Practical Magic

At home the aunts always use the big cast-iron cauldron, which has been in the kitchen since Maria Owens first built the house, but here Sally's largest pasta pot will have to do. They'll have to boil the ingredients for three and a half hours, so even though Kylie is always nervous that someone down at Del Vecchio's will recognize her voice as the one belonging to the wiseacre who had all those pizzas delivered to Mr. Frye's house a while back, she phones in and asks for two large pies to be delivered, one with anchovies, for the aunts, the other cheese and mushroom with extra sauce.

The mixture on the back burner starts to bubble, and by the time the delivery boy arrives, the sky has grown stormy and dark, although beneath the thick layers of clouds is a perfect white moon. The delivery boy knocks three times and hopes that Antonia Owens, whom he once sat next to in algebra, will appear. Instead, it's Aunt Frances who yanks open the door. The cuffs of her sleeves are smoky, from all the lye she's been measuring, and her eyes are as cold as iron.

"What?" she demands of the boy, who has already clutched the pizzas tightly to his chest simply because of the sight of her.

"Pizza delivery," he manages to say.

"This is your job?" Frances wants to know. "Delivering food?"

"That's right," the boy says. He thinks he can see Antonia in the house; there's somebody beautiful with red hair, at any rate. Frances is glaring at him. "That's right, ma'am," he amends.

Frances reaches into her skirt pocket for her change purse and counts out eighteen dollars and thirty-three cents, which she considers highway robbery.

"Well, if it's your job, don't expect a tip," she tells the boy.

"Hey, Josh," Antonia calls as she comes to collect the pizzas. She's wearing an old smock over her black T-shirt and leggings. Her hair has turned to ringlets in all this humidity and her pale skin looks creamy and cool. The delivery boy is unable to speak in her presence, although when he gets back to the restaurant he'll talk about her for a good hour before the kitchen staff tells him to shut up. Antonia laughs as she closes the door. She's gotten back some of whatever she'd lost. Attraction, she now understands, is a state of mind.

"Pizza," Antonia a

"That's good luck," Aunt Jet says when their electricity goes as well. "We'll be the light in the darkness."

"Find a candle," Sally suggests.

Kylie gets a candle from the shelf near the sink. When she passes the stove she holds her nose closed with her fingers.

"Boy, does that stink," she says of the aunts' mixture.

"It's supposed to," Jet says, pleased.

"It always does," her sister agrees.

Kylie returns and places the candle in the center of the table, then lights it so they can go on with their supper, which is interrupted by the doorbell.

"It better not be that delivery boy back for more," Frances says now. "I'll give him a real piece of my mind."

"I'll get it." Gillian goes to the door and swings it open.

Ben Frye is on the porch, wearing a yellow rain slicker; he's holding a box of white hurricane candles and a lantern. Just seeing him makes a chill go down Gillian's spine. From the first, she's been figuring that Ben was taking his life in his hands each time he was with her. With her luck and her history, anything that could go wrong would. She'd been sure she'd bring disaster to whoever loved her, but that was back when she was a woman who killed her boyfriend in an Oldsmobile, now she's someone else. She leans out the front door and kisses Ben on the mouth. She kisses him in a way that proves that if he was ever thinking of getting out of this, he'd better stop thinking right now.

"Who invited you here?" Gillian says, but she has her arms around him; she's got that sugary smell anyone who gets too close to her can't help but notice.

"I was worried about you," Ben says. "They can call this thing a storm, but it's really a hurricane."

Tonight, Ben has left Buddy alone to bring the candles over, even though he knows how anxious thunder makes the rabbit. That's what happens when Ben wants to see Gillian, he has to go on and do it, no matter what the consequences. Still, he's so unused to being spontaneous that whenever he does something like this he has a slight ringing in his ears, not that he cares. When Ben returns to his house he's bound to find a telephone book shredded or the soles chewed off his favorite ru

"Get out while the going's good," Gillian tells him. "My aunts are here from Massachusetts."

"Great," Ben says, and before Gillian can stop him he's inside the house. Gillian tugs at the sleeve of his rain slicker, but he's on his way to greet their guests. The aunts have serious business ahead of them; they'll flip their lids if Ben careens into the kitchen assuming he's about to meet two dear old ladies. They'll rise from their chairs and stomp their feet and turn their cold gray eyes in his direction.

"They arrived this afternoon and they're exhausted," Gillian says. "This is not a good idea. They don't like company. Plus, they're ancient."

Ben Frye pays no attention, and why should he? The aunts are Gillian's family, and that's all he needs to know. He lopes right into the kitchen, where Antonia and Kylie and Sally stop eating the minute they see him; quickly they turn to see the aunts' reaction. Ben doesn't catch on to their anxiety any more than he notices the fiery scent rising from the pot on the stove. He must presume the smell emanates from some special cleaning fluid or detergent, or perhaps some small creature, a baby squirrel or an old toad, has curled up to die underneath the back doorstep.

Ben goes over to the aunts, reaches into the sleeve of his rain slicker, and pulls out a bunch of roses. Aunt Jet accepts them with pleasure. "Lovely," she says.

Aunt Frances runs a petal between her thumb and forefinger to verify that the roses are real. They are, but that doesn't mean Frances is so easily impressed.

"Any more tricks?" she says in a voice that can turn a man's blood to ice.

Ben smiles his beautiful smile, the one that made Gillian weak in the knees from the start and that now reminds the aunts of the boys they once knew. He reaches behind Aunt Frances's head, and before they know it, he has pulled from thin air a chiffon scarf the color of sapphires, which he proudly presents.

"I couldn't accept this," Frances says, but her tone isn't quite so cool as before, and when no one's looking, she loops the scarf around her neck. The color is perfect for her; her eyes look like lake water, clear and gray-blue. Ben makes himself comfortable, grabs a piece of pizza, and begins to ask Jet about their trip down from Massachusetts. That's when Frances signals to Gillian to come close.

"Don't screw this one up," she tells her niece.

"I don't intend to," Gillian assures her.

Ben stays until eleven. He fixes instant chocolate pudding for dessert, then teaches Kylie and Antonia and Aunt Jet how to build a house of cards and how to make it fall down with a single puff of air.

"You got lucky this time," Sally tells her sister.

"You think it was luck?" Gillian grins.

"Yeah," Sally says.

"No way," Gillian says. "It took years of practice."

Just then the aunts both tilt their heads at the very same time and make a very little noise low in their throats, a kind of click so close to silence that anyone who wasn't listening carefully might mistake it for the faint call of a cricket or the sigh of a mouse beneath the floorboards.