“Oh,” she wheezed. “Oh, that’sdreadful.”
“Take another,” Jo Ellen said. “The first one’s just to get the door open.”
Oh, why not? She’d already burned her lungs out. Might as well go up in flames.
The second puff went down easier. It singed less. It actually tasted…well, better than that ten-dollar stuff from Acapulco.
Nothing happened at first. But in a few minutes, the storeroom went soft and golden at its edges. The ketchup bottles looked like decoration—like Andy Warhol had painted the room.
The roar of the storm stopped sounding like a threat and more like bad weather. And Jo Ellen, beaming like a loon froman overturned milk crate, became, abruptly, the funniest and dearest thing Maggie had seen in a decade.
“I am different,” Maggie said slowly, not exactly sure where the thought came from.
“Are you high?” Jo Ellen asked.
“I have no idea, but I mean I’m different this summer. I’ve felt it. I’m less…” She searched for the right description. “Less of a clenched fist. You know?”
“Oh, Iknow.”
Maggie gave a light punch to Jo’s thigh. “You don’t have to agree that much.”
“But it’s true.”
“Destin always did that for me,” Maggie continued as the world suddenly became less edgy and more…interesting. “Our summers here were like drinking spring water after nine months of being parched.”
Jo Ellen gave a happy moan. “How I loved for that calendar to say June so we could leave Ithaca behind and be with the Lawsons again.”
“And then Roger and Artie separated us,” Maggie said.
“For our protection.”
“It would have been nice to know,” Maggie replied dryly. “I mean, would it havekilledthem to tell us rather than just order us apart?” She shook her head. “Roger always ordered me to do everything. And I did it. A good, dutiful wife. Even after he died, I never reached out to you. And I…I am mad at him for that!”
“Easy, Mags. Pot’s supposed to make you mellow.”
“Well, it’s making me realize that thirty years is a long time to carry a man after he’s dead.”
“Let him go, Mags.”
“I am. I did. But…” Without thinking, she took another puff and handed it to Jo, who did the same. “We were always more fun together than apart.”
“Still are,” Jo agreed.
“It’s you who’s changed me,” Maggie said quietly. “It was always you.”
“Or,” Jo Ellen said, lifting the little glowing thing with a slow and radiant smile, “it could be thenotAcapulco Gold you’re smoking.”
Maggie gave an undignified snort of laughter and Jo Ellen caught it like a cold, and the two of them sat on their milk crates in a storeroom full of ketchup and laughed until Maggie’s eyes ran.
Then they just dredged up the past like two little stoned grandmas hiding in a closet during a hurricane. Wait—that’s what they were.
“Whatever happened to Carol Ann Petrie?” Jo mused.
“I hope she got a nose job,” Maggie said. “That thing was a weapon.”
Jo giggled. “She thought she was going to be the next Barbra Streisand.”
“Well, she wasn’t. Don’t you remember she owned a leopard caftan?” Maggie grunted at the memory. “She wore it to a party.”
