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me.”
    â€œNo, I didn’t, you pig-faced lump of dung!” said another. “But maybe I ought to.”
    The first speaker was not intimidated. “I’ll yank off your penis, chop it into pieces, and throw them in the composter!”
    The woman gave me a proud smile. “Children can be so forthright, can’t they? They’re blessed with a naive ignorance of societal conventionality.”
    I assumed this meant she approved of their nasty mouths and graphic threats. This further confirmed my hypothesis that she was the member of the grove who home-schooled her children. Since it was not a home I cared to visit, I said, “If you’ll leave your telephone number, I’ll call you when the book comes in and you can pick it up. As I said, it may be several weeks.”
    As the level of insults escalated from behind the rack, she unhurriedly wrote a name and telephone number on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Do you have children?”
    I winced as the rack shuddered. “A sixteen-year-old daughter.” Who, in contrast to the present barbarians, was a veritable paragon of restraint and decorum.
    â€œSuch a perfect age,” the woman murmured, looking into my eyes as though planting an idea in my mind.
    It was not going to germinate, I thought as I watched her collect her children and leave. The musky smell lingered, but now it seemed to imply malevolence rather than flower power. Psycho-Sexual Transitions in Wiccan Initiation Rituals was not likely to be a New Age version of the Girl Scout handbook. I picked up the piece of paper and read her name: Morning Rose Sawyer. One of the children had referred to his or her sibling as “Cosmos”; I couldn’t remember the other’s name.
    Not that I cared, I concluded as I wrote up an order to Peanut Brittle Press and stuck it in an envelope. For that matter, I didn’t care if the book ever came. My profit on a nine-dollar trade paperback would cover the cost of postage, but it would not impress my accountant.
    I was straightening the cookbooks when Caron came into the store. “The tyrant called,” she announced. “She found another Santa and wants us to report as soon as possible. Inez’s mother has a meeting, so she can’t take us to the mall. Can I have the car?”
    â€œThere’s not much gas,” I said as I gave her the key. “You may have to spend a couple of your own dollars if you want to make it home tonight.”
    She politely overlooked my ludicrous suggestion. “What’s that awful smell?”
    â€œIt’s from a customer who left a few minutes ago.”
    â€œWell, I didn’t think you were wearing some peculiar perfume. All you ever smell like is talcum powder.”
    After she was gone, I tried to reimmerse myself in fantasies, but it was futile. What was wrong with smelling like talcum powder? It was preferable to smelling like ripened roadkill or rotten eggs. Peter had never objected, much less commented on it. He’d never given me a bottle of perfume, for that matter.
    But he had, I remembered with a guilty start. I’d thanked him profusely, then tucked the bottle away in a dresser drawer. Maybe the time had come to shatter the aura of predictability that surrounded me like a scratchy wool blanket. In that I couldn’t afford to enroll in a flight school or book a trek to Nepal, I took Malthea’s card out of a drawer and dialed her number.

Chapter 3
    What had seemed like a moderately eccentric thing to do the previous day seemed downright insane as I walked across the wet pasture. Frost crackled beneath my feet as though I was crushing glass. The diffused light from the eastern sky was adequate for me to avoid stepping in or on anything, although I was more concerned about snakes and mice than I was about livestock droppings. Minutes earlier I’d driven through a subdivision of treeless lots and prefabricated houses, but I