Free A Keeper's Truth by Dee Willson Page B

bull.
    Grams lets
it go. For now.
    “I don’t
want to intrude on your family—”
    “Intrude
away,” I say, laughing. “You have good timing.”
    Bryce
looks confused but steps in anyway, shaking his umbrella free of rain then
leaning it into the hall corner before shrugging off his heavy coat.
    “Ma’am,”
he says, taking Grams’s hand. He nods then bows. “My
name is Bryce Waters.”
    Grams
looks at me, not quite sure what to make of Bryce Waters. I shrug. Her guess is
as good as mine.
    “This is
Katherine, my Grams-in-law.” I say, taking Bryce’s coat and hanging it on a
hook. “My daughter Abby is playing in her room and the old guy in the
kitchen . . .” I motion for Bryce to follow us down the hall,
and Grams’s feeble attempt at hiding her appreciation
for Bryce’s rear-end doesn’t go unnoticed. She clicks her tongue at me. I point
to the back window, “He’s Gramps.”
    Gramps
waves, secures the Game Boy in his lap, and wheels away. He’s been trying to
top Abby’s Tetris score all afternoon. Meyer found the hand-held relic at a garage
sale last year and gave it to Abby for her fifth birthday, claiming she should
learn to respect the classics.
    “You two
have a seat,” Grams says. “I’ll put the kettle on for tea.”
    Bryce
pulls a chair at the kitchen table, studying my face. His cashmere sweater
attempts to hide his physique without success, and my dream scarf sits casually
around his neck, pulling my gaze into its awe-inspiring colors. I sit across
from him as Grams putters around the kitchen, clanging plates and mugs.
    “I’m sorry
to come unannounced and on a Sunday,” says Bryce. “I wanted to make sure you
were all right.” He eyes me with a serious expression. “And apologize for my
party guest.”
    Grams
knows nothing about the Halloween party, but having heard Bryce isn’t guilty of
harming me directly, she saunters off, mumbling something about checking on
Abby, and I slide my hand under the table, hiding the Band-Aid. Somewhere
between Bryce’s living room and home I broke a heel and sliced a finger. It
wasn’t the only scar of the evening. Events of the Halloween party sway through
my internal vision, ending with the drunken lady and crying in my driveway.
    “I’ve
survived worse,” I say, trying to make light of it.
    I touch
the raised contours of the tiny scar on the peak of my left cheek. When I was
fifteen, my mother caught me sneaking out with cigarettes and tequila. She’d
crashed the week before, when depression’s darkness swallowed her whole, and
hadn’t left her room until she heard me in the liquor cabinet at two a.m. She
set the pack of cigarettes on fire and smashed the tequila on the kitchen
counter, the broken bottle slicing my face.
    “You
have,” Bryce says, glancing at my wedding ring. “I am sorry Angitia upset you. She tries to keep herself contained, but I’m afraid alcohol got the
better of her.”
    “ Angitia was the—”
    “Witch.”
He attempts a smile. “She hasn’t been the same since the witch hunt.”
    I stifle a
chuckle. Then notice he’s not kidding.
    “Weren’t
witch hunts in the sixteen-hundreds, in Salem?”
    Bryce
shakes his head, deadpan. “Salem is known for their witch trials, not witch
hunts,” he says. “The hunting of witches, or those suspected of having magical
powers, goes back thousands of years. Ancient texts from Egypt and Babylonia
speak of sorcerers capable of influencing the mind and prophesying. The
Japanese fox witch, for example, could change shape and create powerful
illusions. Most were slaughtered across central and southern Europe in the
fourteen and fifteenth century. Hundreds of thousands of people, the majority
women, were imprisoned, tortured, and executed.”
    A shiver
runs through me.
    “Sadly,
witch hunts still take place. Saudi Arabia continues to use the death penalty
for sorcery, even executing a man in 2007. In 2008, more than fifty people
accused of practicing witchcraft were