Practical Magic - Alice Hoffman [103]
“They’re a bit odd,” Sally warned her next-door neighbor, but to Linda they look like sweet little old ladies.
Linda’s daughter, who used to be Jessie and now calls herself Isabella, slides out of the passenger seat and wrinkles her nose—through which she has taken to wearing three silver rings—as if she smells something rotten. She looks over and sees the aunts studying Sally’s house.
“Who are those old bats?” the so-called Isabella asks her mother.
Her words are carried across the lawn, each nasty syllable falling into Sally’s driveway with a clatter. The aunts turn and look at Isabella with their clear gray eyes, and when they do she feels something absolutely weird in her fingers and her toes, a sensation so threatening and strange that she runs into the house, gets into bed, and pulls the covers over her head. It will be weeks before this girl mouths off to her mother, or anyone else, and even then she’ll think twice, she’ll reconsider, then rephrase, with a “Please” or a “Thank you” thrown in.
“Let me know if you need anything during your visit,” Linda calls to Sally’s aunts, and all at once she feels better than she has in years.
Sally has come to stand beside her sister, and she taps on the window to get the aunts’ attention. The aunts look up and blink; and when they spy Sally and Gillian on the other side of the glass, they wave, just as they did when the girls first arrived at the airport in Boston. For Sally to see the aunts in her own driveway, however, is like seeing two worlds collide. It would be no less unusual for a meteorite to have landed beside the Oldsmobile, or for shooting stars to drift across the lawn, than it is to have the aunts here at last.
“Come on,” Sally says, tugging on Gillian’s sleeve, but Gillian just shakes her head no.
Gillian hasn’t seen the aunts for eighteen years, and although they haven’t aged as much as she, she never quite took notice of how old they were. She always thought of them together, a unit, and now she sees that Aunt Frances is nearly six inches taller than her sister, and that Aunt Bridget, whom they always called Aunt Jet, is actually cheerful and plump, like a little hen dressed up in black skirts and boots.
“I need time to process this,” Gillian says.
“Two minutes had better be enough,” Sally informs her, as she goes outside to welcome their guests.
“The aunts!” Kylie shouts when she sees they’ve arrived. She calls upstairs to Antonia, who rushes to join her, taking two steps at a time. The sisters make a dash for the open door, then realize that Gillian is still at the window.
“Come with us,” Kylie says to her.
“Go on,” Gillian advises the girls. “I’ll be right here.”
Kylie and Antonia hurry to the driveway and throw themselves at the aunts. They hoot and holler and dance the aunts around until they are all flushed and out of breath. When Sally phoned and explained about the problem in the yard, the aunts listened carefully, then assured her they’d be on the bus to New York as soon as they set out food for the last remaining cat, old Magpie. The aunts always kept their promises, and they still do. They believe that every problem has a solution, although it may not be the outcome that was originally hoped for or expected.
For instance, the aunts had never expected their own lives to be so completely altered by a single phone call in the middle of the night those many years ago. It was October and cold, and the big house was drafty; the sky outside was so gloomy it pushed down on anyone who dared to walk beneath it. The aunts had their schedule, to which they kept no matter what. They took their walk in the morning, then read and wrote in their journals, then had lunch—the same lunch every day—mashed parsnips and potatoes, noodle pudding, and apple tart for dessert. They napped in the afternoon and did their business at twilight, should anyone come to the back door. They