Page 20 of The Curse Workers


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I stack the photographs, with a few more of Grandad and Lila’s dad in Atlantic City in front of a bar. They’re standing with an older man that I don’t know, arms draped over each others’ shoulders.

I sweep layers of dust from under the couches and chairs until it billows up and chokes me.

When I flop down to rest, I find a notebook shoved under one of the cushions, filled with Mom’s writing. No more racy photos, just boring stuff. “Oil tank removal—buried” is scrawled on one side of the page, while the other side reads, “get carrots, chicken (whole), bleach, matches, motor oil.” Two pages later there are some addresses, with one circled. Then a script for calling a car dealership and talking them out of a rental car for a week. There are a few more scripts for different scams, with notes on the side. I read them over, smiling despite myself.

In a couple of hours I’m going to run my own scam, so I better study up.

* * *

In our family—maybe in every family—there’s this idea that the kids take after someone from another generation. Like Philip is supposed to take after our granddad, my mom’s father. Philip’s the one who dropped out of high school to join up with the Zacharovs and got his keloid necklace a few years later. He’s big on loyalty and stability, even if he pays his rent by busting kneecaps. I picture him in forty years retired to Carney, chasing a new generation of worker kids off his lawn.

The family legend says that Barron is just like Mom, even though he works luck and she works emotion. Mom can make anyone her friend, can strike up a conversation anywhere because she genuinely believes that the con is a game. And all she cares about is winning every single time.

That leaves me to be like my luck worker dad. He was the person that held things together. When he was alive, Mom acted normal most of the time. It was only when he was gone that she started chasing around millionaires with her gloves off. The second time a guy woke up at the end of a cruise a hundred grand lighter and head over heels in love, his lawyer called the cops.

She can’t help it. She loves the con.

I love it too, just not that much.

* * *

I flip through the notebook, looking for I don’t know what—maybe something familiar, maybe just some secret that will make me laugh. As I turn more pages, I find an envelope taped to a divider. Written beside it are the words “Give this to Remember!” I rip it open and find a memory charm, silver, with the word “remember” stamped on it and an uncracked blue stone set off center. It looks old, the silver tarnished black in the grooves and the whole piece heavy in my hand.

Charms to throw off curse work, charms like the ones Audrey has hanging around her neck, are as old as curses themselves. Workers make them by cursing stone—the only material that absorbs a whole curse, including the blowback. Then that stone is primed and will swallow up a curse of the same type. So if a luck worker curses a piece of jade and wears it against her skin, and then someone tries to curse her with bad luck, the jade breaks and she’s not affected. You have to get another charm each time you’re worked, and you have to have one for each type of magic, but you’re safe. Only rock is effective, not silver or gold, leather or wood. Certain people prefer one type to another; there are charms made out of everything from gravel to granite. If what I’m holding is a charm, the blue stone is what powers it.

I wonder if Mom grifted some ancestral heirloom or if it actually belongs to her. It’s kind of funny to think of forgetting a memory charm. I tuck it into my pocket.

While cleaning the living room, I find a button-making machine, two plastic bags of bubble wrap, a sword with rust staining the blade, three broken dolls I don’t remember anyone owning, an overturned chair that creeped me out as a kid because I swore it looked identical to one I’d seen on television the night before Barron and Philip dragged it home, a hockey stick, and a collection of medals for various different military accomplishments. It’s almost noon by the time I finish, and my hands and the cuffs of my pants are black with filth. I throw away stacks of newspapers and catalogs, bills that probably went unpaid for years, plastic bags of hangers and wires, and the hockey stick.

The sword I lean against the wall.

* * *

The outside of the house is already piled with garbage bags from the morning’s work. There’s enough stuff that we’re going to have to take a trip to the dump before long. I look over at the neighbors’ tidy houses with their manicured lawns and brightly painted doors, and then back at my own. The shutters hang off-kilter on either side of a row of front-facing windows, and one of the panes is broken. The paint is so worn that the cedar shingles look gray. The house is rotting from the inside.

I’m in the process of dragging the chair out to the side of the road when Grandad comes downstairs and dangles the keys in front of me.

“Be back in time for dinner,” he says.

I take the keys, gripping them hard enough for the teeth to dig into my palm. Leaving the chair where it is, I head out the driveway as if I really have an appointment to be late for.

6

THE ADDRESS I GOT OFF the Internet for Dr. Churchill’s office is on the corner of Vandeventer Avenue in the center of Princeton. I park next to a fondue restaurant and check myself in the rearview mirror, finger-combing my hair flat in the hopes of making myself look more like a good kid, reliable. Even though I washed my hands three times in the bathroom of a convenience store when I stopped for coffee, I can still feel the oily grit of dirt on my skin. I try not to rub my fingers against my jeans as I walk into the reception area and up to the desk.

The woman answering the phone has dyed red curls and glasses hanging around her neck on a beaded chain. I wonder if she made the chain herself; irrationally I associate crafting with friendliness. She looks like she might be in her fifties from the lines on her face and all the silver at her roots. “Hi,” I say. “I have an appointment at two.”

She looks at me without smiling and taps the keyboard in front of her. I know there’s not going to be anything on her screen about me, but that’s okay. It’s part of my plan.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Cassel Sharpe.” I try to stick to the truth as much as possible, in case there’s a need for elaboration or photo identification. As she clicks around to figure out who made a mistake, I take stock of the office. There’s a young woman behind the desk, wearing light purple scrubs, and I think she might be a nurse, since there’s only one doctor’s name—Dr. Eric Churchill, MD—on the door. The few files on top of the cabinets in the back are in dark green folders, and a note about the holiday hours is taped to the front of the desk. On stationery. I reach for it.

“I don’t see anything here, Mr. Sharpe,” she says.

“Oh,” I say, my hand freezing. I can’t rip the tape without her noticing the movement. “Oh.” I try to seem worried and hope that she’ll take pity on me and do some more fruitless searching or, better yet, go ask someone.

She doesn’t seem to notice my fake distress and seems, in fact, more irritated than sympathetic. “Who made the appointment?”

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