“But I have muffins!” she shouted, causing him to jump back as the flour wafted into the air around them. Proof of her muffin-hood. “Muffins will be magically appearing at any moment, delivered by a Tall God and a Warrior Princess.” She crowed triumphantly. “I believe I can smell them already!”
“I don’t think I’m supposed to…” Rob said.
“Barter, Rob. It’s called barter! It’s a tried and true tradition of trade.”
Here, Lucy paused. The genetic mutation of alliteration once again rearing its ugly head. Mumsy.
Mumsy who called the cops.
Angry at Mumsy.
Lucy frowned and Rob shrugged and suddenly Sven was striding toward her across the Feed and Seed floor with legs like tree trunks and giant Nordic hands that wrapped themselves around Lucy’s waist and lifted her until her head almost touched the watering cans hanging from the ceiling. They bonged softly and Lucy wished that he would just gently hang her amid the merry watering cans, like a scarecrow, where she would live happily ever after.
“Oh, is Lucy! Mine friend!” Sven lowered her to the ground and tousled her hair. More flour drifted. “Und vere is Dorian? Dorian zee handsome policeman with the raunchy novels?”
Lucy loved that Sven used the words Dorian and raunchy in the same sentence. “He’s fine. He’s making muffins with Ida.”
Sven nodded as if the making of muffins with Ida would cure half the world’s troubles. “He is zee charmer, that is for certain. If you are not careful, he will be sweeping you off your feets before you can say ‘Varsågod!’”
“Heaven forbid.” Lucy giggled. It felt good to giggle. “Not ‘Varsågod’.”
“Oh yes, most definitely,” Sven’s eyes were glacial pools. How was that shade of blue even possible?
She didn’t notice Ruby appear behind Sven until he turned and inhaled her friend’s face with a giant Viking kiss.
“Jealous,” Lucy managed.
“Tell me about it,” agreed Rob.
“Oh,” Lucy looked at Rob again from a different angle. “Sven?”
Rob shrugged. “Definitely.”
“I feel your pain,” Lucy raised her hand and she and Rob did a fist bump over the counter. He handed her a string of licorice and they both gazed at the spectacle of manhood and romance blossoming before them.
Ruby came up for air, pushing away from Sven’s embrace. “Sven is mine, both of you, so you’re going to have to stay single for at least one more day.”
“Au contraire,” Lucy bobbled her head at Ruby, like a know-it-all muppet.
“Indeed?” Ruby asked. Lucy decided to ignore the look of concern that flitted across Ruby’s face, knowing with certainty that her worry was more for Dorian than it was for Lucy. Lucy never doubted Ruby’s genuine friendship and love for her… but Ruby knew that any man that came close enough to snogging Lucy was probably going to end up disappointed, crushed, ruined or dead. Not a very romantic list.
Lucy braced herself against the counter, swinging her licorice with insouciance. “I think Ole Lazy Eye has a thing for me… and my goat. Wink wink.”
“Lucy, his name is Dorian, and it’s really not a good idea to be mocking a man of the law. Not when you’re living with a goat and digging holes in your backyard with your bare hands. Some would interpret that as potentially criminal behavior.”
“Yeah… like my Mother.” Lucy chomped her licorice. “Did you know, Mumsy called the cops…”
“I heard.”
“I didn’t,” said Rob, eagerly leaning forward to hear of someone else’s brush with the law. Lucy rolled her eyes.
The cowbell above the door announced the arrival of Dorian and Ida. Goat slipped in behind them and trotted immediately toward the back of the store. Ida beamed, holding a tray of blackened muffins which smoked gently as she set them down on the counter. The smell of burnt sugar and dog hair made every nose wrinkle in unison. Lucy smiled at Dorian as he shrugged and nudged her with his elbow.
Ida grinned and plucked a blackened and wizzened blob off the top of one of muffins. She popped it in her mouth. “Burnt raisins are the best!”
“I think there’s a secret to the oven we haven’t discovered yet,” Dorian stroked his chin thoughtfully.
