Joanna Jinxed

By Judy Gill

Joanna's jinx is at it again. As a much younger colleague, he was forbidden, but his eyes begged, his hands were warm, and he smelled like man, and in a moment of weak self-indulgence she agreed. Now, the whole town will see their elementary school vice-principal pushing a big belly when school opens, and after Christmas break, a stroller. She will not hamper his excitement over his new position by telling him. Yet. Maybe in time. Then… Oh, god, her jinx was never supposed to harm those she cares for! 

 

Of course, there are alternatives for a forty-three-year-old woman who needs another child like she needs warts on her nose. Should she terminate? No. How about running away with her teenager to…to the Galapagos? No. She couldn't get insulin for Sibyl there. How about the South of France? Tempting, but there's a language barrier. Stay and force her best friend, a nurse practitioner, to help her through this?

 

Maggie wants babies, can't have them. Can she hurt Maggie by letting her joy show? And what about Mike, Joanna's summer lover, who was nowhere near in April? How will he feel if he sees her Cheshire Cat tattoo grinning just above her pelvis, grinning broader and broader?

And that is only the beginning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Champagne Book Group
• Release date: Dec 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781771554527

Judy Gill

Judy Griffith Gill lives on Canada's west coast--the Sunshine Coast of BC--with her husband of (mumblety-five) years. Over those years, they raised two beautiful, successful daughters both of whom are married to fine men and have blessed the Gills with three grandchildren. She is writing less, but enjoying it more, along with summers afloat aboard the cabin cruiser she and her husband own. When not out boating or enjoying dock parties with friends, she grows everything from blueberries to raspberries, interspersed with herbs and plenty of flowers, on her patio. Her oldest daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter live nearby--near enough her granddaughter willingly waters the plants when Judy is afloat.

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Joanna, Jinxed

JUDY GRIFFITH GILL

CHAMPAGNE BOOK GROUP

Joanna, Jinxed

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

Published by Champagne Book Group

2373 NE Evergreen Avenue, Albany OR 97321 U.S.A.

~ * ~

First Edition 2021

eISBN: 978-1-77155-452-7

Copyright © 2021 Judy Griffith Gill All rights reserved.

Cover Art by Melody Pond

Champagne Book Group supports copyright which encourages creativity and diverse voices, creates a rich culture, and promotes free speech. Thank you by complying by not scanning, uploading, and distributing this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher. Your purchase of an authorized electronic edition supports the author’s rights and hard work and allows Champagne Book Group to continue to bring readers fiction at its finest.

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Chapter One

Gramma, you got a baby in your tummy?

My first impulse was to stand abruptly and spill the kid unceremoniously to the floor while sucking in the gut his chubby fingers had prodded. Fortunately, grand-maternal instincts prevailed, and I buried my face and laughter in his cinnamon colored, fresh-from-the-bath scented curls, likely inherited from his father, whoever he might be. My older daughter, Faith, either didn’t know or wouldn’t say. She was a lot like my mother, a so-called free spirit. Read: Totally irresponsible.

No, Eddie. Of course, I don’t. Why would you think so?

You’re fat in the tummy, like Jimmy’s mommy, he said in his surprisingly deep voice.

I was, was I? I looked down. Shit! I was, especially when I was sitting. Jimmy’s mommy was hatching her second baby. I’m a gramma, I said, trying to hide my indignation. Grammas don’t get babies in their tummies.

They just get old and start to get fat. I didn’t tell him, because to my mind, at forty-three, I don’t exactly qualify for old, but was definitely putting on a bit of pork. I’d noticed it but chosen to ignore it. But…if a three-year-old noticed, there was no point in denying it to myself any longer. Then it hit me— Omygod! What if…

Dizzy, I strenuously denied the possibility to myself. But still… what if? No. No freakin’ way! Not even the jinx some bad fairy had put on me at birth, the jinx I’d lived with and which screwed up most of the good things I’d ever wanted would be so cruel, so I pushed the notion aside.

Now, I said to Eddie, do you want me to read the rest of this story, or do you want to go to bed?

Read, Gramma, he said, softly for once.

