What He's Been Missing

“Let she go now.” She poked at the young woman with the feather earrings. “She be right now. Right, baybee?” She looked back at me.

The woman let go and I sat up on what was just a long oak table with four uneven legs. Candle wax in all colors was smeared beneath me. It was hard, though, and looked like it had been there for some time. In fact, everything around me seemed old and hard and that it had been there for some time. There was a wall lined with shelves filled with glass containers and old coffee cans, jars, and some books. Dust was on every shelf. On everything. An old woodburning stove with two boiling pots that looked more like something out of a movie about New Orleans than something you’d actually see there were on the lit eyes. The only window in the room, a thirsty square that was kissed with years of dirt and grime, was cracked behind the stove. A single light bulb with a string hung above me, but it wasn’t on and giving light. The light in the room came from the candles on the other table beside me.

“There,” Tante Heru said, after watching me gather my surroundings. “Now ya is good. Now ya kin talk to ya Tante Heru.”

“Talk?” I repeated.

“Wha ya want? Why ya come to dis place?”

“I love him. But he doesn’t love me,” I said. “He’s marrying someone else!”

“Ya wan Tante Heru to stop de wedding?” Tante Heru pointed her wrinkled and knotted index finger to something on one of the shelves and Kete ran to get it.

“No,” I said. “Not that.”

Kete stopped.

“Wha ya wan?”

“I want love. Real love. I want someone who wants to marry me. Not the man who wants to marry her,” I said. “I want what I’ve been missing: the man of my dreams.”

Tante Heru pointed in a whole different direction at a potted plant that was sitting on the windowsill behind the sink.

Kete went to the plant and there was noise that sounded like a garbage can falling over outside the window. Kete quickly opened what was left of a raggedy and stained old curtain over the broken window and cursed in French at whatever made the noise.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I didn’t see,” Kete said. “Probably just some schoolkids. They be trying to spy on Tante Heru.” She said something in French and took a few sprigs from the plant. Handed them to Tante Heru.

“Ya come to auntie in pain, baybee,” Tante Heru said, tossing the sprigs into one of the pots on the stove. “Ya come fa ya love. I kin give it to ya.”

“Give it to me? From that pot?”

Kete put her hand out to me. “Fifty dollars. We take cash or charge. No checks.”

I almost laughed. But they both looked so serious.

“You’re saying you can give me true love for fifty dollars?”

“You choose from three wishes. One ta make ’im come in de morning, two ta make ’im appear jes when ya need ’im, three ta make ’im go away,” Tante Heru said.

“Why would I want him to go away if he’s my true love?”

“Baybee, true love nah always wh

a ya reckon it be,” she said. “Sometimes wha da trut is can take ya breath. Right?”

I looked around the room.

“Whatever,” I said, reaching into my pocket for a credit card. “If it works, it works. If not . . .”

Kete took the card and scanned it through a little machine tucked on the side of one of the shelves.

Tante Heru was standing over the boiling water chanting in some language that didn’t sound like French.

When the credit card cleared and Kete brought it back to me, Tante Heru, with her face sweaty with the steam from the pot, came back to me.

“Speak ya love, baybee. Speak it loud,” she ordered.