June’s friends were familiar with her regular bouts of insomnia, but she told them that last night was especially bad. After giving up on sleep, she’d gone out for a long walk, accompanied by the troop of cats that were always present during her nocturnal strolls. She’d walked until she felt tired, but when she finally crawled into bed, she’d been too haunted by the pain she’d seen in Bren’s eyes to rest.
Nora understood. As tired as she’d been when she went to bed, she couldn’t quiet her mind. She kept thinking about Bren. Finally, she’d drifted off, but her sleep had been fragmented and she woke up with a fuzzy head and a dry mouth.
“Why would she be rude to people trying to help her?” Hester asked. “If she’d been drunk, her behavior would make more sense.”
Nora said that she hadn’t smelled alcohol on Bren’s breath.
“But she might have been using,” June said. Her only son was an addict, which meant she recognized the signs. “It was too dark for me to see her pupils, but the vomiting and irrational anger make it a possibility.”
Estella held up a finger. “Wait. If Bren’s the muffin maker, could she have sampled certain ingredients too many times?”
“She could chug a gallon of CBD oil and still pilot a rocket,” Sheldon said testily. “CBD and THC both come from the cannabis plant, but only THC can get you high. I hope Celeste has lots of signage or she’ll go blue in the face explaining this to people.”
June picked up the wine bottle and topped off everyone’s glasses. She skipped Nora’s, because she was drinking Perrier instead. Settling back in her chair, she said, “I’ve heard positive things about CBD. Plenty of lodge guests have inflammation, autoimmune disorders, or both. The mineral waters ease their discomfort for a little while, but they can’t take the water home with them. They have to rely on CBD pills and salves for pain relief.”
Sheldon’s face darkened. “It’s either that or an opioid addiction. I came close, and let me tell you, it’s hard to pull back.” He took a fortifying sip of wine. “The problem with chronic pain is the chronic part. The damn thing won’t go away. You can eat the right food, meditate, and all the other bullshit the professionals tell you to do, but none of it works. You hurt. You can’t work. You can’t go out to dinner. You can’t sit in a movie theater. You can’t drive a car. And you can’t find a treatment that gives you your life back.”
“It’s a barrel of laughs sharing a house with this man,” June said.
“You love having me there. It keeps all your church friends guessing.” Sheldon gave June a one-armed hug. “You and me. Two boomers shacking up. Watching TV together. Sitting on the porch and talking. You know those ladies don’t believe you when you tell them that I’m an asexual. You know they think I’m ravishing you every night.”
June grunted. “Please. This is my sixth decade on this earth. The only things that can seduce me are a comfy chair, a good bottle of wine, and a movie starring Denzel Washington.” She pointed at the surrounding shelves. “And books. Not all of them. To me, getting lucky is reading something so magical that I’m put under that book’s spell. That book owns me. I can’t think about anything else until I finish it. And I can’t think about anything else for days afterward. And the next book I read is doomed. It can’t take the place of the magic book. But I keep reading. I keep reading because I know that feeling will come along again.”
“You should put that on a throw pillow,” Estella said.
“If I could make it fit, I would.” Nora smiled at June. “I loved every word you just said. That’s how I want people to feel when they see our window display. I want them to fall under a book spell.”
Hester jumped up. “Put on some music, Nora. Let’s make some magic.”
Later, while Sheldon, Estella, and Hester hung a backdrop of shimmery midnight blue, June and Nora transformed a pair of faceless, genderless, poseable mannequins into women of power.
June’s woman wore a loose red skirt woven with filaments of gold, a beaded leather belt, a white peasant blouse, and a shell necklace. A headscarf covered part of her long, black wig.
“She’s rocking the Native American, African, and Romany look,” she said, standing back to admire her work.
Nora’s mannequin wore the black and red skirt of a flamenco dancer and a T-shirt embroidered with an evil eye inside the hamsa hand of protection. She had Buddhist prayer beads around her wrist and a Celtic knot tattoo on her bicep. A gold laurel wreath crowned her wig of curly brown hair. “Middle Eastern meets Celtic meets Spanish meets Greco-Roman.”