“Lucy… Rosalee, Irenia and Belinda are waiting in the café.” Ruby waved Lucy toward the back of the store, smiled at Dorian, dusted flour off Ida’s nose and squeezed Sven’s bicep all at the same time.
“Ugh,” Lucy moaned. “The HAWC. Shall I have no peace? Shall I have no rest?”
Ruby rolled her eyes and put her hands on her hips. Mumsy called the cops when Lucy misbehaved. Ruby just had to glower. Lucy grabbed the tray of smouldering muffins off the counter and sighed. “I bear the weight of the world’s sorrows,” she muttered under her breath.
“I doubt it’s all the world’s sorrows, ya know,” Rob shrugged again. Rob did a lot of shrugging, but then again, he was a young man with a probation officer so maybe he had some things to shrug about.
“I must face the music,” Lucy said, squaring her shoulders as if she were about to walk the plank. “My firing squad awaits.”
“Just be honest with them,” Ruby said. “And know that we all have faith in you.”
“Really?” Lucy turned to look at her friends through the veil of muffin smoke wafting across her vision. She was pretty sure that only Ida had a ‘you can do anything’ look on her face, but Ida also wasn’t averse to having naps with Goat, so.
Lucy coughed once. Sighed twice. And turned to enter the café.
✽✽✽
The three stalwart representatives of the Heartswell Association of Women who Care were sitting around a table close to the window, overlooking the river. They seemed to be in the middle of devouring the pastry offerings of a small country when Lucy delicately placed a black muffin in the middle of the table and curtsied in greeting.
There was a moment of silence, as ritualistic moments often require, as the three observed the muffin, and then Lucy, and then the muffin again. There was a collective inhale which could only signal the beginning of an oration on the inadequacies of said muffin offering, so Lucy leapt in with both feet.
“Ida and I have, like, totally nailed the bakery phase of the café planning and now we’re moving on to interpret and diagnose the intricacies of oven operation.” When in doubt, use big words and use them quickly. “I feel confident that our upcoming investigations of both convection and thermodynamics will result in a far superior product…”
“One moment, dear.”
One of the HAWC ladies interrupted her, which was good since she had the word ‘geothermal infusion’ on the tip of her tongue but, like a monkey with a typewriter, she didn’t really know how to use it.
“One moment dear,” the woman repeated. Lucy was fairly sure it was Irenia. In plum. But it could have been Belinda. “We have to go through the formal process of holding a meeting. It’s a matter of principle. We wouldn’t want to be remiss in our dedication to our task, now would we?”
Here Irenia, who might be Belinda, tittered in such a way that Lucy felt certain that being remiss was both not humorous and not tolerated.
“Of course. Um. Sure. I am all about being remiss,” she smiled winningly. She definitely did not feel like she was winning. She tried to ignore the communal sigh which rose and fell among the HAWC committee.
“You start, Belinda,” said mint green, gesturing expansively toward the woman to her right dressed in deep plum, like a bruise.
“Aha! So, you’re Belinda!” Lucy blurted. Belinda. In plum.
“What?” Belinda’s eyebrows, which were drawn above her eyes in very thin, very severe lines, disappeared under her perm.
“Nothing… Belinda.” Lucy smiled. Look who’s winning now.
“Thank you, Irenia,” Belinda gathered herself.
“Aha!” crowed Lucy. Irenia. Mint green.
“What on earth is wrong?” Fuchsia straightened her skirt against her thighs,
looking surprisingly guilty.
“Nothing… Rosalee!” Lucy triumphantly pointed at fuchsia, beaming in her victory. Let them try to take me down, she thought.
Not today, ladies. Not. Today.
Flush with triumph, Lucy decided the meeting should begin. “Besides the Mastering of the Muffins, I have also started the Community Garden.”
She sat back in her chair, running each of the ladies’ names through her fingers like the beads of a rosary and feeling quite chuffed with herself. All this, she thought, and I haven’t even had a drink yet today.
