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“I told you, ‘bendy’ is a selling point.”
“Honey, I saw all kind of potential in you last night.”
* * *
The drive back was pleasant enough. I ended up sleeping for a good portion of it, which made Jed snicker about having worn me out. I snarked back that I was just trying to avoid further trauma from Atlanta traffic. We only made a few stops for coffee and Sno-Balls, and by midafternoon, we were rolling back into town.
I liked that despite the fact that we’d seen each other naked, nothing seemed to change. He still made inappropriate jokes. I made vague threats to his manhood. It was lovely, relaxed. But I felt strange that I didn’t feel worse. I’d fought with Stephen, but I wasn’t sure if I’d broken it off with him officially. He’d left me ten voice-mail messages, most of which I’d ignored. As far I knew, he was ordering bloody apology flowers and sending them my way. If so, I was a terrible girlfriend. But what bothered me the most was that I didn’t actually feel bad. Physically, I felt good—balanced, limber, and untroubled. The last time I felt this loose was after getting a massage at one of those day spas when Penny got married and insisted on a girls’ do.
I was a morality-free zone.
Still, it was hard to feel bad, knowing that the plaque was resting comfortably in my overnight bag. Jed pulled the truck into the driveway and slowed to a stop. “So, frankly, I’m sick of the sight of you,” he told me with a distressingly straight face. “Get out of my truck, and definitely do not come to my side of the house for dinner.”
“You are truly a bizarre man,” I told him.
“Is pizza OK?” he asked, grinning.
“Fine, pizza, with a potential side order of repeat sex.”
He climbed out of the truck and craned his head back through the door. “If I place the order that way at Pete’s Pies, the lady who answers their phones will pass out.”
“But she will remember the order.”
“I’ll get the bags,” he called from the truck’s tailgate. “Can you grab my mail?”
“Sure!”
I was halfway to the door-mounted mailbox when I heard Jed yelp, “Shit!” and then a crunch. When I rounded the truck, I saw him standing over my suitcase, which was lying on its side in the gravel.
“What happened?” I asked, fumbling with the zipper. I’d placed the plaque inside a zippered pocket on the outside of the bag. I could only hope that Jed hadn’t dropped the bag on that side.
Jed’s expression was stricken. “It just slipped out of my hand.”
I scrambled through my overnight bag to find the cloth bag I’d wrapped around the plaque. My heart sank as the bag tinkled and crunched in my shaking hands. The clay was shattered. There were three or four pieces the size of my thumb, but everything else was practically dust. It wasn’t surprising, I supposed, considering how old the clay was. I took deep breaths and tried to keep myself centered. I couldn’t risk having a meltdown and blowing up Jed’s porch lights.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, his face ashen. “How bad is it?”
“Bad,” I told him, holding up the clay shards. I took a deep breath and forced my voice to stay steady. “Accidents happen, Jed. It’s not your fault.”
Jed bent to examine the bits in my hand. The outsides of the larger pieces were distressed and old, but the interiors were just as bright and fresh as a new penny. Maybe the hum of magic that had cloaked the plaque all those years had formed some sort of stasis?
“How angry is Jane going to be?” he asked, taking one piece and turning it over in my palm. “I can tell her it was my fault.”
“Jane won’t be angry at all,” I told him honestly. I tried to manage a smile for him, so he wouldn’t beat himself up over this. “It’s just an ashtray.”
* * *
Later that evening, I tried to piece the plaque back together like a jigsaw puzzle. I managed a flat, vaguely round shape, but that was it. I even tried to use the plaque’s own magic to get the pieces to call out to one another, to re-form to its original state, but it didn’t respond the way I thought a magically infused item would. They were just bits of clay. Instead of contaminating those bits with the fumes of Super Glue, I decided I would take them to the shop, put them in an unbleached cotton bag, and close the lot up in a drawer full of good Kilcairy soil. That was the extent of what I could do.
I heard Jed walk out his front door and listened for the sound of his truck, but I got distracted when the phone rang. My dear Penny didn’t have an opinion about whether the plaque would “work” when it was broken. It was possible it wouldn’t work, but at the same time, I felt sort of free. The Kerrigans couldn’t get all four items. They couldn’t bind us, which would ease my family’s anxiety and keep the clinic running smoothly. Of course, we couldn’t bind them, but that was another problem entirely. Still, I’d failed to protect centuries of family history. And I was depressed beyond the telling of it, and Jed was embarrassed. The evening I’d hoped would be spent having the aforementioned bendy-straw sex was spent in separate quarters. I sat in the kitchen, staring down at the dust, trying to figure out what to do.
Penny did, however, think it was rather hilarious that of all the people in the family, I’d been the one who inadvertently destroyed our heirloom.
“You are hereby the worst witch in the family!” she hooted. “I mean, clearly, it’s a tragedy, but the fact that you did it, and not me—”
“Too soon, Penny.”
“Stephen came by the clinic,” she said, in a quick change of subject. “It was rather shocking, him just showing up out of the blue. I know he avoids coming here unless it’s absolutely necessary. Anyway, he seems to think you’ve lost your mind. Did you really break it off with him?”
