Page 31 of Impractical Magic

“Seventeen all over again?”

“Ha, you’re being generous. I think I was acting even younger than that. And listen.” Here she turned to face him, hoping her words came out as sincerely as she intended. “I’m so sorry, Nate. I’m sorry about how I acted. And I’m really sorry about your dad . . . Is he okay?”

“Oh, my dad’s fine.” Nate frowned. “What did your mother tell you?”

“Just that you had to perform some sort of dramatic rescue?”

Nate laughed. “Wow . . . well. That’s not the whole story. She told you about my uncle Viz?”

“Yeah. How’d that even happen? Hundreds of years of only-children and then twins suddenly?”

“Nobody ever admitted anything. But my grandmother may have resented the one-child rule. And she was a witch, so . . . maybe she cheated? In any case, it backfired because my dad was always considered the ‘real’ son. I’m told that everybody treated Viz like he was just this weird, gift-with-purchase kid. Not a bad boy, everybody said, but he just didn’t fit in. So when he turned eighteen, he left. Which meant, of course, that he quickly forgot all about Oak Haven or that he had a family at all. Before he left, he told my dad he wanted to check out Texas, maybe work on a ranch. But that was all anybody knew.”

“I don’t remember you ever mentioning him while we were growing up.”

“Are you kidding?” Nate said, making a face. “Big family secret. But then . . . I don’t know what happened exactly. Dad hit middle age, and he just . . . he got it into his head that he should find his brother. Took several years to track him down, thanks to the Forgetting Spell.”

“Sure. Because non-witches can leave Oak Haven and remember it, but not for very long.”

“Exactly. Growing up in Oak Haven gives people like me and my dad a little resistance to the nonsense trivia . . . but it’s weak. Non-witches like us can keep our memories solid for about three days, and then somewhere on day four, all this trivia starts buzzing around in our heads. Like, you try to remember a phone number, but all you can come up with is the fact that Martina Navratilova won Wimbledon a grand total of twenty times. It gets gradually worse, and by day six? Total amnesia. No recollection of the past at all. But Dad decided the risk was worth it, and he set out looking for Uncle Viz. Texas is a big place—even bigger when you can only search for three days at a time. So it took a while, but he did find him. And Dad started taking these trips out west to visit. Dad tried to convince Viz to come visit Oak Haven, but he wouldn’t. Viz said he’d left for a reason, and even if he didn’t remember what that reason was, he was going to trust himself that it must’ve been a good one.”

Scarlett smiled. “That sounds exactly like something a rancher would say.”

“Absolutely. Anyway, it kind of worked—Dad doing the visits. Then, a few years ago, he was headed home but only made it as far as Atlanta. Then his flight got delayed, and delayed some more, and then canceled. He ran out of time. We went to the airport to pick him up and found he never got on the plane.”

“Oh my God. So . . . what . . . I mean, what happened?”

“Mom worked the witch connections—she knew somebody in Boston who knew someone in a coven in Savannah, I think it was. Just an all-points-magical bulletin, basically, looking for Dad. It turned out, he’d never left the airport. He got confused and missed his flight, and then he just stayed. I flew out to Atlanta to get him—found him sitting in a Macaroni Grill in Terminal 3. He had no idea who I was. That was the worst part. I walked up to him and said, ‘Hey, Dad,’ and it was just—” Nate gestured at his own face “—just blank. Nothing. It’s one thing to be told, oh, Dad has amnesia, whatever. But to have him just look right through me like that?”

“Oh, Nate . . .” Scarlett reached over and squeezed his hand. “I’m so sorry.”

“No, it’s okay, he’s all right now. But what sucked at the time was that my first reaction was to be mad. I was, like, so so mad at him, for a long time. It wasn’t his fault—it’s just that stupid Forgetting Spell. And, of course, I knew that, but . . .” He sighed. “I don’t know. I couldn’t get over that moment when he didn’t know who I was.”

“If he didn’t recognize you, how did you get him to come home?”

“Mom planned for that. She wrote him a letter for me to give to him when I found him. I don’t know what she wrote, but whatever it was, it was enough to convince him that he could trust me.”

“But you say he’s fine now, right?”

“Totally fine. It took a week or so, and Earl Twelve was back to his old self. Me, though . . . Not so much. It’s so stupid because I know he didn’t do anything wrong. But I still dream about that blank expression sometimes.”

Scarlett studied Nate like a stranger—just a young man beside her on the bench, sitting there with his sadness. She felt like she was seeing him for the first time—seeing him as a real person. Not Nate, the surprisingly bangable handyman, or Nate, the over-idealized, never-quite-was boyfriend. Just Nate, a good guy. A good guy and a true friend, who she’d left in the lurch so long ago. “I should’ve been here.”

“Nothing you could have done.” Nate turned slowly, his gaze finally meeting hers. “I thought about getting in touch. I really did, but I couldn’t bring myself to make that call. I mean . . .” He sighed, struggling to find the right words. “When you got so upset at the store today . . . I just wanted to say, Scarlett, be serious. Do you really think I didn’t want to visit you?! Of course I wanted to visit you. Of course I did.” His voice carried a level of frustration that took Scarlett by surprise. “I think about you all the time. About us . . . or about what we might’ve looked like if there had ever been one. But what am I supposed to do, visit you for three days at a stretch? That’s what it would have been—just like my dad and my uncle. Three days, no more. Would that be enough for you? Because it wouldn’t for me.”

“Nate . . .”

As he gazed at her, Scar looked at his lips and suddenly the only thing she could think of was what it might be like to finally, finally kiss them after all these years.

“Scarlett? Were you about to say something?”

“Uh. Yeah. I . . . um.” She turned away, hoping a thought—some thought, any thought—would return to her abruptly empty brain. “Look, I feel shitty about having just walked away from us being friends or whatever.”

“Friends . . . or whatever?” Nate tilted in his head in the sexiest way—he really could be a bastard sometimes.

“Yeah . . .” Scarlett laughed awkwardly. “Uh, that was weird of me to say. I just meant that, uh, friends are extremely important. And old friends are even more so—I mean, there’s a whole song about that, make new friends and keep the old and so on, and I don’t know how long I’m even going to be in Oak Haven, but while I’m here, like, uh—why can’t we be friends?”

Nate grinned. “Why can’t we be friends? That’s a song, too. Very musical conversation we’re having. Okay, friend. Do you mind if I make a request?”