MissBEHAVED

“Have you given any more thought to my goat yoga suggestion?” Grace asked Kenny, popping a piece of pepperoni in her mouth. “My friend Josh and his partner are closing on their house in a few weeks, and he’s an excellent yoga teacher.”

“No.” Kenny’s scowl would have scared anyone not aware of her prickly personality, and her love for her goats. “I’m not letting a bunch of strangers in with my girls. Who knows what they’d do to them.”

Grace rolled her eyes. “Nobody is going to hurt your precious goats, Kenny. People pay a lot of money to do yoga with smelly animals climbing all over them. It would be a huge moneymaker for you. And Josh has done it before, so he knows how the goats are.”

“You’ve got that big, heated room attached to the barn you’re not even using,” Raquel pointed out, always thinking like an accountant. “You should put it to use to at least offset the cost of the electricity.”

Kenny turned her glare on Raquel, but they’d been friends for so long that it had no effect. “I use that room to store my soaps and scrubs.”

“So buy some shelves or build some cabinets,” Layla replied like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “That room is plenty big enough to hold your stock and have at least twenty people for yoga. Plus, it has all those windows that face the woods along the back of your property. People would eat that shit up.”

“And it has concrete floors that would be easy to clean up after the goats,” Layla pointed out.

“I’d go to a goat yoga class,” Charlotte added.

Kenny looked around and found everyone nodding their heads in agreement.

She finally shook her head but said with a growl, “I’ll think about it.”

“Yay!” Grace clapped her hands in excitement. “I’ll give Josh your number so you guys can set up a meeting. This will be so great! I’ll be coming to every class, too.”

“He’s probably going to want me to get some fancy, relaxing yoga shit to decorate the room. Candles or plants or statues. Wall hangings, maybe.” Though it sounded like complaints, we all knew that was Kenny’s way of wrapping her mind around the idea, and if she was talking about decorating, she was getting excited. For a woman who lived in jeans and work boots and spent more of her time with her herd of goats than people, she had an eye for style. Her goat milk soaps and other bath products sold in boutiques all over the region and were expensive as hell for a reason.

“I’ll help you with some marketing materials, if you want,” Charlotte offered. “We can take some pictures and do some social media posts to let your existing customers know. You could even set up a little display in one corner of the room and put out some product for people to buy while they’re there for yoga.”

“That’s a great idea, Char.” Raquel nodded her head in agreement. “This will be so good, Kenny. You’ll see.”

“I guess I could use extra money in the winter when I don’t have the farmers markets to sell at every week.”

Kenny’s grudging acceptance of the plan was all we were going to get, so Raquel wisely chose to move on.

“Now that that’s settled, how was everyone’s week?”

We started every book club with the same question. Yes, we read and would talk about the book, but not until we each had an opportunity to share the highs and lows we’d encountered since our previous meeting. More than anything, this group was about friendship and support, so I settled into my chair and took a healthy sip of wine, waiting to see who’d begin.