With the finality of the gates of Heaven descending upon the downtrodden, Lucy was smoted with the realization… I haven’t had a drink yet today. In her confusion and the sudden bloom of sweat under her hair, she realized that smoted wasn’t a word. As her heart rate escalated, she realized that she had no access to liquor anywhere between here and the second-floor bathroom of the School. As she swallowed hard against the lump of panic moving through her chest she realized that Belinda… Rosalee… Irenia… was speaking…
“All in favor?”
“Aye,” all three chimed in unison.
“Wait,” Lucy felt she was missing something important.
“New business,” said Irenia, ignoring her. “Lucy’s Community Garden.”
“Oh yeah, the garden. There’s not…”
“It’s almost May, dear… you should have those potatoes in the ground by the end of May.” Mint green. Irenia. Green like garden.
“Um…Potatoes?”
“Well now, Irenia,” Belinda added her voice to the firing squad. “She might have some success with leafy greens. Lettuces, and maybe herbs. It might be a bit much to leap to tubers right out of the blue.”
Tubers. Lucy snorted a little and tried to disguise it behind a sneeze.
“I agree to disagree, Belinda dear,” Irenia wouldn’t go down without a fight. Lucy gripped the sides of her chair with both hands and counted backwards from one hundred. How could she have not at least thought to bring a flask?
Irenia kept talking, a low murmur against Lucy’s sudden, irrational raging thirst.
“But we are hoping to supply garden produce beyond just July and August. I think we can all agree…” Irenia indicated the world at large. Lucy nodded vigorously. “We can all agree that tubers and root vegetables really are… what do you young people say… the bomb?” Irenia tittered merrily. A church mouse perched on a wheel of cheese.
Lucy guffawed.
All three HAWC ladies turned as one to stare at her.
Lucy took a deep gulping breath and was about to announce that unless one of them had a quart hidden in their voluminous purses, this meeting was done, thank you very much… when she caught sight of Dorian out of the corner of her eye.
Dorian, with his hand on Ida’s shoulder, who was holding Goat on a very short tether, standing just outside the window talking to Sven. Ida, her eyes shadowed with the dark circles that were her trademark. Ida, with her hand stroking Goat gently and smiling like this was simply The. Best. Day. Ever. Ida with the drunk mother and dirty fingernails and the terrible baking skills.
“Fuck,” Lucy breathed, releasing her chair and bracing her head with both hands.
“I beg your pardon…” Rosalee gasped.
“What was that you were saying?” breathed Lucy. She drew what she hoped was a deep cleansing breath. She had heard about cleansing breaths and she thought she could totally be all about cleansing breaths, if she could only have a drink after each one. “…about Leafy Greens?”
There was a pause. The earth rotated. The sun shone. Lucy’s heart beat several times without her even asking it to.
“Lucy, dear,” Irenia said gently. “At least you have dug the plots. That’s the heavy work taken care of, and now we can have the manure delivered.”
Lucy blinked slowly. With her head still clutched in her hands and with her face turned to the table she asked the only obvious question.
“The what?”
Sixteen
“I don’t think I’m going to like… this,” Lucy waved her hand and grimaced in the direction of the playground. Dorian looked at her, smiling in that annoying way people smiled when they thought you were an idiot. “I don’t think it’s legal. It shouldn’t be legal… right?”
Dorian squinted into the dust motes circulating through the early morning sunbeams as they poured through the big windows in what had once been, many years earlier, his own grade six classroom. They were standing at the windows on the second floor, gazing out over the soccer field. He wasn’t wearing his uniform, but he was, apparently, on official duty because no one else in the department had wanted to respond to the call from the school… from Lucy… whom some of the officers had taken to calling Loopy… this early on a beautiful spring morning.
“There’s nothing illegal about what they’re doing and, as you’ve just admitted yourself, you knew they were coming, so, technically it isn’t trespassing.”
“They’re wearing pajamas!” Lucy pressed her face against the window.
“As are you.”
This was exactly the kind of observation that Lucy felt was unnecessary. He was lucky she was wearing anything, thank you very much.
“Well.” She straightened the top of her flannels with as much dignity as their pink bunny pattern would allow and turned to face him.
Sober. I am sober, she wanted to say.
