He needed some distance so he could think straight.
“It’s about my wife,” he began. “I was wondering…”
Fuck a duck. Peaches attempted to compose herself.
Stuart coughed, jiggled his knee, coughed again. “See, pot, weed, marijuana is supposed to help with MS, right? But she doesn’t have a prescription yet, and I think she should try it. I thought maybe since you’re a nurse you might have some kind of connection? And like maybe you could hook us up, see if it helps?”
Peaches smiled through her disappointment, distracting him with her dimples.
“Sure,” she answered slowly. She had no idea where to get pot, but there was no way she’d ever say no. Maybe Liam could help. He’d told her about the kids who smoked weed through those little vape pen things and pretended it was just herbal apple fumes or whatever. She hadn’t smoked pot herself since college. She preferred wine.
“My friend mentioned some ‘doctor’ who makes house calls. He can bring you whatever you need. I think he called him Dr. Mellow, but that can’t be his real name. I haven’t looked him up. I thought I’d ask you first.”
“Sure, of course.” Peaches had no idea who Dr. Mellow was, but he sounded like the type of doctor all those cool arty people in the sixties like Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick would call when they’d almost OD’d on amphetamines and hadn’t eaten or slept in a year and needed some cocaine and a vitamin B12 shot just to stay alive. “I’ll see what I can do.”
She closed the gap between them and ran the comb through his hair just because she could, parting it on the side and combing it back behind his ears so that he looked like a little boy on picture day.
“I’ll get my people to talk to their people and get back to you,” she said vaguely.
Her school phone began to ring. She mussed his hair up with her fingers again and turned to answer it.
“Nurse’s office, this is Peaches.”
Stuart stood and rolled her chair up behind her so she could sit down.
She sat, tilting her head and flashing her dimples gratefully up at him.
The call was from the mother of another second grader with lice.
“Grab a pen. There are four lice ladies you can contact. None of them do house calls and they’re all a hassle to get to, but they’ll get rid of them.”
“Thank you,” Stuart mouthed silently, so as not to interrupt her call.
And without any attempt to curb herself, Peaches winked in reply.
* * *
“Pot? Marijuana? Cannabis? Reefer? Herb? Mary Jane?”
Liam blinked up at his mother from the mattress on the floor that served as his bed. He took off his round, wire-rimmed reading glasses, rubbed his eyes, and put them back on again. Had she really just asked him where she could buy weed?
“It’s okay. I’m not trying to trick you or get you or your friends in trouble,” she said. “It’s for a friend. Or actually, a friend’s wife. She needs it for pain.”
Liam shrugged. He was pretty sure Shy Clarke didn’t smoke weed. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. He was going to be her tutor. He’d liked her for over a year and now they were actually going to talk to each other. He liked her so much he could barely look at her. He was going to have to get over that.
“Seriously?” his mom demanded, about to go into one of her “I was semi-edgy in high school and you could be too if you just made the effort” gentle tirades. His mom was a good person, but she hated that he wasn’t a musician who wore holey black jeans and ripped T-shirts. She hated his neatly trimmed hair and that he kept his pants up with a belt. She hated that he liked salad and was home every night. She hated that when he asked her to test him with flash cards he knew all the answers. She still loved him, he knew that. It was his apparent conformity she hated. “You don’t know anyone?”
Liam wasn’t about to rat out Bruce, whom he wasn’t really friends with anyway. Bruce was high seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, and he basically supplied the entire high school with weed. He was a brute too. No one messed with Bruce, for fear of pissing him off. He was the El Chapo of their school.
“Omnia… vin-cit!!” Peaches’ husband Greg’s boyish yowl resounded from the basement. He was adapting