Free Morning Glory Circle by Pamela Grandstaff Page A

street from the service station, where he worked all morning, to the Rose and Thorn, where he worked all evening.
    “Aren’t you going home for lunch?” she asked him.
    “Can’t,” he said. “Ian got held up and I have to open the bar by myself.”
    Their Uncle Ian used to be the police chief before he retired at the beginning of the year, and now he drove a school bus and managed the family bar. Maggie headed to her parents’ house to get lunch for her dad, known as Fitz, and her Grandpa Tim.
    “I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about us,” her father said gruffly, but Grandpa Tim smiled and blew her a kiss as she passed his recliner. The Irish setter known as Lazy Ass Laddie only stirred from his cozy spot next to the heater long enough to thump his tail at Maggie, then curled it back up and closed his eyes.
    Back when Maggie was still in grade school, her father had fallen off a ladder while painting the trim on the house and broke some vertebrae in his back. Her mother often said the only thing that cushioned his fall was the six-pack he consumed before he got on the ladder. After a couple surgeries failed to help relieve his pain, Fitz declared he was done with hospitals, and had since relied more heavily on medication mixed with alcohol to control his pain.
    Maggie heated up some leftovers, made Lazy Ass Laddie go out in the backyard to pee, and then served the two men on TV trays in the front room. Maggie washed up their dishes when they’d finished, and her grandfather winked at her as she left. Grandpa Tim was Bonnie’s father, and reportedly started smoking back in Scotland at the tender age of six. He suffered from emphysema and had recently undergone surgery and radiation treatments for throat cancer. He couldn’t talk above a whisper.
    Maggie stopped back in at the bakery to tell her mother she’d taken care of lunch, and found her mother resting behind the counter during an unusual lull. She told her mother a bit about Caroline.
    “All the money she’s got and you’re buying her toothpaste and groceries,” Bonnie said. “That makes no sense to me.”
    “She just got back in the country and doesn’t have any American money yet.”
    “There’s a bank not twenty yards from here full of American money, and her the richest woman in the county. That’s how the rich stay rich, daughter. They’re always looking the other way when the bill comes.”
    When Maggie returned to the bookstore she found out from Jeanette that Caroline had gone upstairs for a nap. Maggie looked at her tab and saw she had picked out mostly news magazines, some big city newspapers, and chamomile tea. Maggie went upstairs to her apartment and took her purchases to the kitchen, after closing the door to the bedroom, where she could see a Caroline-shaped lump under her quilt. She fired up her computer and looked up some vegan recipes to see if she could make lunch out of anything she had purchased.
     
     
    Caroline slept through lunch clear until 3:00 p.m., at which time Maggie warmed up the baked sweet potatoes, green beans with garlic and onion, and whole grain muffins she had prepared for lunch. Caroline ate a couple little bites of everything, and pronounced it all delicious, but didn’t actually consume more than a half-cup of food, all told.
    She told Maggie about meeting Drew, and already seemed to know more about him than Maggie did. Maggie knew Drew had been in Belize with the Peace Corps for a year between college and vet school, but she didn’t know he’d been back to visit several times.
    “He was in the Peace Corps with a person who I know really well,” Caroline said. “It’s such a small world.”
    Maggie made her friend some hot chamomile tea, and then gently broached the subject she was determined to discuss.
    “Are you feeling okay, Caroline?” she asked her, as she reseated herself across from her friend at the table.
    “I’m fine,” Caroline said, but she was shaking her head as she