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There were four rooms—two on either end of a long hallway—and a bathroom in between. The door of the room closest to me was cracked open. I stepped up to it and pushed it wider, revealing a bedroom.
The room was neat and I thought maybe it had been my Grandma’s. On the full-sized bed was a crocheted afghan in blues and greens and purples. There were needlepoint pillows on the bed with sayings like,
“The Rules Don’t Count in Grandma’s House!” and
“Grandma’s House is Home.”
In the closet were lots of old-fashioned dresses and also more cardigans. The shoes were lined up neatly in rows and everything had the faint sweet, floral scent that I had smelled on the cardigan I was now wearing.
There were some pictures on the nightstands of the bed and I picked one up and looked at it. It showed a little girl with thick black hair and pale grey eyes laughing and blowing bubbles. Another showed the girl pointing at something with a look of wonder on her face. Yet another showed her biting into a giant slice of watermelon which looked both messy and delicious.
“They’re me—they’re all me,” I murmured. I wished I could remember the exact memories the pictures showed, but all I got when I reached for them wass a blur of colorful half-recollections and the feeling of being loved and safe and happy.
After wandering around my Grandma’s room for a while, I checked out the room beside it, which turned out to be a sewing room. There were several sewing machines set up with projects in various stages of completion. There was a quilting frame too and plenty of yarn and needles for knitting and crocheting.
I wished that I could have learned to sew from my Grandma. Maybe I would take an on-line course or watch some YouTube videos and see what I could do, I thought as I left the room and went on with my tour.
The upstairs bathroom was beautiful. Like the downstairs it had black and white tile but unlike it, it also had a tub. It was a gorgeous old claw-foot bathtub which looked deep enough to submerge even a plus-sized curvy girl like me up to the neck. There were puffy pink towels in the small linen cupboard as well as a collection of bath salts and bubble bath.
I had another flash of memory while looking at the tub. I remembered being in it with the bubbles up to my chin, laughing and using the foam to make a unicorn horn for myself.
Grandma was laughing with me as she watched me have fun with the bubbles and I suddenly missed her with all my heart. I wished I could hug her and be enfolded in her arms.
But she was gone now. How had the Orc put it? She had “faded”—which seemed like an odd way to say someone had died. Anyway, it was just me and Sebastian and the little voice which sometimes spoke in my ear. I still wasn’t sure if that was her spirit or just an echo of her, left behind.
I waited, but the voice didn’t say anything, so I moved on to the next room in the house at the other end of the hall.
It turned out to be a library with a fireplace on one wall and a window seat that had been turned into a reading nook with a mound of fluffy cushions. There were lots of very old-looking books that were bound in leather but also plenty of tattered paperback Harlequin romances. I seemed to remember that Grandma had always had a romance tucked in a pocket of her apron or her cardigan. She called them her “love stories.”
There was a desk in one corner that would make the perfect place to work—if the house had Internet connection, which I kind of doubted. I hadn’t seen any Wi-Fi router anywhere so far and there was no computer either—not even a clunky old one. I was going to have to get that fixed somehow, if I was going to keep working from home.
Lying on the desk was a big, ancient-looking leather-bound book. On the front of it I saw an intricate scene had been worked into the leather—a willow tree with many trailing branches that dipped into a flowing river. It looked like the tree in the backyard, I thought. On the spine was stamped a single word—Pruitt—my Grandmother’s last name.
Opening it to the first page, I saw a kind of family tree had been drawn. I read my Grandma’s name and my mother’s and mine too. It went all the way back to the 1600s. Of course, I didn’t recognize most of the male names—I saw my father’s and then I looked for my Grandfather on my Mom’s side. When I saw his name, I frowned. Morris? Had Grandma named her house after her late husband? It seemed like a weird thing to do, but whatever. I shrugged to myself and moved on.
I turned to the next page and saw the word, Grimoire in flowing script. Wait—wasn’t that a book of spells? I flipped through more of the brittle old pages carefully and saw that I was right—the book was filled with all kinds of herb lore, advice, and yes—what looked like rituals for magic.
A Spell for the Banishment of a Man Unwanted, read one.
Light candles three of honeycomb stained black.
Place them in a triangle, picture he who you wish to banish, and chant the following:
“I Banish thee Once
I Banish thee Twice
And if I must
I Banish thee Thrice.
Never more to Darken my Door
Get Ye Hence
And come No More
So Mote it Be!”
