Page 81 of The Rules of Magic

“The curse will never find us,” Hay always said.

“Is that possible?” Franny would then ask.

“Isn’t that what we’ve done? We’re here together, darling.”

“You two are like teenagers,” Jet teased them when she came upon them kissing in the parlor or the kitchen.

“But aren’t we still?” Hay said with a grin.

“Oh, yes,” Franny said. “And you’re still refusing to eat a tomato sandwich.”

“And you’re still difficult.”

There was that grin, so how could she be annoyed? Still, she protested. “I was never difficult.”

“No,” Hay said, linking his arms around her, pulling her near. “Never once.”

As most doctors do, Haylin diagnosed himself. He had cancer and he knew enough to know it was too late. He conferred with an old friend at Mass General, a specialist in oncology and hematology, but he already knew what the advice would be. Live now.

He told Franny at the lake, where she wept in his arms. Still, he insisted there was always some good to come out of every circumstance. Now the curse could not touch him. They’d held it off with trickery. He was dying and nothing more could bring him to ruin. They could finally be husband and wife. It was too late for many things, but it was not too late for that. Jet had been right. Whenever they looked at each other they saw the people they had first fallen in love with. She was a gawky, beautiful freckled girl with long red hair who liked tomato sandwiches for lunch and had shivered when he first kissed her. He was a tall boy who cared more about other people than about himself, one who had almost died of appendicitis at Harvard and who had refused to stop loving her, no matter what fate decreed.

That same afternoon when he told her he was dying, he went out and bought her an engagement ring, an emerald, which some people say is much preferable to a diamond, for it causes love to last. In certain lights it was the gray-green of her eyes, and in full sun it reminded her of the garden, a deep, lush green.

Haylin went to Jet for her permission to ask Reverend Willard if he would officiate at the service. Jet telephoned the Reverend, who said he would be honored to do so. Haylin then went over to his house and the men drank glasses of whiskey. The Reverend said he liked to get to know the people he would be marrying; it was more personal that way.

“We’ve been together since we were kids, sometimes more so and sometimes less so,” Haylin told him.

The Reverend congratulated Dr. Walker and said he was a lucky man. Franny was waiting for him at home. He walked so slowly now, it broke her heart to see it, but she waved and rushed out to meet him. She worried that the Reverend had changed his mind, and that Hay would be disappointed, but instead the men had wound up having several drinks.

“I told him it was the end of the curse,” Haylin assured Franny. “At least for us. If we’re choosing anything, let’s choose love.”

On the day the doctor married Frances Owens the whole town came out to stand on the sidewalk and watch through the window of town hall, moved by the power of love. Some of the children had never even seen a member of the Owens family, for they weren’t allowed to walk down Magnolia Street, and they wondered now why their parents had always been nervous about the tall lady with red hair. The Reverend wore his old black coat and his thin black tie. He had aged greatly, and was now quite stooped. His arthritis made it difficult for him to drive, so on Sundays, Jet often picked him up in the station wagon she and Franny had bought and she would drive the Reverend to the cemetery. They usually brought plastic lawn chairs so they might stay awhile, especially in fair weather. When the daffodils were blooming they brought armfuls along. They remembered Levi better than anyone, and because of this they often didn’t need to speak. Jet still wore the moonstone. She had never once taken it off, not even to bathe.

As the wedding service was about to begin, the Reverend nodded to Jet, who was the maid of honor, dressed in a pale green shift. She nodded back, and in that quiet way they shared the grief the feud between their families had caused as well as the joy of the day.

Unable are the Loved to die, for Love is Immortality, the Reverend quoted when he ended the service, a blessing not only for the husband and wife but for Jet as well, who understood his meaning in his choice of Emily Dickinson. Levi would always be with them.

When the happy couple walked out of town hall there were wild cheers. Franny hadn’t even known there were so many people in their town. She hunched down, unused to all the attention. The doctor’s patients threw rice and the children’s chorus from the elementary school sang “All You Need Is Love.” Franny carried a bunch of long-stemmed red roses. Hay was slowed down a bit by the problems with his leg and by the pain he was suffering, but he grinned and waved as if he had won a race, his arm around his bride, who was crying too much, right there in public, to notice much of anything other than how crowded the street was on this day. Even people who had always disliked the Owenses, and blamed them for every misfortune in town, had to agree that Frances Owens made a beautiful bride, even at her age, even though she dressed in black.

Dr. Walker moved into the old house, for he had no fear of curses, just of the pains and suffering of real life, and anyone could tell he was happy. People would see him watering the garden. He weeded between the rows of lettuce while singing to himself. He had to close down his office, but he’d talked a young doctor from Boston into taking over his practice, which was fortunate for him and even more fortunate for the town. These days Haylin wanted to spend as much time as he could with Franny, who liked to tease him about his new gardening mania. He’d put out a wooden box just inside the fence, filled it with lettuce, and urged their neighbors to take as much as they’d like.

“The best lettuce in the commonwealth, if we can keep the rabbits away,” he told people passing by.

“They’re never going to walk through the gate,” Franny insisted.

And then the oddest thing happened, they did. His patients and her neighbors all came past the gate, and although some appeared to be nervous, they gratefully took the lettuce, heads of all varieties, each so good that people who made salads of the stuff dreamed of rabbits and of their own childhood gardens.

Charlie Merrill was now deceased, so Franny had asked his sons to bring over a bench so Hay could sit and rest out on the porch, which he had begun to do. He had slowed down, but not completely. He let Jet water the garden now and Franny weed, but all that summer he set out lettuce for his friends and patients.

“Aren’t I lucky,” he said one evening when he and Franny were sitting on the bench holding hands, watching the dusk sift down. Hay remembered walking through Central Park, lying on the grass looking at stars, swimming in the cold pond just before he went away. He remembered Franny with her red hair pinned up haphazardly lying on the floor with him in the cook’s room at her parents’ house, naked and beautiful.

He tried not to take painkillers because he didn’t want to spend any of his time with Franny in a haze. “I might have drowned long ago, and then we wouldn’t have had all of this.”

Franny had no idea how it was possible to love him more, but she did. She thought perhaps that was the curse, to love someone so much when you knew he would leave you. But Hay was right.

“We are lucky,” she said.

“It was all because of third grade. When you walked into the classroom in a black coat, looking pissed off.”