I drifted away, looking around until I found some eucalyptus oil as well as peppermint.
“Do you have a cough?” Miranda asked me.
“Not right now, but you never know, and I hate taking medicine, so it’s better to just diffuse it.”
“It is, yes,” she said, grinning at me as other people started hovering around.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Calder,” Mrs. Whitley, the woman I’d met the day before outside Jenny Rubio’s house, greeted me.
“Brann, please, and how’re you, Mrs. Whitley?”
“I’m better since you took care of things for Jenny yesterday.”
“It was nothing.”
“No, no,” she corrected me, smiling, moving closer. “It was a huge deal actually, the biggest and bravest, and please, call me Susan.”
“You know,” I told her, ignoring the compliment, “we should probably grab some white sage for Jenny and some palo santo wood so she can smudge her house and get any residual bad juju outta there.”
“Do what now?” She chuckled, reaching for me.
I snorted as she took my arm, and I led her over to where the sage bundles were and explained how even if you didn’t believe in it, the process of doing it was helpful.
“You see, I think sometimes there’s this bad, sticky energy that lingers in a place, you know? Sometimes you gotta get it out so you can breathe easy.”
“I think I need some of that for my house too.”
“Keep in mind that not everyone loves the smell, but it dissipates pretty quickly.”
“Well, that’s what open windows are for,” Mrs. Whitley offered cheerfully.
“That’s exactly right,” I said, handing her off to Ben, who started explaining what different kinds of smudging sticks were used for.
“Do you have any tea tree oil?” I asked Miranda.
“I do, yes. And since you asked for the eucalyptus oil, I have some dried eucalyptus if you want some for the shower.”
“Oh, that’d be great, thank you.”
Donna Bailey was hovering close to me, and I passed her the peppermint oil, which she took without thinking.
“If you put that in water and spray it around the house, it’ll get rid of a lot of bugs. Spiders for sure—they don’t like the smell,” I explained to her.
“Really?”
I nodded. “We used to put it in our water so it tasted better, makes you wake up a little, and bonus, helps with your breath.”
“Oh,” she said, looking at the small bottle in her hand. “I had no idea that they would have things like this here. I mean, I usually have to drive to Helena to pick up my oils or order them online.”
“One of my buddies, in the spring and summer, his wife sprays her curtains with sandalwood so that when the breeze hits them, the whole place smells awesome.”
Her slow smile was good to see. “That sounds lovely.”
I turned back to Miranda. “Do you guys have any beeswax lip balm or those wrapped candles?”
Miranda nodded like she was in a daze, staring at me.
“Could you show Donna where that is?”
“Yes,” she said sweetly, waiting on Lucy’s mother. “They’re right over here.”
“Thank you,” Donna said, stepping around me to follow Miranda.
Moving off to the side, I squatted down so the girls could show me what stones they picked out. Lucy and Kate wanted me to see too. I didn’t miss that the booth was now swamped with people, and Ben was quickly working the Square Reader attached to his iPad.
“Do you get a cut of the action?” Emery teased, his hand on my shoulder as I stood up beside him. “Because your interest in those things certainly sold them to others.”
Half of me wanted to say, you touch me a lot and it’s doing weird things to my breathing, so knock it off. The other half didn’t care. Standing there, staring at him, brain addled, my focus not what it should have been, I wasn’t sure what to say.
“How do you know about all this stuff?”
“Well, whenever my unit wasn’t deployed, I stayed with my buddy Huck Riley, and he’s ‘that guy’—the all-natural, ‘God keep us from prescription medication’ type. He tries to never put anything chemical into his body, which was impressive when we were in SEAL training together, because you fu—” I noticed Olivia close to me. “—you hurt all the time. I don’t care what kinda shape you’re in. So the fact that he wasn’t popping eight hundred milligrams of Ibuprofen every few minutes was a surprise.”
“I’ll bet,” he said, drawing me forward, out of the way of some more people trying to get into the booth. “Who got your friend interested in his pursuit?”
“His grandmother,” I answered, passing the oils I had to Ben, ready to pay for them. “And he explained it to me as certain things have been around a long time. I remember being in Thailand, and there was stuff there I’d never seen and really didn’t even wanna try, but Huck insisted, and he’s right—sometimes a good cup of tea can cure what ails you.”