Odd Hours

she did not know about the supernatural side of my life.
    Now, when she opened the door in answer to my knock, Blossom said, “Ah! Come in, come in. God has sent me a sucker to fleece at cards. Another prayer answered. I’ll have my Mercedes yet.”
    “You won fifty cents the last time. You’ll need to beat me every day for a thousand years.”
    “And won’t that be fun !” Blossom closed the door and smiled at Annamaria. “You remind me of my cousin Melvina—the married Melvina, not the Cousin Melvina who’s an old maid. Of course, Cousin Melvina is crazy, and presumably you are not.”
    I made introductions while Blossom helped Annamaria out of her coat and hung it on a wall peg.
    “Cousin Melvina,” Blossom said, “has a problem with a time traveler. Dear, do you believe time travel is possible?”
    Annamaria said, “Twenty-four hours ago, I was in yesterday.”
    “And now here you are in today. I’ll have to tell my cousin about you.”
    Taking Annamaria by the arm, Blossom walked her toward the back of the cottage.
    “Cousin Melvina says a time traveler from 10,000 A.D . secretly visits her kitchen when she’s sleeping.”
    As I followed them, Annamaria asked, “Why her kitchen?”
    “She suspects they don’t have cake in the far future.”
    The cottage was magically lit by Tiffany-inspired stained-glass lamps and sconces, the shades of which Blossom had crafted herself.
    “Does Melvina have a lot of cake in her kitchen?”
    “She’s a positive fanatic for cake.”
    On a living-room wall hung a colorful and intricately detailed quilt of great beauty. Blossom’s quilts sold in art galleries; a few museums had acquired them.
    “Perhaps her husband is having midnight snacks,” Annamaria said.
    “No. Melvina lives in Florida, and her husband, Norman, he lives in a former Cold War missile silo in Nebraska.”
    From a kitchen cabinet, Blossom took a container of coffee and a package of filters, and gave them to Annamaria.
    As Annamaria began to prepare the brewer, she said, “Why would anyone want to live in an old missile silo?”
    Opening a tin of cookies, Blossom said, “To avoid living with Melvina. She’d go anywhere with him, but not into a missile silo.”
    “Why wouldn’t there be cake in the far future?” Annamaria asked.
    With pastry tongs, Blossom transferred cookies from the tin to a plate. “Melvina says maybe they lost all the best recipes in a world war.”
    “They had a war over cake?”
    “Probably the war was for the usual reasons. Cake would have been collateral damage.”
    “She does sound kind of crazy.”
    “Oh, yes,” said Blossom, “but not in a bad way.”
    Standing in the open door, I said, “Annamaria is in a little trouble—”
    “Pregnancy isn’t trouble,” Blossom said, “it’s a blessing.”
    “Not that. Some bad guys are looking for her.”
    “Bad guys?” Blossom asked Annamaria.
    “Nobody’s inherently bad,” said Annamaria. “It’s all about the choices we make.”
    “And the Deceiver,” said Blossom, “is always there to whisper the wrong choice in your ear. But I believe remorse can lead to redemption.”
    “Some people,” I said, “the only way they get around to remorse is after you break a baseball bat over their head.”
    “When he sobered up, my father regretted what he did to me,” said Blossom.
    “Some people,” I testified, “they lock you in a car trunk with two dead rhesus monkeys, put the car in one of those huge hydraulic crushers, push the SQUISH-IT button, and just laugh. They don’t even know the word regret .”
    “Did you forgive your father?” Annamaria asked.
    “He’s eighty-two,” Blossom said. “I pay his nursing-home bills. But I don’t see him.”
    “Some people,” I said, “they lose their temper and you have to take a gun away from them, and you give them a chance to rethink what they did, and they say they were wrong, they’re remorseful, but then they let you walk into a room where they know there’s a crocodile that hasn’t been fed in a week.”
    Both women gave me the kind of look you usually reserve for a two-headed man walking a blue dog.
    “I’m not saying everyone,” I clarified. “Just some people.”
    To Blossom, Annamaria said, “But you forgave your father.”
    “Yes. A long, long time ago. It wasn’t easy. The reason I don’t see him is because he can’t take it. Seeing me tears him apart. The guilt. It’s too hard on him.”
    Annamaria held out a hand,