“I'm tired, that's all.”
She looked at the mess on the floor. “You look lower than a catfish at the bottom a the river. And a perfectly good pork chop's lookin’ as sorry as you are, down in my kitchen. That's two kinds a sorry.” She leaned forward and brushed my brown hair out of my eyes. She was always after me to cut my hair.
“I know, I know. The eyes are the window to the soul, and I need a haircut.”
“You need a good sight more than a haircut.” She looked sad and grabbed my chin as if she could lift me up by it. Given the right circumstances, I bet she could. “You're not right.”
“I'm not?”
“You're not, and you're my boy, and it's my fault.”
“What do you mean?” I didn't understand and she didn't elaborate, which was generally how our conversations went.
“She's not right either, you know.” Amma spoke softly, looking out my window. “Not bein’ right isn't always somebody's fault. Sometimes it's just a fact, like the cards you pull.” With Amma, everything came down to fate, the cards in her tarot deck, the bones in the graveyard, the universe she could read.
“Yes, ma'am.”
She looked into my eyes, and I could see hers shining. “Sometimes things aren't what they seem, and even a Seer can't tell what's comin’.” She took my hand and dropped something into it. A red string with tiny beads knotted into it, one of her charms. “Tie it ’round your wrist.”
“Amma, guys don't wear bracelets.”
“Since when do I make jewelry? That's for women with too much time and not enough sense.” She yanked on her apron, straightening it. “A red string's a tie to the Otherworld, offers the kinda protection I can't. Go on, put it on.”
I knew better than to argue when Amma had that look on her face. It was a mixture of fear and sadness, and she wore it like a burden too heavy for her to carry. I held out my arm and let her tie the string around my wrist. Before I could say anything else, she was at my window, pouring a handful of salt from her apron pocket all along the sill.
“Everything's gonna be okay, Amma. Don't worry.”
Amma stopped in the doorway and looked back at me, rubbing the shine out of her eyes. “Been choppin’ onions all afternoon.”
Something wasn't right, like Amma said. But I had a feeling it wasn't me. “You know anything about a guy named John Breed?”
She stiffened. “Ethan Wate, don't you make me give that pork chop to Lucille.”
“No, ma'am.”
Amma knew something, and it wasn't good, and she wasn't talking. I knew it as sure as I knew her pork chop recipe, which didn't have a single onion in it.
6.14
Bookworm
If it was good enough for Melvil Dewey, it's good enough for me.” Marian winked at me as she pulled a stack of new books out of a cardboard box, sniffing deeply. There were books everywhere, in a circle around her almost up to her head.
Lucille was weaving through the towers of books, prowling for a lost cicada. Marian made an exception to the Gatlin County Library's no-pets rule since the place was full of books but empty of people. Only an idiot would be in the library on the first day of summer, or someone who needed a distraction. Someone who wasn't speaking to his girlfriend, or wasn't being spoken to by his girlfriend, or didn't know if he even still had one — all in the space of the two longest days of his life.
I still hadn't talked to Lena. I told myself it was because I was too angry, but that was one of those lies you tell when you're trying to convince yourself that you're doing the right thing. The truth was, I didn't know what to say. I didn't want to ask the questions, and I was scared to hear the answers. Besides, I wasn't the one who ran off with some guy on a motorcycle.
“It's chaos. Dewey decimal is mocking you. I can't even find one almanac on the history of the moon's orbital pattern.” The voice from the stacks startled me.
“Now, Olivia …” Marian smiled to herself as she examined the bindings of the books in her hands. It was hard to believe she was old enough to be my mother. With not a streak of gray in her short hair, and not a wrinkle in her golden-brown skin, she didn't look more than thirty.
“Professor Ashcroft, this isn't 1876. Times do change.” It was a girl's voice. She had an accent — British, I think. I'd only heard people talk that way in James Bond movies.
“So has the Dewey decimal system. Twenty-two times, to be exact.” Marian shelved a stray book.
“What about the Library of Congress?” The voice sounded exasperated.
“Give me a hundred more years.”
“The Universal Decimal Classification?” Now irritated.
“This is South Carolina, not Belgium.”
“Perhaps the Harvard-Yenching system?”
“Nobody in this county speaks Chinese, Olivia.”