I read while he nestled close, those chubby fingers still kneading gently the way a cat would at my unfortunate blubbery roll which, in the last week it seemed, begun pooching out whenever I sat down. Eddie’s eyelids drooped. I slowed my reading pace, lowered my voice, and let it dwindle to nothing. He slept. I sat silent, grousing to myself.

Time for the gym again. Dammit, I hated the gym, hated the loud intrusive music, hated all those svelte twenty-two-year-old bodies in their vari-colored Spandex and the fact they never broke a sweat and I did. Buckets of it.

My mother, Laura MacPherson, who prefers to be known as Moonflower Meadow, strolled into the living room, wandered over, glanced at Eddie and the book I’d been reading to him. She issued a disdainful pffft and plopped her plumpness onto the overstuffed chair she favored. She stuffed it completely. She put her grubby bare feet on the ottoman I was using, shoved my feet aside, and leaned back, reaching into her pocket for, I thought, her ever-present peanuts. Instead, she produced a fat doobie, flicked her Bic and lit up, filling the room with the reek of pot. Talk about jinxed. Like I said, from birth right on up, my mother was the biggest jinx of all.

Laura! I whispered sharply, glancing down at Eddie’s closed lids and long lashes. Get outside with your damned joint! What are you, crazy? Eddie’s here in case you didn’t notice.

She pulled the hem of her flowered cotton skirt from her ankles to midway up her thighs, fanning her chubby legs with a convenient magazine, looking dreamily at the ceiling fan as it slowly circled, creak, creak, creak. WD-40 time, I thought, reflecting on the fact it would be impossible for me to run my household without WD-40 and a good sturdy claw-hammer.

I noticed. Laura sighed. When isn’t he here? Her voice held a weariness I seldom noticed in my normally vivacious mother.

"When he’s in daycare, which he is from nine every morning until one of us picks him up. But it is now getting on toward nine in the evening, so… Out!" I pointed at the French doors leading to the back porch, wondering why it had to be a daily task to remind Laura of house rules. Rules had never been of any great importance to her.

She’d continued her hippie ways long after most sensible hippies were fading into memory or turning into CEOs, church-going citizens, and even, horror of horrors, cookie-baking grandmothers. Hah! If Laura ever baked cookies, they’d be so laced with dried up THC-laden leaves I wouldn’t let either Eddie or Sibyl near them. Though it was probably already too late for Sibyl. The girl was becoming more of a handful every day. But at least she hadn’t, like her big sister, run away from home. Yet. I suppose Faith could be forgiven, considering the turmoil there’d been in her life—our lives—a bit more than six years ago when she was fourteen and had fled. I’d have run away from home as well except I still had an eight-and-a half-year-old child at home—and my then-husband, George, had been the one who got to run away.

Laura heaved herself out of her chair, elbowed open the French doors and stepped out. Looking as defiant as a twelve-year-old, she, took a deep drag, held the smoke, then puffed it into the room. With a toss of her hair, she popped the glowing top off her joint. It fell into a tall wide terracotta urn where big purple irises with plum-colored throats rose up above a tangle of variegated ivy even I couldn’t kill. The rest of it, she slid into the pocket of her skirt.

Why so crabby lately? she asked, returning, letting a long, thin trickle of smoke slide out of her nose. You’ve been acting like you’ve had PMS for the past month or so.

How can I have PMS when even my body doesn’t know when it’s going to have a period? Since the onset of menses my cycle had been about as predictable as earthquakes, which probably explained why I had one twenty-year-old daughter and one fifteen-year-old, with nothing in between, despite never using birth-control. Possibly George’s infrequent interest in me could be blamed.

Our lackluster sex life had left me feeling inadequate and on edge for years. Sometimes, though, when the girls were younger, and I was constantly tired from working full time at one job, part-time at another, in addition to running a household, I’d considered it a blessing. Plenty of friends complained about things as mundane as seeing them in the act of frying pork chops or scrubbing floors made their husbands horny.

Funny, though, since the divorce, my own libido had picked up considerably, tough as it was for a teacher, more recently the vice-principal of the only elementary school in a very small town, to get laid and not incur gossip. Hell, Three Rock Cove thrived on gossip. It was the best entertainment, especially when the cable station got blown off the hill. It pretty much made the winter-time, tourist-free boredom bearable to some.

