Chapter 57

I spent the next week waiting for the seeds to arrive in the mail. Then the second week planting the seeds which finally arrived. They were nestled in their little fake greenhouses, aka baggies, when I began moving them outside. The temperature was consistently well above forty degrees in the daytime. The small cart I had built from an old yard sale bike, worked well for that as well as transporting cups of worms to the Soul for delivery. Like most thing I owned, it had to do at least double duty.

During those two weeks I saw Maurine on the weekends. I didn’t bother to call Marge, since she didn’t seem interested in dating me. I could understand since I was certainly not ‘catch of the day’ material. I had to talk to Lucinda every day about some aspect of the business, so she became the only woman with whom I had regular contact. It was always a pleasure to do so, but lately it had included hugs and kisses. That made it even more pleasurable.

Since she knew I was seeing Maurine again, I was a little surprised that her enthusiasm remained the same. It had always been my experience that women didn’t like to share. Well that had been my experience before I came into contact with Marge. Her behavior seemed to be spreading among my friends. Perhaps we had always been latent rebels. Maybe we had just needed an introduction to a more adventurous lifestyle.

While I had been doing the grunt work with my dirty hands, Tommy had picked up a gas stove top and oven. Both were well used, but that wasn’t a problem. Tommy and Gerome moved them into the smaller store room of the gym. They in effect converted it to the beginnings of a kitchen. Tommy also had several kitchen cabinet units from two different houses. He helped Gerome install those.

“It took a day to teach Gerome how to light the damn pilot lights. That boy is the least mechanical male human being I ever met. I’m pretty sure he can do it though,” Tommy said after his day of hard work. He seemed to have things up and going.

“So why am I here?” I asked.

“The installation was two days ago. Lucinda has been busy with her baking experiment. It seems that before she feeds them to the MMA thugs, she wants to try them out of us,” He explained.

“Okay, let’s give it a try. And Tommy be nice, we need her to get this right,” I said.

“So we are here to test your cookies,” Tommy said.

“So much for being nice,” I said to Tommy.

Then to Lucinda I said, “I’m sure they are great.”

“Well they weren’t easy for me, but I managed to make three different ones for you to try. I have to warn you the finished cookies won’t taste the same. These were not made with the oil from the weed,” she informed us. “I just wanted something to aspire to copy.”

There was a chocolate chip which was more a sugar cookie with chocolate chips. Then there was a chocolate cookie dipped in a thin chocolate glaze, last but not least there was coated cinnamon spice cookie. Each of them was more than satisfactory. The chocolate dipped in a chocolate glaze was master baker quality for which I had hoped.

“These are fine Lucinda did you have help with them?” I asked.

“To be honest Marge helped me. She didn’t know what they are for,” she said.

“Come on, she can guess. I guess like it or not, she is going to be involved. Her involvement ends with advising you on the baking. She is not to be involved in the business on a regular basis. She has the most to lose, so will be the easiest for the cops to flip,” I said.