “A long time ago I had my cards read by a very good reader. I didn’t think much of it at first, I was young and more concerned with the immediate future than the long-term, but as time went on I realized she was spot-on. Everything she told me that day has come to pass except one thing, and I have no reason to believe there would be one thing she was wrong about when she was right about everything else.”
“What was the thing?” Kat asks.
“She said I’d have two sons. I had Zachary and for years afterward I thought maybe she was just bad at math, or maybe he was twins for a moment before he was born and then not, but then I figured it out and I should have figured it out sooner. I know he’ll be back because I haven’t met my son-in-law yet.”
Kat grins. The sentiment makes her happy, so matter-of-fact and simple, so accepting when everything with her own parents is a constant struggle. But she’s not sure she believes it. It would be nice to believe.
Madame Love Rawlins asks about her plans and Kat tells her about the job she’s accepted in Canada, how she’s going to drive to Toronto to visit friends for a few days before continuing on. The friends are a fiction invented to sound less like the truth of exploring an unfamiliar city solo but Madame Love Rawlins withholds comment. Kat mentions virtual reality and once she gets to the subject of scent Madame Love Rawlins brings out her collection of hand-blended perfume oils and they sniff bottles while discussing memory and aromatherapy.
They unload Zachary’s belongings from the sky-blue car together, taking several trips up to one of the spare bedrooms.
Alone in the room after the last trip, Kat takes a folded striped scarf from her bag. In the time since she knit this particular scarf her feelings have changed regarding the sorting of personalities into overly simplified, color-coded house categories but she is still fond of stripes. Next to the scarf she leaves a key-chain flash drive with <3 k. written on it in metallic-silver Sharpie.
Kat takes a bright teal notebook from her bag. She puts it down on the desk but then picks it up again. She looks back toward the stairs, listening to Madame Love Rawlins move from room to room, the rain-like sound of the beaded curtain.
Kat puts the notebook back in her bag. She is not ready to part with it. Not yet.