Me, I loved it. The boredom, not the gossip. I’d lived with plenty of the latter thanks to George Hansacker, when it all came out. I still asked myself almost daily why the hell he’d blabbed, been so open with what I considered our own, personal family business. I can’t recall the number of times I thanked whatever powers may be for my foresight in retaining my own name, Joanna MacPherson.

Well, if it’s not PMS, Laura said, maybe it’s menopause.

Hey! I’m a good ten years from menopause!

Pre-menopause, then. Go to the health food store in Squally Bay and get yourself some Oil of Evening Primrose.

Yeah, sure, first thing next century. I pursed my lips for a moment then sneered at her. "Well, the next century is far away, and I’ll not only be well past peri-menopause, menopause, and meno-damn-well stop once and for all, but long in my grave, I figure I can conveniently forget about your ‘natural’ remedies. Remember what happened to me when you told me to go buy those capsules made from special oregano leaves, grown only on a certain pesticide free mountain-top in Italy or Spain or France or somewhere else in Europe? Or was it the other thing, because you said my memory was getting bad? Hives, both times, hives as big as quarters all over my body, thanks to your kind advice. Health food! I scoffed. Witchdoctor stuff. Poison."

They’re natural substances, fruit of the earth.

So are arsenic and asbestos, I said.

After a moment, as Laura took a fresh bag of peanuts from her skirt pocket, tore it open with her teeth and dumped a fair portion of it into her mouth, I added, And cholesterol, which is produced in our own human bodies. I had no idea of the cholesterol content of peanuts but was pretty sure Laura didn’t either. It didn’t faze her one bit. She chomped.

Because she smoked so much pot, she had the munchies all the time. She gave up the argument, though, her sulky expression telling me she knew when she was beat—at least on the score of whether natural was necessarily good. It wasn’t often I won, so I savored the victory with a sweet smile. It faded almost as it was born because she swallowed and spoke.

The kid’s asleep, she said, taking the stubbed-out roach from her pocket and caressing it like a fat man cherishing a forbidden cigar—and considering smoking it anyway— so what does it matter what I do in front of him?

Eddie opened his eyes and popped to a sitting position on my lap, beamed the welcoming smile he had for everyone, even those who either barely tolerated him or ignored him. Well, in truth, Laura had so-far cornered the category. Moo-Cow! he said, happy to see her despite her studied indifference to him..

Laura’s eyes flared. Don’t call me Moo-Cow, you little bastard, she muttered, fortunately under her breath. Eddie couldn’t lip-read, but I could and glared at her while trying not to grin. She switched her own glare from Eddie to me. And don’t you dare laugh!

My daughters and I had gone into screaming fits of hysterical laughter when Eddie started talking and dubbed Laura Moo-Cow because he couldn’t say Moonflower, laughter she construed as encouraging the kid. I didn’t think so, but hey, I admit to not discouraging him, either. It was so much fun to watch my mother fume and it was good for my girls and me to have something to giggle about together. About all we have in common is blood. I guess blood wasn’t enough. Or maybe it was the entire problem.

It’s your own fault, Moonflower, I said. If you didn’t insist on him calling him by your chosen name, he might call you something sweet like Nanna or Gee-Gee.

Little bastard ever does, he’ll only do it once.

I stiffened. Your great-grandson’s name is Eddie, and don’t you call him anything else, I said through gritted teeth. I won’t have the word used in this house.

While it might technically be true, bastard as applied to Eddie, was not a term I countenanced, even from my mother. Especially from my mother, who was no one to call anybody a bastard which is what she’d made me. I’d grown up without a father, without any knowledge of who or where he might be. Oh, I got the info later, when it was past time to do me any good. Small towns can be cruel to fatherless kids and I probably knew the meaning of illegitimate before I could spell cat.

Gramma mad? Moo-Cow mad? Eddie asked, looking worried.

Shh… go back to sleep, honey. No one’s mad. I rocked him until his lids fell shut again.

Laura tossed another handful of peanuts into her mouth and crunched noisily. Well, he is one, isn’t he? Sometimes pot made her mellow. Sometimes it made her argumentative. Gee, Jo, guess which one it is tonight?

