“Friday belongs to Venus, and the moon rules passions such as love.” Next, she leads them through the step-by-step of practicing candle magic; each candle in the store comes with a brief instruction card of how to dress the candle, when to light it, how long to keep it lit, how to properly extinguish it without affecting the magic at work, and how to read flames. Candles with two wicks, for twin flames, are marginally more complex.
Kristin picks up a red seven-day candle called Make Your Wish and waves it under Mr. Yoon’s nose as if admiring a wine’s bouquet. “You’d like this one, Daniel. It smells like cinnamon.”
Mr. Yoon makes a noncommittal noise. He keeps his hands balled behind his back, not touching anything.
Trevor proudly educates them on candle disposal—if you don’t dispose of a candle responsibly after using it for magic, your spell might not work right, or it might draw curious or dark energies to the scene where the spell was conducted. You can either bury the candle in your front yard, bury it in a riverbank, or leave it next to railroad tracks. There are certain ones you can drip across the road outside your house or anoint your doorway with, for protection, before they’re deactivated.
“That’s Maxima,” Trevor tells Alex, whose gaze is locked on the crystal ball on the mantel. “It’s good luck, if you want to touch it.”
“I remember.”
I feel an ache in my ribs—the happy, yearning sort with a three-second delay of pain—remembering right along with him. Grandma referred to Alex asthat boy.
That boy came by the store looking for you again. That boy needs a haircut. That boy better keep his pants on. You better be treating that boy right.
Alex’s gaze flickers from Trevor to me, assessing our proximity to each other; he looks swiftly away again, one hand resting on the carved wooden sign with arrows pointing in three directions:CANDLELAND, THE GARDEN, THE CAVERN OF PAPERBACK GEMS.
“How charming!” Kristin exclaims, rubbing Grandma’s crystal ball. “Daniel, isn’t that charming?”
He grunts. Luna and I cut each other nervous smiles, then I follow Kristin’s focus to our whiteboard, with a fundraising meter drawn on it. Thanks to Zelda generously adding more of her book royalty money to it yesterday, all we need at this point to fix the sewer line is two thousand dollars, which would surely be a drop in the bucket to the wealthy Mr. Yoon. As for fixing the greenhouse, that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon. I’ll be lucky if we manage to tuck enough away to get that running before the end of the year.
I show them to the Garden, my fridge stocked with ready-made pieces (talismans for luck and love, mostly), the Wedding Bells wreath I was working on before their arrival. It’s outfitted in Canterbury bells, bluebells, bells of Ireland, white ribbon, and an actual bell, small and silver. The tour group is squeezed in due to the limited space, and all the heady scents mixed together makes Mr. Yoon sneeze.
“How cute!” Kristin gushes, accidentally knocking over a bottle of root hormone I use for propagation. When she replaces it, the neem oil goes tumbling. “Are you online, too?”
“Yes,” Luna responds before I get the chance. “We get a lot of business through our website. Fairly diverse business, too.While physical traffic comprises mostly women, roughly half of our online demographic is actually men between the ages of thirty-five to sixty-five.”
“I’d like to see the lot,” Mr. Yoon interjects, clearly not interested in my flowers or Luna’s stats.
“Oh. Uh, it’s this way.” Trevor glances at me, and I nod, feeling a bit outside of my body because this is our best shot, and I can’t tell if it’s going well or if I’m going to have to start downsizing. How will I choose between sea holly and red-hot poker plants? Blue poppies and Amethyst in Snow?
Luna droops after the two of them leave. I pull her close to my side, cheek against her shoulder. She tousles my hair. I can already hear the conversation we’ll have tonight, in which she’ll insist on getting rid of some candles to make more space for my flowers, which I’ll refuse. Around and around we’ll go, but in the end, I shouldn’t have gotten carried away planting all this stuff in the first place when I didn’t have proper room, so I’ll be the one digging up inventory with a trowel.
“What is it, exactly, that you need to do to the property?” Alex asks me.
“New sewer line, then repairing the asphalt afterward. The greenhouse needs a couple of panes replaced, and its floor is completely ruined thanks to backflow.”
“What sort of flooring are you looking to get?”
I shrug. “That’s kind of up in the air right now. I asked a contractor how much it would cost to pour concrete, and at six dollars per square foot, it comes out to almost seven hundred dollars, not including labor. But he also said that a rush job will cost more.”
Alex makes a face.
“It probably doesn’t sound like that much, but we’re a littlein the red after pooling all of our money to buy the lot,” I tell him, rambling, “as well as other night market expenses. Farmers market tents, tables, industrial fans, heavy-duty extension cords, that sort of thing. Our priority right now is a fixed sewer line, so that we’ll have a paved parking lot to put all the booths on. Which is why we’re hoping Mr. Yoon helps us.Ifhe says yes, we’ve got a guy who promised he’d get in here right away to work on it. We’d be able to launch the night market like we advertised, by the skin of our teeth. We wouldn’t break contracts with vendors.” We were quick to get business in motion, contracting all sorts of promises before we realized the full extent of sewer line damage.
“The night market,” he repeats, brows furrowed.
“Yes.” I can feel my eyes grow starry as I imagine it. “We want to create a labyrinth of outdoor tables and potted trees decorated in fairy lights and moonflowers. Colorful rugs, those little pouf things you can sit on. Other vendors can bring their own pieces to sell, for a fee, all of it magic-related. There isn’t any nightlife in this town except for Moonshine, the bar, so we think it’s an untapped market. Ours will be family-friendly. And then later, once I’m able to use the greenhouse, I’ll make it pretty and open it up for people to walk through. I can do special midnight flora fortunes.”
A smile spreads across his face as I chatter on. “What?” I hedge, self-conscious, but he just shakes his head, still smiling.
“These arelovely,” Kristin remarks, jolting us out of our bubble. She lifts a yellow carnation to her nose. “Do you think I could have one?”
I smile at her, taking the carnation. “This one,” I say conspiratorially, tapping her chin with it, “wouldn’t suit you, I’mafraid, unless you’re planning to jilt Mr. Yoon at the altar. It meansrejection.”
She claps her hands. “Really! What would you pick instead?”
“For you?” I hum, perusing our options. “For you, I would pick lily of the valley, because you’ve found happiness in love again. Stephanotis, for marital bliss. And...” My fingers hover over a vivid orange bloom, waiting for my intuition, either a sticky sensation or one that sparkles. “Bird-of-paradise.”
