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she was going to be difficult. Of all the damn-fool, pigheaded . . . ”
    “Hush, love,” Rachel said. “There’s no harm done, and now we know just where we stand. I’d rather have a nice cup of tea than listen to you cursing out Mrs. Gordon for just trying to be a good mother.” She turned her head to look at me. “Very impressive, by the way. We knew you had to be like Ophie, because of the garden, but we didn’t know the half of it. You’ve got a kick like a mule, Mrs. Gordon.”
    I must have been staring at her like one of the flying fish. Here I thought I’d half-killed her, and she was giving me a smile that looked perfectly genuine.
    I smiled cautiously in return. “Thank you,” I said.
    Kim pulled at the sleeve of my jacket. “Hey, Mom, that was awesome. I guess you’re a witch, huh?”
    I wanted to deny it, but I couldn’t. The fact was that the pattern of flowers on my jacket was different and the colors were muted, the flowers more English garden than tropical paradise. There were only three buttons, and they were larks, not parrots. And I felt different. Clearer? More whole? I don’t know—different. Even though I didn’t know how the magic worked or how to control it, I couldn’t ignore the fact—the palpable, provable fact—it was there.
    “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I am.”
    “Me, too,” my daughter said. “What’s Dad going to say?”
    I thought for a minute. “Nothing, honey. Because we’re not going to tell him.”
    We didn’t, either. And we’re not going to. There’s no useful purpose served by telling people truths they aren’t equipped to accept. Geoff’s pretty oblivious, anyway. It’s true that in the hung-over aftermath of Ophelia’s blue punch, he announced that he thought the new neighbors might be a bad influence, but he couldn’t actually forbid Kim and me to hang out with them because it would look homophobic.
    Kim’s over at Number 400 most Saturday afternoons, learning how to be a zoologist. She’s making good progress. There was an episode with zombie mice I don’t like to think about, and a crisis when the porcelain cat broke falling out of a tree. But she’s learning patience, control, and discipline, which are all excellent things for a girl of fourteen to learn. She and Rachel have reanimated a pair of passenger pigeons, but they haven’t had any luck in breeding them yet.
    Lucille’s the biggest surprise. It turns out that all her nosy-parkerism was a case of ingrown witchiness. Now she’s studying with Silver, of all people, to be a psychologist. But that’s not the surprise. The surprise is that she left Burney and moved into Number 400, where she has a room draped with chintz and a gray cat named Jezebel and is as happy as a clam at high tide.
    I’m over there a lot, too, learning to be a horticulturist. Ophelia says I’m a quick study, but I have to learn to trust my instincts. Who knew I had instincts? I thought I was just good at looking things up.
    I’m working on my own garden now. I’m the only one who can find it without being invited in. It’s an English kind of garden, like the gardens in books I loved as a child. It has a stone wall with a low door in it, a little central lawn, and a perennial border full of foxgloves and Sweet William and Michelmas daisies. Veronica blooms in the cracks of the wall, and periwinkle carpets the beds where old-fashioned fragrant roses nod heavily to every passing breeze. There’s a small wilderness of rowan trees, and a neat shrubbery embracing a pond stocked with fish as bright as copper pennies. Among the dusty-smelling boxwood, I’ve put a statue of a woman holding a basket planted with stonecrop. She’s dressed in a jacket incised with flowers and vines and closed with three buttons shaped like parrots. The fourth button sits on her shoulder, clacking its beak companionably and preening its brazen feathers. I’m thinking of adding a duck pond next, or maybe a wilderness for Kim’s