David Cureux asked his ex-wife. He had followed Clare into her basement to discover an entire bookcase stocked with foam meat trays. Those were not the only things stored in the basement. There were old magazines, including every copy of Midwifery Today ever printed, a stash of gift boxes that took up twenty-four cubic feet of space, the infamous box of rubber bands, another of twisty ties. The woman never threw anything away, but for the life of him David had no idea what she planned to do with those meat trays.
“We’ll need these things when it all falls apart,” she said.
It, David knew from long and turbulent experience with this woman, was civilization as they knew it. She’d raised two children, who now spoke with a sort of hushed horror of growing up amidst the ominous predictions of a woman they still believed to be a seer, even though they’d finally learned to tune out her prognostications of global disaster.
“I guess you could put them together with duct tape and build yourself a house,” he reflected of the meat trays. “Or a coliseum.”
“Never mind that. Let’s move these upstairs.”
These were more than twenty boxes too heavy for the sixty-eight-year-old woman to carry up the cellar steps by herself. They contained telephone directories for the years 1968 to 2005. Not just phone directories that had belonged to Clare, but most of the discarded phone directories for the state of West Virginia—or so David suspected.
“I have to get this done,” Clare said, referring to the delivery of the boxes to recycling, which her ex-husband had promised to do with his pickup truck. Clare was reluctant to part with them, but she’d realized that every issue of Birth Journal could no longer be kept upstairs. So those magazines were coming downstairs and the phone books would have to leave. “We need to hurry. Someone’s coming about a love potion.”
A person who knew Clare less well would draw one of the following conclusions: One, she’d made a previous appointment with someone who wanted a love potion. Or two, she’d received a phone message or written message asking her to be home at a particular time to greet a customer interested in a love potion.
David, however, understood that Clare simply “knew” someone was going to come by. Enough people approached her about love potions that it wouldn’t be a huge coincidence for her to receive an unannounced visitor requesting one. If such a person arrived in the next few minutes, David would chalk it up to the popularity of his ex-wife’s brand of snake oil. Their lives had been full of these instances of Clare supposedly “knowing” things were going to happen. Like the time she’d made them pack up from fishing because Bridget had broken her arm. “Bridget’s been hurt. We have to go home,” she’d said.
He’d found these announcements aggravating, because she always expected him to act on them. And coincidence had made her nearly always right.
If it wasn’t coincidence, there was a scientific explanation of which he was unaware. Whenever he told her that, Clare said matter-of-factly, “Of course, there is.” Clare’s point of view was that she had “the sight,” but that there was a scientific explanation for this gift.
Nonetheless, David’s physician’s mind did not stretch to encompass love potions that worked. The love potions were snake oil, and they appeared to “work” because people who were so determinedly in love that they would try such things could often get their way anyhow. And then there was the placebo effect, with all its variations, including the power of positive thinking. The strength of human belief could account for the supposed “success” of the love potions.
David hefted a box of phone books. On the off chance that a victim was on her way—usually it was women who went in for love potions—he preferred not to meet the person. Or be seen anywhere around Clare at the time. His city council seat was up for election again, and the council was having credibility problems as it was; damned if he’d let association with a dispenser of love draughts scupper his chances. He told his ex-wife, “You might think of me.”
“I do,” she said, misunderstanding. “You need the exercise.”
“LET’S TAKE ANOTHER CALL now. We’ve got Julie on the line. Hi, Julie.”
Mary Anne had switched on the radio as she started her car to drive herself and Cameron to Clare Cureux’s house in Myrtle Hollow and obtain a love potion. Hearing the detested voice of her least favorite person, she reached out to turn the radio off again.
“Don’t touch that dial,” Cameron said, batting her hand away.
“Hi, Graham.” It was a shy-sounding, young-sounding female voice. “It’s about my fiancé.”
“You’re engaged. Great! That lucky guy.”
“The hypocrite,” said Mary Anne. “I don’t think he’s ever asked out the same woman twice.”
“He’s waiting for the real thing,” Cameron insisted, undoubtedly partly in jest.
“Thanks,” the radio caller said, sounding so sweet that Mary Anne herself listened attentively for her problem, the problem the young woman expected to resolve by listening to Life—with Dr. Graham Corbett, which Mary Anne thought of as Get a Life. “Well, we’ve been engaged six months and we’re planning to be married at Christmas, and I totally love my fiancé, but he does this little thing that kind of bugs me. He says these things. I know he thinks he’s being funny, but he really hurts my feelings. Like I’m a little overweight but I’m not superfat, and I was showing him a wedding dress in a Brides magazine, and he asked if it comes in plus sizes.”
“Creep,” Cameron hissed.
“That’s not very nice,” Graham remarked, sounding compassionate.
From the man who says I have an ass that’s made for radio, Mary Anne reflected. You sorry piece of work.
“And I’m an English teacher, but I really want to write short stories, and I sent some in, trying to get published, and he says, ‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.’”
“Have you told him how these comments make you feel?”
“Yes. He says I’m oversensitive.”
Graham made a thoughtful sound. “Julie, I want you to do something for me. I want you to think about how you feel when he says these things. Then, I’d like you to close your eyes…Got them closed?”
It was the intimate older-brother tone that listeners seemed to love. Knowing how little relation it bore to the real Graham Corbett, Mary Anne found it pretty hard to take.
“Yes,” said the girl who was engaged to a jerk.
Beside Mary Anne, Cameron had her eyes closed.
“Just imagine spending the rest of your life with someone who says things that make you feel that way.”
The poor girl made a slightly distraught sound. Cameron echoed it.
Mary Anne said, “I can’t believe you buy in to his act.”
“Shh!”
“Now, let’s try a different experiment,” Graham said. “Imagine how you would feel with someone who loves you so much that he wouldn’t dream of saying anything that could hurt your feelings. This is going to be a self-confident guy, so
