Mind Games

She’d blocked him out countless times over the years, but on that night he always slipped through. She understood he knew her weaknesses, read hers as she read his. Whatever strange twist of fate had bound them together refused to break.

“Maybe, darling, you don’t really want it to.”

In the craft kitchen, she helped Lucy with a new batch of soap.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“It’s a kind of reassurance, isn’t it, that he’s still paying? He’s still locked away.”

“They’d tell me if he wasn’t. But … I don’t know, maybe you’re right. I start thinking about him when we get into June like this. Maybe it’s me giving him the opening and not just him taking it.”

“You said it didn’t scare you. He doesn’t scare you.”

“No, he doesn’t. It disturbs me. But when I see him, when he’s inside my head that way and I see him, hear him? I guess it’s better to deal with the truth. It gives me a kind of satisfaction, and a kind of comfort. A dark one I’m not proud of.”

“Why shouldn’t it?”

“Fifteen years this month, Grammie. There’s no price he can pay that makes up for what he did, but fifteen years? I can’t seem to move on.”

“That’s nonsense.”

Lucy finished the pouring, stepped back. She brushed back her hair. She still favored the one thick braid, and the dramatic white streak had been joined by threads of white through that raven black.

“You’ve built a life, honeypot, and a good one. You’ve used your gift well, sparingly and well. If you use it for this, when thoughts of your parents come so close? Why shouldn’t you?”

As Lucy spoke, they began the cleanup together.

“He’s an evil man, Thea, with the gift inside him twisted into something dark. That I believe with all my heart. So you let him in that one night, and doing that assures you he’s where he belongs.

“If I could do the same, I would.”

“Really?” She’d never imagined her grandmother wanting, or needing, that kind of payment.

“He took my children from me. Fifteen minutes or fifteen years, that doesn’t change. I don’t know if I could’ve forgiven him if he’d asked for forgiveness, if he’d truly atoned. But he hasn’t, so I don’t forgive.”

“No, he hasn’t. He’s not capable of atonement.” She took a long, easy breath. “The past is his world because he has no real present, no future. And in the past, he had power.

“It helps, Grammie, to know you feel the way I do.”

“Maybe this time of year especially. It hits this time of year. But.” Turning, she gripped Thea’s hands. “While we can’t lock the past away, not when it holds the ones we love, we have a real present, and a future. And that’s where we look.

“Now, let’s have some lemonade on the porch. We earned it. I swear, Rem’s business management works me off my feet.”

Thea laughed, and felt her mood lighten. “You wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“I can’t deny it. Here I am with employees.”

“Who you could let take over the work. You never will.”

They took their glasses out to sit where Thea had sat so many summer nights studying the stars, listening to the hills whisper.

Now her dog, the mountain of him, wrestled with Tweedle and Dee. The chickens hummed, and old Betty Lou, too old to produce milk, cropped at the grass in the field.

Young Rosie, her replacement, dozed on her feet in the sun.

“I wonder if Rem’s ever going to build a house.”

“He’s making some noises about it,” Lucy told her. “More serious type of noises. He’s just twenty-five.”