They were young, they were in love, they were soul mates, they were supposed to be together.

The law thought differently.

Chapter 15

Chapter 15

I deliberately stayed out of my mother and aunts’ “medical” marijuana business, but I did remind them yet again, like a parrot, that it was illegal. They pooh-poohed.

“What will they do? Lock us up?” my mother said.

For some reason my aunts and mother thought this notion was hilarious, and they bent over cackling, their matching blue-flowered garden hats tipping back and forth. We were wandering through their mother’s garden, cutting flowers for Hat Night. Hat Night is on the first Tuesday of the month when they each make the most “beaudacious” hat they can.

They put the photos of each hat on their website—Flowers, Lotions, and Potions—and the site gets a zillion hits, as usual, from all over the globe as people vote for their favorite. They post a goofy, funny photo of the three of them, taken by me, wearing each other’s hats, so as not to “improperly influence the voting.”

“Yes, they might lock you up,” I said.

“Why so prim and proper?” my mother asked, then sighed, her white bell-shaped hair swinging.

“Why so fearful and afflicted by doom? I think you’ll get in touch with your inner self if you smoke a joint, sweetheart,” Aunt Camellia said, linking an arm around my waist. “It’ll release your worries into the universe.”

“Why so strict and rigid?” Aunt Iris asked. “You have to let go a little, Evie. Get wild and crazy. Do something off the wall. Derange yourself.”

“Derange myself?”

“Yes, do something so out of the ordinary that you feel deranged,” Aunt Iris said. “In a fun yet sensible manner.”

“I am already half-deranged,” I said. “My brain is a churning gray mass in my head with inexplicable tendencies to see the future. You think that’s not deranged enough? By the way, when did you all start smoking pot?”

“We hardly ever do, dearie,” Aunt Camellia said. “In fact, I think I’ve done it less than five or six or seven times.” She paused. “Or eight.”

My mother and Aunt Iris nodded.

“But it was fun,” my mother said. “We did it before we led our friends in drunken sailor songs at Milton’s birthday party last week.”

I rolled my eyes. That was a noisy party. I left early. “It won’t be fun if Chief Allroy comes on your property with a warrant, looks in that greenhouse, and then you’re in trouble.”

“Chief Allroy?” my mother squealed as if I’d made a joke, then burst into laughter, her hands flying in the air, both filled with bouquets of sunflowers.