Cecily and Abe had watched from the porch, eating Joanna’s birthday cake and laughing, and ten-year-old Esther had swung beside her the whole time and cheered her on. If she’d been jealous, she hadn’t shown it. 

Usually, their parents were careful to only give their daughters magic that Esther could enjoy, too, the magic of the environment or physical objects: the floating spell had been an anomaly. Perhaps in compensation, the girls had woken just days later in their shared room to find their mother sitting in the chair by Esther’s bed, and their father cross-legged on the rag rug at her feet with a blue cloth-bound book in his hands. 

Joanna recognized the book immediately. It was the book that had brought her parents together, the book Cecily had sold to Abe at an antiquarian expo in Boston a year or so after he and Esther had moved from Mexico to Vermont. It was an oft-repeated story in their family: how Abe’s attention had been caught as much by the pretty Belgian woman manning a booth of used books as by the little blue book she’d priced at only seven dollars, not knowing how its magic hummed in Abe’s head; and how, though Cecily had been drawn to the way Abe’s bushy-eyebrowed intensity contrasted with his easy, roaring laughter, she’d been just as interested by the two-year-old child on his hip, who laughed every time he laughed, throwing back her small head of dark curls in imitation of grown-up good humor.