“That was you outside the other night,” I said. I kept my voice low so Mom and Mo wouldn’t hear. “You scared my parents.”
She smiled like it was funny. “Not the reaction I was hoping for.”
“You stand outside of a stranger’s house in the dark, you’re probably gonna scare somebody.”
“I didn’t mean to,” she said softly. “It’s been a while since the shop was open. I heard a new family moved in, so I came to see. But you’re not a new family after all, are you?”
“Wanna tell me what that’s supposed to mean?” I asked. I scanned the shelf and spotted the jar with the comfrey near the top. I slid the ladder in place and climbed up to grab it.
“You’re related to Circe.” She was suddenly at the base of the ladder holding it steady with one hand. “I can see that by looking at you. Do you mind if I ask how?”
“Her sister, Selene, was my birth mother.”
She made a noise like a cough, but when I looked, she stood stoic, thoughtful. I climbed down and set the jar on the counter as she walked to the opposite side.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Of course.”
Again, something about her struck me. She was pretty—no. More than that. She was beautiful. But it wasn’t just that. I shook my head. “Uh, sorry—I lost my train of thought.”
She shrugged. “It happens.”
I scrambled to think of what I’d meant to ask her. “There are stores—you know, online—that sell most of this stuff.”
“I don’t want to buy it online, and nobody else does either.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“I don’t know the people selling it,” she said flatly. “I have no idea what they intended when they cultivated the plants.”
“Is that important? The intent of the person handling them?”
“More than anything.” She glanced at the wall of glass jars, then set her hands on the counter, leaning in. “I read a study once. It said that if you have a plant and talk to it like you love it, it’ll grow faster, bigger. But if you keep a plant and talk down to it, insult it, it will wither and die.”
“That’s true,” I said. I’d read the same article and had even done an entire paper on the process for my environmental studies class. “So maybe there’s something to it, to what you think and feel when you grow a plant.”
She nodded. “I think so. I imagine plants are kind of like people. Tell a person they’re worthless, hurt their feelings everyday—they’d wither, too.” She let her delicate fingers dance over the surface of the counter, then up to her lips. Her eyes were like the centers of Velvet Queen sunflowers, brown and blazing. She held my gaze. “But imagine telling someone they’re beautiful, magnetic, stunning. Every single day. Imagine how they’d flourish.”
I knocked over the jar of comfrey as I shuffled papers, trying to avoid her stare.
Marie straightened, a smirk on her lips. “Anyway, the plants and herbs here are just better. They stay fresh longer. They don’t rot in their containers. Why do you think that is?”
“I—I don’t know,” I lied. I was beginning to get some idea.
“You’re new to this place, but it isn’t new to you,” Marie said. “It’s in your bones. It’s part of who are.”
I couldn’t look straight at her because I didn’t know where my gaze would land—her wide eyes? The full curve of her bottom lip? “How do you know that it’s in my bones?”
“I know a lot of things,” she said. “For example, there are paper bags under the counter. And there should be a scoop and scale under there, too.”
I looked down. She was right.
“I’ll take eight ounces of the comfrey,” she said.
“Right.” I took the lid off the jar. The species was Symphytum officinale. “This kind of comfrey is called common comfrey. It’s good, but the Russian strain, Symphytum uplandicum, would be better for Alec’s ulcers. The alkaloid content is higher in that strain.”
I raised my head to look at Marie. Her eyebrow arched, her mouth a half smile. I quickly scooped the dried comfrey leaves onto the scale, measured out eight ounces, and then dumped them into a paper bag. In the drawer to my right, I found a sheet of small black stickers and used one to seal the bag. I handed it to Marie and she pushed a twenty-dollar bill across the counter.