The Turning Season Read Online Free Page B

goodies,” Celeste tells Alonzo as she begins pulling groceries out of the bag. She knows perfectly well about the two freezers full of Tupperware containers, but it turns out she hasn’t exactly been shopping for staples. So what we have here are chocolate donuts, gooey butter cake, chocolate-covered raisins, five different kinds of chips, three kinds of cheese dip, and a bottle of premixed margaritas.
    â€œYou can’t have any of the booze,” she tells him. “But the rest of it’s all yours if you want it. Oh! And I have a cooler in the car. I picked up some barbecue on the edge of town. We can have that for dinner.”
    â€œWhat kind of barbecue?” he says. Testing her.
    She swats him on the head. Love tap. “Chicken for me, pork for you. Did you think I’d
forget
?”
    He ducks his head and doesn’t answer that. But he’s smiling. “I’ll go get it. Anything else in the car?”
    â€œUh—
yeah
. What do
you
think?”
    â€œMovies?”
    â€œAbout twelve of them! I didn’t know what you’d seen so I checked out, like, half the new releases.”
    â€œCool,” he says. “I haven’t seen hardly anything.”
    I hear Bonnie’s voice in my head.
He’ll sit and watch cable all day, movie after movie, but he doesn’t like to go to the theater. At first I thought he just didn’t want to go with
us
, and then I thought maybe his friends don’t like movies. But then I figured it out. It’s dark. He feels trapped. It triggers all his irrational fears. So we let him rent whatever he wants.
    â€œI haven’t seen anything, either,” she says. “Work work work. That’s all I do. This is like a vacation.” She glances expressively around the kitchen. “Well, the kind of vacation where you go to a dude ranch for the summer and you have to clean out the horse stalls and bale hay or whatever.
That
kind of vacation. Still. It will make a change.”
    Celeste is a freelance writer and editor with a couple of big clients she can work for remotely. She’s said more than once she doesn’t know how shape-shifters ever held down jobs before the advent of the Internet, because being a contract employee who works from home means never having to come face-to-face with your boss or your customers. Of course, her own particular brand of transformation is the best—she can change at will, and she’s always the same animal, a slim bobcat with a golden pelt and unnervingly huge eyes. It would hardly be like having a disability at all to be able to control it so completely. It would almost seem like being normal.
    â€œI fed the dogs this morning, but there’s a lot more to do,” Alonzo tells her. “But I can handle it. You don’t have to help.”
    She gives him an incredulous look. “
I
am the adult here!
You
are the child!
You
are the one who is helping
me
!”
    This actually makes him laugh. “Yeah. You keep telling yourself that,” he says and slouches out the door.
    Celeste is Alonzo’s favorite person in the world. I’m even more grateful on his behalf than my own that she had the time to come out here this weekend.
    The two of them largely ignore me for the rest of the day as they do grinding physical labor around the property. Despite her princess appearance, Celeste is a hard worker; give her a task, no matter how distasteful, and she’ll get it done. Now that there are two of them, they can finish the chores that require four hands, spend a little more quality time with the dogs, and make sure everything is as tidy as a backwoods zoo can be.
    Celeste also takes a couple of hours to listen to my voice mail and call back the four or five pet owners who’ve phoned to make appointments for their animals. I don’t have that much retail business anymore—once Janet left, I tried to gently encourage the majority of her clients to