Dune stumbled out of Kama’s room, trying hard to hold her head steady. She’d fallen asleep to the fog of a couple of stiff McCallan’s and now she felt resentful that alcohol left this kind of rubble inside her head. She needed water. She made a promise to herself to drink whiskey slowly from now on, with water. As she said it, some part of her knew it wouldn’t happen. She liked the dizzy numbness that came from rapid fire shots. She stepped into the kitchen and suddenly felt so alert that the hair on her arms stood up, her head cleared.

The harvest on the table had been organized. As she’d brought home vegetables over the last few days, she had just spilled things onto the table, to come back and work on once she figured out what everything was. Now the abundance was in a circle of ordered piles around the table. In the middle, one of the books was open.

Had she gotten drunk and organized these vegetables?

She stepped up to the table, touching the book. It was open to a page that said mustard greens, with photos. Dune looked around the table until she found the pile of mustard greens. The page had information about the nutritional qualities of mustard greens and a set of recommendations for how to cook it. She placed one hand in the book to save the page, and gingerly lifted the cover until she could see it. Field Guide to Produce: How to Identify, Select and Prepare Virtually Every Fruit and Vegetable at the Market. Dune didn’t remember finding this book on the shelf, didn’t remember being in the kitchen at all last night.

She ran upstairs and peeked in Mama Vivian’s room. The pile of dirty sheets she had dropped just outside the door last night was undisturbed and her grandmother had soiled herself. Mama Vivian hadn’t done this, then.

Dune took care of her grandmother and then returned to the kitchen and sat down at the table, the raw fuzzy feeling returning to her brain. She would stick to weed for a while. She flipped a page in the book and then another, until she had identified each pile of food on the table and come up with an idea of how she wanted to process it.

She was going to need a lot of mason jars.

chapter ten: Hardware

Approaching the decrepit hardware store on Third with some stealth, Dune tried to remember how long it had been closed. Maybe since the big Ace Hardware store came over on Trumbull? Seemed like a long time. But some places never looked open.

She knocked on the front door, waited long enough for an answer, if one was coming. The quiet inside the store matched that of the city around it.