Free Careful What You Witch For by Amanda M. Lee

asked.
    “I … she just wanted to check up on us.” Aunt Tillie wasn’t wrong when she said I was loyal. I wouldn’t throw her under the bus. No matter what.
    “You’re lying,” Teddy said. “You always were the worst liar of the lot. I don’t know what you’re lying about, but you’re definitely lying now.”
    “Hey, don’t talk to her that way,” Dad snapped.
    Teddy took an involuntary step back. “I didn’t mean that. I don’t know why I said it.”
    I did. “Why don’t you guys go up to bed,” I suggested. “I think everyone drank too much – and fought too much – tonight. We’re all on edge. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”
    “What are you going to do?” Dad asked.
    “I’m going to make sure everything is cleaned up,” I said, rolling up my sleeves.
    “By yourself?”
    “It’s fine,” I said. “It won’t take me very long. Everyone else is in bed, and you guys should join them.”
    Dad looked unsure. “I don’t think … .”
    “Just go,” I said, rubbing my forehead wearily. “Trust me. I could use the time alone to … decompress.”
     
    I WORKED steadily, cleaning the dining room first and carrying all the dishes into the kitchen so I could wash them. I stacked everything in neat piles – just like my mother taught me – and then attacked a pile at a time.
    After several minutes, I realized I wasn’t alone.
    Dad had changed his clothes, and he was now dressed in flannel sleep pants and a T-shirt. He joined me wordlessly at the counter and started drying.
    I broke the uncomfortable silence first. “I told you to go to bed.”
    “I’m not tired,” Dad said.
    “You should be. You drank enough wine to knock out three men twice your size.”
    Dad chuckled. “There’s something about being accosted by a ghost to sober you up.”
    “I guess.” I was so used to it, it didn’t even register anymore.
    “I’m sorry about what Teddy said. He didn’t mean it. He’s not himself tonight. None of us were ourselves tonight.”
    “I know.”
    “I’m sorry about … everything.”
    “I know.”
    Dad stilled his hands, focusing on me. “Do you want to talk about it?”
    “I don’t know what there is to talk about.”
    “I think there’s a lot to talk about, Clove,” he said. “Do you want to start with why you’re so mad?”
    “I’m not mad.”
    “You’re mad,” he said, his voice gentle. “You have a right to be mad. We shouldn’t have left.”
    “No, you shouldn’t have.”
    “There are two sides to every story. You know that, right?”
    “Of course there are,” I said. “It’s hard to listen to your side of the story when you’re trying to tell it while saying horrible things about another member of my family.”
    Dad’s eyebrows flew up. “Who? Aunt Tillie?”
    I nodded, plunging my hands deeper into the scorching water to search for errant silverware.
    “You and your cousins say horrible things about her all the time,” Dad pointed out.
    “That’s because we can,” I said. “She likes to mess with us. The truth is, we like to mess with her, too. She’s always been there for us.”
    “I know.”
    “You know, when we were in middle school, there was this girl named Gracie who was torturing Bay,” I said, my mind traveling back in time. “Bay can talk to ghosts. I don’t know if you know that, but she can. When we were kids, people thought she was the weird girl always talking to herself. It’s not like we could tell them the truth, so she just had to suck it up.
    “Anyway, Gracie was … horrible to Bay,” I continued. “It didn’t matter how many times we beat her up – and we did beat her up – she just kept coming. It was like she took Bay’s very existence as some affront to nature.
    “I think she knew, even then, that there was something different about Bay,” I said. “She knew there was something different about all of us. Bay never liked to cry in front of our mothers and Aunt Tillie. They didn’t like