Magic

stacks and stacks of old newspapers, and wastebaskets full of splintered glass figurines. The desk contained hundreds of old lace doilies. One drawer was brim full of ballpoint pens. But not one scrap of relevant business information had been housed there. Inside a file cabinet she had found cigar boxes full of buttons of every description, but not until she checked the icebox and looked beneath three dozen old Life magazines did she find what she’d been looking for.

She realized, as she eased down into the chair behind the desk, that while she had been looking for this financial information, she had been dreading actually finding it. It had become obvious to her that Addie was in no condition to run a business with anything remotely resembling efficiency. She feared the books on Lindquist Antiques would only confirm what she already knew to be true.

Shoring up her resolve with a deep breath, she brushed the dust from the cover of the old ledger and turned it back. The first few pages of columns were written in her mother’s neat, brisk hand. Sales and acquisitions were noted with proper care and detail. The columns of figures added up to the penny.

Rachel checked their accuracy with her calculator, feeling slightly inferior. Addie had always done math in her head as quickly and unerringly as any machine. She had always expected Rachel to be able to as well, and she had always seemed let down when Rachel hadn’t been able to live up to that standard. Rachel recalled with a pang the nights she had sat up in her bed with her covers over her head to hide the brightness of the flashlight as she worked on her math tables, determined to make her mother proud of her.

The only thing about Rachel that had unfailingly pleased Addie had been her voice. Addie had been a demanding taskmaster, forcing her to practice, practice, practice; correcting her slightest error; critiquing every note. But when Addie had sat and listened to a performance, a look of rapturous longing had stolen over her face. Pride and love had shone in her eyes. And afterward Addie had always roused herself, as if from a dream, and said, “You have the voice of an angel, Rachel. I am so very very proud of you.”

Rachel shook herself now from the bittersweet memory. She had fought against that pride in an attempt to gain her mother’s understanding, and she had lost. It had been a foolish thing to do, but she’d been young and rebellious and longing to have her mother love her for who she was, not how she sang. She rubbed at her temples now as she thought of how it had all backfired on her, how all her pretty rainbows had melted into grayness.

Maybe if Bryan had had to deal with a harsh reality or two, he wouldn’t be so quick to believe in magic either, she thought.

A relationship with Bryan Hennessy. She shuddered at the thought, though whether it was out of fear or anticipation she couldn’t have honestly said. She told herself it was righteous indignation. The nerve of the man insinuating that she had been pursuing him!

Turning another page in the ledger, she noticed that the handwriting had changed subtly. It wasn’t quite as neat or strong. A figure or two had been scratched out and written over. The penmanship worsened with every page, until she began to find words misspelled, letters transposed, mistakes in the math. And Rachel realized that what she was seeing was documentation of Addie’s decline.

Nearly a year had passed since the last entry had been made in the book, and that final column of figures had never been tallied. The page was wrinkled and dark from a coffee stain, as if Addie had perhaps become upset with her inability and had spilled the cup in her haste to escape the written evidence of the illness that was progressively stealing her mind.

Rachel set the ledger aside and picked up the inventory book, hoping against hope that it was more up-to-date. But what she found was a repeat performance. The entries started out logical and legible, and gradually declined to the point that what little she could make out made no sense. The book was no more up-to-date than the ledger had been, and it was too much to hope that nothing had been purchased or sold in the interim. She was going to have to inventory everything in the house, then they would have to have a sale of some kind to dispose of the bulk of the merchandise.

They would be able to take only Addie’s most personal possessions and a few antiques to San Francisco. Rachel knew they would not be able to afford much in the way of an apartment. There certainly wouldn’t be room for the hundreds of pieces of furniture Addie had accumulated, or the bric-a-brac… or the bird cages.

“Oh, Mother,” she whispered, planting her elbows on the desk and rubbing her hands over her face as a wave of helplessness crashed into her. “What are we going to do?”

Addie stood in the doorway to the office, motionless as she stared at Rachel. Spread out on the desk before her daughter were the books she had come to dread and hate. It was clear to her that Rachel had seen them. A cold knot of panic settled in her stomach.

“What are you looking for?” she asked, trying to sound commanding but sounding uncertain instead. She shuffled into the room, her garden boots scuffing on the worn rug. “Money to give to Terence, the slimy snake?”

“I don’t see Terence anymore, Mother,” Rachel explained calmly. She wondered how pleased Addie would have been to know her relationship with “the cheap folk singer” had died long ago, that the bloom of love had faded along with her dreams.

“Good,” Addie said, taking a seat on a dusty chair that sat beside the desk. “I never liked that boy. He wasn’t good enough for you.”

Rachel didn’t comment on the remark. Terence was in the past. There was no sense wasting energy thinking about the past when the future was going to take everything they had.

“Mother, we need to talk,” she said gravely. She was bracing herself for a fight, but when she looked into her mother’s eyes, she didn’t see the anger she had come to expect. She saw sadness. Somehow that was worse.

“I’m a little behind on those books,” Addie said.

“It’s all right. We’ll get them straightened out.”

“Here. Let me, Rachel. You were never good with numbers.”

For an instant there was a flash of her old efficient, businesslike self as Addie reached across the desk and picked up the ledger. She sat up straighter, her bony shoulders squared beneath the thin cotton of her housedress. Taking a pencil out of a cup on the desktop, she opened the book.

Gritting her teeth in determination, she began at the top of the page. She saw the numbers, took them into her brain, and tried to put them together, but they scattered and went off in all directions in her mind. She took a deep breath and tried again. She had always been so good at math. Now she could barely comprehend the numbers on the page before her. She tried to add two numbers together, and just before the answer became clear to her, it slipped away.

A terrible chill ran through her. She could excuse her forgetfulness. She was a busy woman with a lot on her mind. So what if she put her car in reverse instead of park once? So what if she went to the mailbox on Sunday? Busy people forgot things all the time. But this, this was something else. She couldn’t discount her inability to add these simple numbers together.

She stared at the figures on the page until they seemed to leap out of their columns and spin around one another in a whirlpool of black and red ink. Panic rose up in her throat, and she slammed the ledger shut. She wanted to throw the book aside and run out of the room, but her brain suddenly couldn’t separate all the intricacies of each task, and she clutched the book to her breast instead.

“Mother?” Rachel asked softly. Her own sense of panic was growing inside her, and it trembled in her voice. She had never seen her mother as anything other than strong, invincible, indomitable. And before her very eyes Addie was shrinking down on her chair, her face a mask of stricken confusion. Rachel reached out toward her, the fingers of her hand curling over the edge of the musty old ledger. “Mother?”

“Rachel,” Addie murmured, her voice straining. She felt too fragile and frail to speak louder than a whisper. She felt as if she might shatter like the many china figurines she had broken over the last few months as the connection between her brain and her fingers had shorted out. The shield of anger and indignation that had held her up so many times was gone, vanished as suddenly as her memory could vanish.

All her life she had been strong. She had stood on her own to raise her daughter when her husband had been killed. She had never asked for help from anyone. But now she turned instinctively to her daughter, her eyes full of anguish and tears. “Rachel, I’m so frightened.”

Rachel took her mother in her arms and held her as her mother had held her when she’d skinned her knee or had had a bad dream. And she offered what comfort she could while she shared her mother’s pain and felt the pain of her own loss. She was losing her mother. Addie would never be the strong one again. It was Rachel’s turn. At that moment both of them realized it.