and shipped to the office of Tilly’s Timeless Treasures for their annual Christmas party; holiday chocolate sampler boxes found for a wedding planner who needed them for an upcoming wedding; twelve special gifts bought for Harry Davis, Realtor, for his upcoming office party...and a partridge in a pear tree.
Sophie Miles set aside her laptop and stretched. All in a day’s work for a professional shopper. She sneezed. Was she coming down with something? This would not be a good time to catch a cold, with the holidays right around the corner. Not that she had any big plans other than hanging out at her parents’ house for Christmas.
Of course, hanging out at her parents’ was a good thing. Hanging out by herself, well, at this point in her life it wasn’t exactly what she’d planned. She’d figured she’d at least have a boyfriend in tow.
Being thirty and single at Christmas, with no hub, no kids, sucked. Being thirty and single sucked, period. She was pretty, she knew that. Blonde, blue-eyed, nice butt. She didn’t have the biggest boobs in the world, but they were okay. She had good teeth. She was kind. She liked kids and football and wasn’t too bad in the kitchen. Or the bedroom. Yet here she was, still single. Just because she had some health concerns sometimes.
“Sometimes?” her last boyfriend had echoed. “Everything’s an emergency with you, Sophie. You’ve always got something. Or you think you’re getting something. Or you’re worried you’re gonna get something.”
That was an exaggeration. And it was only natural to worry. New viruses popped up all the time and people needed to take their health seriously.
“He does have a point,” her sister, Sierra, had said when Sophie tried to cry on her shoulder. “You can get a little squirrelly. That’s scary to some guys. I mean, I get it, but—”
“I am not a squirrel,” Sophie had insisted. “I’m just in touch with my body.”
“Right. That’s why you thought you had throat cancer last year when all you had was acid reflux. Then there was the time we all stayed at that cabin in the mountains and you were sure you’d been bit by a tick and had Lyme disease, and the time you swallowed that corn nut and—”
“Never mind,” Sophie had said, cutting off her sister before the list could grow any longer.
Just because a woman was vigilant about her health, it didn’t make her squirrelly or a hypochondriac. Cuts could get infected. So could insect bites. Colds could turn into bronchitis and bronchitis into pneumonia. You could pick up the flu virus simply by touching an elevator button. (Which was why Sophie always pushed those buttons with her knuckle. Or better yet, her elbow.) It was important to be aware of your environment, especially after what people had gone through when COVID-19 hit. That wasn’t squirrelly. That was preventive medicine.
Speaking of, she went to the shelf in her kitchen cupboard dedicated to her many bottles of vitamins, minerals and herbs, and took out her chewable vitamin C. Sneezes turned into colds in a heartbeat.
Her work was done for the day and her immune system was now boosted, which meant there was no putting it off any longer. She had to go to Costco and purchase those food supplies for her friend Camilla, the caterer. Camilla almost always did her own shopping but she was swamped and one of her employees was out sick, so she’d begged Sophie to help her out. The big warehouse store would be a zoo, full of people carrying all kinds of germs. This time of year people were walking petri dishes. No one stayed home when they were sick anymore. She’d take more vitamin C before bed.
She was reluctantly moving toward the closet to get her coat when her sister called. “Are you working?” Sierra asked.
She usually worked straight through lunch, eating an apple (an apple a day and all that) and some yogurt (probiotics, good for the digestion) while she surfed the internet on behalf of her clients. Today she’d gotten done early and once she’d braved Costco she was going to curl up on her couch with a cup of rooibos tea and stream a Hallmark movie.
“Just finished,” she said. “You on your lunch break?”
“Yeah. Thought you might have a minute to talk.”
A minute to talk. Obviously about how Sierra’s plans for the night before had gone. There wasn’t any excitement in Sierra’s voice. That wasn’t a good sign.