God, it was like having another teenager in the house. I’d raised one—who ran away at fourteen, got pregnant at sixteen, became a mother at seventeen, and came home. I was trying my damnedest to guide my second through the troublesome years, felt I was failing miserably, and I still had to deal with a zoned-out mother? Sometimes life just plain stunk. I’d always suspected I was jinxed but had become certain of it when George dropped his bombshell and the court made me pay spousal support.

It was my turn to sigh. Laura, I’m tired, Go away. Please!

Laura apparently agreed about the quality of life. She huffed. I can’t talk. I can’t cuss. I can’t smoke in my own home and all because of Faith’s kid. My life hasn’t been the same since he came along.

May I remind you he came to this house before you did?

I’m still his senior and should be given some privileges, if nothing else.

You have the privilege of leaving anytime you want, I said. And if you stay, you can talk all you want. You can cuss out of his hearing and smoke outside. If I recall, I never let you toke up in front of my kids, either, when they were children. Now they were no longer classified as such, there wasn’t a lot I could do about it, since I couldn’t be home all day.

Looking very much like Sibyl, Laura pouted and pulled her orange Bic out again. What if I want to smoke here? This is my favorite chair.

The smell of the chair had long ago told me she smoked there when I wasn’t around, but just then, I was definitely around so I warned her with a look. Don’t try it, Laura. It’s bad for Eddie. He breathes it in, sleeping or waking. It is not permitted, I added in my best vice-principal voice.

As usual, it had no effect on Laura. Funny. It worked fine on kids. Even seventh-graders. Sometimes. The other hat I wore at school, guidance counselor, I’d long ago learned to keep in my locker—never bring it home.

Laura hated to be understood. She called it humored. I didn’t bother trying any more. Neither worked. The fact was, I didn’t like my mother any more than she liked me. I tolerated her because, hmm. I’m not sure why. She tolerated me because she liked having a place to live and someone else to pay the bills.

So? she asked. Didn’t you breathe it in all your life? What harm did it do you? Chill, Swansdown.

My flash of temper brought me to my feet. Do. Not. Call. Me. Swansdown. I took a threatening pace closer to Laura, though my only choice of weapon would have been thirty-seven pounds of sleeping child I’d either have to throw at my mother or hold by his ankles and use as a cudgel. I shuddered at the thought. Eddie was the one person who never made my life suck. He made it better in every way.

Why not? It’s your name.

It is not. I caught myself on the verge of tossing my head to flick my hair over my shoulder and resisted. After all, I was a mature adult and my hair wasn’t long enough to flick. "I had my name legally changed, which is more than you did, Moonflower, whose legal name is Laura. I didn’t want to be named after a bag of cake-and-pastry flour."

I didn’t name you after flour! Her lower lip trembled. Laura’s feelings were easily hurt. It was the lovely feather from the comforter while I was birthing you. When the midwife snatched the corner of it out of my mouth, feathers flew. There was one floating over me like in the opening scene of Forrest Gump. It was an omen.

You were probably so high when you birthed me you don’t remember a damned thing. Besides, I think it was a pigeon feather floating around Forrest’s head, and since I was born before the movie ever hit the screens, you’re blowing smoke out your— I dragged in a deep breath, found it laden with the fumes emanating from either the chair or my mother’s clothing or both, and backed up again to give myself and Eddie cleaner air.

Laura never seemed to see the contradiction between what she loudly and vehemently demanded governments provide with regards to clean air and what she did to her own personal environment and her family’s.

Whether it was the whiff of left-over smoke or just plain lack of interest, the fight went out of me and I laughed as I sat down again. I suppose I should be glad you didn’t name me Goosedown, or even worse, Chicken Feather. I pretty much doubt the commune had anything like swansdown in its bedding.

Laura sniffed. You’re mocking me. You never wanted anything I wanted for you. A beautiful, unique name, a pristine, peaceful, righteous world where everyone loves everyone else and there’s no war, no strife, no cruelty.

A tear rolled down one pink porcelain cheek and dripped off a dainty pointed chin—only to get lost in the folds of the three other chins below it. Despite the paunch I appeared to be developing, I was glad I’d inherited my father’s lanky body instead of my mother’s short voluptuous one. The paunch I could diet and exercise away. And would.

