Page 2 of A Witch-ish Guide to Protectors and Pendulums

I looked up, still hefting the box up with my knee and shifting it to my hip. “Excuse me?” I asked.

“The door.” The voice came from an irate man. When I looked up—bam!This unbelievable sense of déjà vu hit me from out of the blue. “You’re standing in it, neither inside nor outside. I don’t care which you choose, but make your choice and close it already.”

Seventies porn music played in my head as I watched his mouth move, a mouth putting me under a hypnotic spell until I realized the words coming from that hypnotic moving mouth weren’t very flattering. “Are you sick or just dumb?” he shouted at me in a highly aggrieved manner, I might add.

I blinked the brain fog away.

What?

My ears felt filled with fluid. I shook my head until the muffled sound cleared and I blinked several times again.

“I asked if you’re sick or are you just dumb?” he repeated curtly. “Come in or get out. I don’t care which, just stinking do it.” Uh, was that a tone? Did I detecta tone?

That hardly seemed necessary. I stepped in, letting the glass door slowly ease shut. “Well, you could’ve helped me and that would’ve gotten the job done faster.” And oh, yeah, did he ever get my mean eyes. Theif looks could killeyes that I saved for the worst offenders.

“I could’ve,” he answered. “But it’s not in my job description.” The jerk, I mean okay, he happened to have been a handsome jerk, but a jerk nonetheless. And he had the audacity to smirk. As if.

Why was it that the best-looking people were always the biggest assholes?

This guy had to be one of the worst because he seriously caused a big-time tingle in my parts. All the parts, not just my girly parts. I was talking rapid-heartbeat, hard-to-catch-a-breath, face-flushing-with-embarrassment-from-being-a-lowly-peon-in-his-presence kind of sexy. His hair appeared so brown that some might’ve mistaken it for black, and he wore it short but artfully shaggy in thatI know I’m hotway that ridiculously hot people lived by. And if that weren’t enough, he had the audacity to have these black eyes that shimmered and reflected the light in the store like pieces of shiny coal.

Don’t get me started on those shoulders—I mean, who gave him the right to have shoulders that broad and muscled while working behind the cash register? Those shoulders belonged on romance book covers. Or now that I was on a roll, how about being that tall? Jeffery was six feet. This guy looked at least a head taller. Who gave him the right to look like that while working in a store where anyone—me, I was anyone—could see him? Everything about him ticked me off on principle.

If that was the way he wanted to play this,fine. He didn’t know who he was dealing with. I walked that box over to the checkout, dropping it on the floor. “Well,” I started in, hand to my hip, leaning into his space with my eyebrow raised—better believe I broke out the eyebrow raise for this one—and I cocked my head, giving it to him straight. “If it’s not in your job description to help a girl out when you see her struggling with the door, then you’re just going to have to deal with escaping air.”

He opened his mouth to spew something highly entertaining, I was sure, but I cut him right off.

“Oh, no… You had your say. It’s my turn now,” I said. His mouth snapped shut while he bared his teeth at me like a dog.“Bad puppy,” I admonished him. “Heel.” Ever heard that saying ‘He had murder in his eyes?’ Whoever made that saying up had clearly been talking about this guy, but I didn’t have two cares to give. And for my parting words, I looked him right in the eye and said, “And I have three more boxes in my truckjust like this one.”

Then in the grandest exit I could muster, I spun around on my heels and walked out. If I was being honest, I didn’t expect it to work, but he followed me outside. Because he followed me to my jeep pushing in front of me to heft up one of the boxes, I magnanimously ignored his grumbling.

We each carried a box and when we reached the door, he shifted his box into one arm as if holding a tissue box and opened it, holding it for me to pass through first. The last box he fetched on his own.

As he bent his knees to set it down, I pet the top of his head like I would when giving praise to a dog, contemplating whether or not I had enough time to scratch behind his ear before getting the heck out of there. “Good boy,” I said and then I ran for my life while laughing my fool head off.

I distinctly heard the sound of a thump against the glass making me pretty sure he threw something against the door. Before hopping back in my jeep, I popped inside the sub shop next door for a veggie sub on parmesan bread, a giant chocolate and raspberry chip cookie, and a diet iced tea to go. Smile still planted firmly on my face.

On the way home, my phone rang. Typically, not a big deal, but today the screen said:Janet. Janet? No. I wasn’t in the headspace to deal with Janet. It’d been months since I last heard from her. Being Jeffery’s mom, and with Jeffery being gone, she’d found it hard to be around me. I must admit, I’d dropped the ball on keeping in touch with my almost mother-in-law as well.

In my contemplation of what she could possibly have to call me about, I almost missed answering the call. And wouldn’t that have been a shame? Yes—sigh—it would’ve. I was being mean. “Hello?” I answered.

“Simone, dear… how are you?” She’d sounded sad since Jeffrey’s passing, but today she emitted it through the line, filling my car up with her sorrow.

“What’s wrong? Is it Charles? Daphne?” Charles, her husband, and Daphne, her daughter—Jeffery’s father and sister—were the only other reasons I could think of to cause her this level of misery.

“No…” she whispered. “They’re fine. It’s… Simone dear, the police phoned. They’re finally releasing Jeffery’s personal effects.” She sniffled loudly. “They told us to collect it by this afternoon.” This, she followed by a second, even louder sniffle. “I can’t do it, Simone. I can’t.Please…”

Of all days to ask me to pick up his personal effects, but how did I tell herno? She was almost my mother-in-law and this was Jeffery we were talking about. I owed him this much, to see to his parents now that he couldn’t.

“Sure,” I told her, sighing. “I can head there now.”

“Thank you,” she said softly. Then we hung up.

And just like that, I merged over three lanes of traffic, horns honking as I cut a few people off in my attempt to make it to the righthand turn lane, taking a hard right at the next light, then flipping around to turn back onto the street I just came from, only heading the opposite direction.

Seven stoplights and two more turns later, I pulled into a metered spot in front of the police station. Right before I opened my door, I remembered I’d been cleaning in a garage all day and sighed. I must’ve looked ridiculous walking into that secondhand shop, one big, hot mess.

My eyes shot to my jeans. Dirty. Hurriedly, I flipped down the visor mirror, holding back a scream given the horror of my appearance. The soft lavender I’d dyed my hair two months ago to help me move forward now held a sheen of silver from all the dust.

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