An Unrehearsed Desire. Lauren B. Davis

letting your imagination run away with you.” Dad sounded tired and sad.

      “Good riddance, I say!”

      “Keep your voice down, Libby.”

      It took me a long time to get to sleep.

      Aunt Shirley came to my room real early next morning. Mother-of-pearl combs held her hair in a messy pile on the top of her head. She had bluish-gray smudges under her eyes. She told me she was leaving.

      “But why?”

      “That’s the way it has to be for a while.”

      “But why?”

      She took my hand and put it on her stomach. “Things change, Kat, that’s part of the magic. It comes from the most unlikely places.”

      “I don’t understand.”

      “You will,” she smiled.

      “I don’t want you to go,” I said.

      “I wish I didn’t have to go.”

      “I could come with you.”

      “No, Sweetie, your place is here. When you’re older, you can come visit me. In the meantime, you remember everything I taught you, won’t you?”

      “I’ll remember,” I said, but it was hard to talk.

      She put her arms around me and hugged me tight.

      In the morning, she was gone. And nobody would tell me what was going on. It was as if she’d never been there and I wasn’t allowed to talk about it.

      “But what happened?” I wailed.

      “Nothing happened,” said my mother. “And that’s all there is to it.” She clamped her mouth down in that firm line I knew permitted no discussion. “Absolutely nothing happened here.”

      I took a little paprika bottle from the drawer, emptied out the paprika in the back garden, where I figured it would kill slugs, and then went to St. Anne’s Church. I slipped in the big wood doors, and made for the stone bowl in the chapel. I scooped a bit of church water into the empty bottle and headed over to Ginny’s.

      When she showed up at the door I told her to get the money.

      “We have to bury it,” I said. “We can’t spend it.”

      “Why not?” said Ginny. “I want to go down to Dougall’s and buy a goldfish.”

      “We can’t,” I said. “That’s what they call dirty money.”

      I explained about what my mother had said. About money and men.

      “I don’t get it,” Ginny said.

      I wasn’t sure I completely did either, but I knew somehow that this money, all bright and shiny, was tied up with things I didn’t want to think about.

      “It’s evil money. If we keep it, bad things will happen. All right? It’s dirty money,” I repeated. “We have to make a ceremony. We have to cleanse it. From that man.”

      “You think so?” I could see by the way Ginny’s skin went red that she had weird feelings about the man, too.

      “I do. A ritual is required.”

      She nodded, solemn.

      So I dug a hole and put the money in, tied with a white handkerchief and a sprig of cedar. I sprinkled church water over it just in case. Then I filled up the hole and spat three times. And we left that money in her back yard, near the doghouse so Toby, her big mangy German shepherd, could guard it just like the wolf spirit my Aunt Shirley says stands guardian over me.

      I think about that money, in the ground a whole year now, but Ginny never mentions it and somehow I don’t feel much like digging it up. I don’t feel like doing much of anything this summer, except sitting up in the old apple tree out in the orchard. Sometimes, if I close my eyes and concentrate real hard, I can smell Aunt Shirley’s clean sweet scent on the breeze. The smell of vanilla and wood-moss and rainfall.