Once, my mother had been as trim as those twenty-two-year-olds in Spandex, but the years and the munchies and lack of exercise—especially in the two-and-a-half years since she’d moved in permanently with me, the girls, and Eddie—had added a good sixty pounds.

Why do you have to be so…difficult, Swanny? Laura complained. So…different?

Me, different? At least my grandchild calls me Gramma. It’s his great-grandmother he calls Moo-Cow because he can’t get his tongue around ‘Moonflower.’

"Fifty-seven is far too young to be anyone’s great-grandmother, whatever he calls me. I didn’t even want to be a grandmother, but did you listen to me? No. You made me one, and you’ve gone and turned me, a young, vital woman in my prime, into a great-grandmother! You’re just plain unfair to me."

She was so good at channeling a nine-year-old screeching, No fair! It was my turn! I smirked, nastily I’m sure. "Sometimes life is unfair, Moo-Cow, and may I remind you, I did not make you a great-grandmother. Faith did. And may I further remind you, you’re sixty now, nearly sixty-one. You were just about to turn fifty-eight when Eddie was born. He’s three. I’m forty-three—"

And beginning to act eighty-three, Laura interrupted. As well as look it, what with all those ugly frown lines. Smile more often and your face won’t look so haggard.

I laughed again. Ah, yes, way to go, Moo-Cow. Insults are a fine thing to help promote peace and goodwill. If I look haggard, it’s because the school year is almost over and I’m tired. Maybe if my ‘young, vital’ mother, a ‘woman in her prime’ would get a job, pull her own not inconsiderable weight, do her fair share of cooking and housework, I wouldn’t be so worn out all the time.

Snot, said Laura, AKA Moonflower, AKA Moo-Cow. If you weren’t so house-proud, you wouldn’t worry about keeping this mausoleum dust free with gleaming floors and windows. Tidy, tidy, tidy. Boring, boring, boring, she chanted, waving a hand at the neat bookshelves and the toy box in the corner, where Eddie had to toss all his playthings before he got a bedtime story.

I like tidy. Remember? I grew up in what amounted to a slum. My girls and my grandson will not. I leaned over and slid Eddie’s book onto a low shelf at the end of the sofa.

If you care so much about how your grandson grows up, you wouldn’t be reading him trash like a talking rabbit, she said, you’re giving him the entirely wrong outlook on the world.

"Okay, okay, tomorrow I’ll read him The Paper Bag Princess." It was the one and only gift Laura had bought for her great-grandchild since his birth, not because she adored him and wanted to shower him with largesse, but because she thought it would be a good introduction to her brand of feminism. I suspect she shoplifted it somewhere.

Though I tell you, I went on, no three-year-old boy is going to get it that Ronald is an arrogant, sexist jerk. Eddie likes the book because it has a dragon in it. A talking dragon.

He’ll get it eventually. But only if you and his mother raise him properly, raise him to see the future as it could be, as it should be, as it must be, for the good of humanity, for the good of the earth. Peace, health, happiness, and freedom. All those things I want for you, for Faith and Sibyl, for the poor bas—for Eddie, there. Jesus! Not only is this house boring, the way you live, the way you want me to live, is worse than boring.

Exhaustion swept over me in a huge tide. I’d been hearing this lecture in its many different varieties all my adult life. I yawned. Oh, for Christ’s sake, Laura, go hug a tree. I really wanted to tell her to go fuck a duck but if I did, for sure Eddie, sleeping or not, would hear and start repeating the rhyme in his biggest voice at the most awkward moment he could find.

I went on, If you’re bored here, maybe you could go out into the woods and write a song, or go play your guitar in the park, or…or something. I fast ran out of suggestions. The only thing I want right now is some peace in my own home. To hell with the rest of the world.

Laura rose, making a big deal out of wiping tears from her face with one of the multiple scarves with which she festooned herself, stumbled over the ottoman and headed outside, trailing her floaty drapings and her acrid miasma behind. She sniffed again, rubbing the tip of her nose with the back of her hand, making me wonder if she was doing coke. Please, not heavy drugs!