Actually, she wanted to scream it and claw her way past him to cubicle number three in the girls’ bathroom, but she felt she was restraining herself admirably. “I would like you to remove these people from my soccer field, please, Mr. Officer Sir, please. And thank you.”
“Nope.” He smiled at her and slid his sunglasses on with a look which she could only describe as … amused.
“Do you always find crime scenes amusing?” she asked.
“Not really,” he said, turning and walking out of the room. “But you’re quite a hoot.”
A hoot.
Seriously.
Lucy had woken at the crack of dawn. She had cleaned her bedroom, and tied Goat outside, and shooed the chicken out. She had made a coffee and even done a few stretches. It was a brand-new day. A day that suddenly was violently interrupted by the arrival of the T’ai Chi people.
A dozen or more of them.
She had stood in the library, clutching the windowsill and peeking between the curtains that still smelled like bubble gum and spitballs as three, four… five… vehicles had arrived in her parking lot.
People had disembarked. Pajamas were being worn.
Someone had knocked on the door, which she ignored. Until they knocked again. No one knocks at a school. They just…. walk…in…
“Not today, people,” she whispered. “Not. Today.”
She had pelted down the hall and down the staircase, skidding to a stop in the entry vestibule and then tiptoeing ever so quietly to the door and driving home the lock mere moments before the T’ai Chi-er on the other side turned the knob.
She chortled behind her hand as she listened with her ear pressed to the door.
“I don’t know,” said a bewildered voice. “I’m pretty sure someone… just… locked it.”
She felt the shiver of a push against the wooden door. “And… I think I can hear someone… chortling… on the other side of the door.”
There were expressions of wonder and consternation, hollered greetings and exhortations to open the door, explanations of who they were (The T’ai Chi People, duh, like she hadn’t figured that out) and what they wanted (to invade her personal space, no thank you) but she stood strong. She felt certain that if she ignored them, they would go away.
She had dashed around the corner and into the staff room to peek outside, hoping to see them all driving away, but no. They were unpacking bottles of water, and blankets, and… lunch baskets? They thought they were going to stay for… lunch?
She ran back to her bedroom and grabbed Dog out of his reverie on
her bed. She ever so quietly let him out the emergency exit door and giggled as he trotted down the fire escape and around the building. That’ll fix them, she thought.
She waited breathlessly for Dog to sound the alarm and incite the roar of vehicles gunning out of the yard… but there was nothing. Then there was laughter. Then there was Dog merrily bonding with the invaders, tongue lolling and smiling like every day should be T’ai Chi day. Then there were twenty pajama-clad Tai Chi-ers cavorting in her soccer field and she did what any self-respecting alcoholic would do. She reached for a glass… but stopped.
Not doing that anymore.
So, she called the cops instead.
She hadn’t expected Dorian until she realized that she had expected Dorian and was thrilled that he had shown up and was standing beside her in her bedroom.
“Sorry, Lu,” he said as he sauntered down the hall. “They can’t be called “squatters” unless they begin to establish a small village. I think they’re just here for the morning.”
Lucy snorted, trailing behind him with her arms crossed on her chest. No bra. That was a bad choice.
“And besides,” he stopped at the front door and turned to smile at her. What an asshole, with the smiling and the sauntering. “I think it’s good for you to have visitors.” He removed his sunglasses, winking at her like he was offering her a gift.
She took a step back.
“So… what do I do with them?” she wailed as he turned and trudged down the steps. She was pretty sure he was laughing. At her.
“You do what you promised you would do,” he said, stopping to pat the traitor canine who suddenly appeared at his side.
“Oh, yeah, like you know what I promised to do,” Lucy stammered. Most days, Lucy herself couldn’t remember what it was she had promised to do. Such was life. One made promises. One bought a school for a dollar. One was overrun with gracefully moving elders on sunny mornings when all one wanted was a drink, but one wasn’t going to have a drink, was one?
“I do, actually, know what you promised. Everyone does,” Dorian cocked his head to the side and pondered her like a giant friendly dog. She squirmed a little. It was the sunglasses.
Love on the Rocks: A Heartswell Harbour Romance Page 9