No. A second later, I scoffed at myself. Of course, she wasn’t doing coke. Drugs cost money, and she had only a small disposable income, mainly because of her refusal to do any kind of meaningful work to top up her meager bank account. When she turned sixty, she learned because she’d never held a job, just raised a child which was an outright exaggeration, she was entitled to only a small pension from the Federal government.

I didn’t personally think she was entitled to it because she’d had no involvement in raising me, beyond labor and birth. She’d have to wait for another five years for her Old Age Security. Right. She’d have to wait. Meaning, I’d have to wait.

Oh, hell, I shouldn’t be so bitchy. Laura had done the best she could, considering she’d been only a kid herself when she was saddled with a child—me. Maybe I should give her more credit for…for something. I just wished she’d give me some of the credit I longed for.

She received a slightly larger disability pension because she’d managed to convince someone in authority she had a bad back. Of course, her sacroiliac never stopped her climbing onto the bandstand in the park and bopping around with her guitar. She never had trouble joining whatever group might be in town on summer weekends and happily raked in her share of the tips tossed into the collection bucket.

The wanna-be rock star kids appeared to love the aging hippie, to welcome her, but I worried about them maybe laughing behind her back at the old lady who wore funny clothes and sang like Joan Baez. I doubted any of them had ever heard of Joan, but still, none of them ever told her to get off their stage. Even Sibyl loved having a grandmother who was so cool. Go figure. Must be the generation gap. And I, being the generation sandwiched into the gap, felt more and more squashed every day.

Anyway, Laura said, poking her head back in the door, once more defiantly blowing a stream of smoke directly into the room, "it’s our house. The will said you had to give me a home as long as I wanted it. Remember?"

"Yes. I do remember. Did I mention the property taxes are coming due on our house? Be nice if you anted up a bit of cash to help with the expense."

Taxes are immoral.

Not paying them is illegal.

I don’t have any money.

Oh? Your pension all gone? She’d be hitting me up for a loan any day now—a loan she never repaid.

Her pensions weren’t huge, but she lived rent free, I provided all her meals, and the thrift store was the only place she could count on for the kind of wardrobe she chose. Her current boyfriend kept her supplied with weed from his well-hidden plantation back in the woods. I really had no idea what she did with her stipend. Probably bought lottery tickets or supported one of the many save some kind of rodent groups.

The damn government doesn’t pay enough to keep a flea. You could add to it, give me an allowance, if you weren’t so cheap.

I’m not cheap, Laura. I’m frugal. With good reasons.

Hah! she said with a toss of her long, straight hair.

She ironed it. Honest to Pete, I kid you not, she ironed her hair. Never ironed anything else, of course, but her hair, yup. It used to be dark but was now shot through with silver. I must confess, it did look pretty in the sunlight as she floated through town, smiling and waving at everyone.

He left you well off enough, she went on, and if it hadn’t been for his special regard for me, you wouldn’t have this big old house to complain about taxes on.

Laura drifted away, toward the backyard and out of sight, probably heading for the hammock strung between a maple and a copper beech. I curled one leg up under myself, resting Eddie’s head and shoulders on it. I really should take him up to bed. He was getting heavy enough to make my back ache, but I loved cuddling him. It was a long time since Sibyl had been cuddly. Now, all she did, like her grandmother, was prickle and gripe.

He left you well off enough. I wished! In a court of law, the he in question would be called, I imagine, my putative father, though I looked enough like his mother to have been cast from the same mold. He must have had some kind of guilt-complex toward Laura. Maybe because he’d been slumming and knocked up a sixteen-year-old hippie-girl who’d claimed to be twenty. If it ever came out, it would have devastated his rich family who’d built this house as a summer place.

By the time he learned about my existence, his career in politics was in full swing. Or maybe the guilt was aimed at me, the long unknown child of his youth, because it was to me he’d willed his estate in a document dated the year I met him at a school fund-raiser. That was the first and only time I ever saw him in person, though he never let on what he was to me. Maybe he wasn’t sure then. But he certainly suspected.

Then, I was married and the mother of one child with another on the way. I knew nothing about my father or his estate until he died four and a half years ago, about the time I was beginning