Page 80 of The Scent of Happiness

“So I can say, ‘that’s a nice tie you’re wearing’ but if I ask someone what scent she has on, that’s crossing a line?”

“Correct.” Otis spread his arms wide. “I’m glad you see the difference.”

“But they aren’t different,” Brooke insisted. “They’re exactly the same.”

Otis brought his hands together. His fingers twitched and he rubbed the tips of them. He sucked in his lower lip, making a tsk sound with his teeth. “You were late for work today.”

“Yes. A few minutes.” No sense denying it. Was that the real issue? Which one was Otis mad at? If she could figure out which one was worse, she’d know how to apologize and maybe they could move past this. “I’m sorry?” she tried. “For…everything?”

“You said you overslept,” Otis said.

“Yes?” Brooke tried to think. What was he asking her, exactly? She started imagining the possible reasons he could ask her that and didn’t like any of them.

“I know you take certain medications,” Otis said gently. “Did you take them this morning?”

Dammit. Brooke scrambled for her bag before remembering that she’d given it to Lauren. She’d forgotten her pills. Oh God, how absentminded could she be? And how mortifying that her boss had to remind her. Was he legally allowed to ask her if she was off her meds? Did that matter? Thank goodness he did. What would happen if she’d gone a whole day without them?

You’re running on impulse now, said Theo’s voice in her head. Like you always do. He was right. She jumped into things without thinking, did whatever felt good in the moment, and never considered consequences. She could barely do one job, much less two. Thank goodness Theo was out of the picture. A boyfriend was the last thing she needed right now. If she was going to get her life together, she needed to work on herself and herself alone.

“Brooke?” Otis asked. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. I should go get my—Lauren has my—they’re in my bag in the breakroom. My meds. I need my meds.”

“Go ahead,” Otis said.

Brooke stood to go, but paused at the door. Her feet felt heavy, as if her body was being dragged downward, but above it, her thoughts were clear. She knew what she had to do. “Otis I’m really…um…I won’t talk that way to my co-workers—to anyone. I recently got some complications out of my life. I resolved some things and um… Well, I want to say I’m sorry and things will be different from now on.”

“Good,” Otis said. “Because you’re a valuable employee, and I’d hate to lose you.”

This time, he sounded like he meant it.

* * *

“Oh no,” Brooke said. “No, not again.” Her soap was setting up way too fast. It had accelerated like crazy, and she’d be lucky to get it into the mold at all, much less make any kind of decent design out of it. She scraped out her bowls as quickly as she could, growling at the thick batter and the blotches of yellow and purple.

What had gone wrong? It was probably the water discount. She should have known better than to try a recipe with less water, especially when she was soaping at a hotter temperature. She was hoping that hot plus dry would equal a shorter curing time, but what she got instead was a complete failure that nobody would buy no matter how good it smelled.

She dropped her spatula into the bowl and put it on the counter next to all the other dirty dishes. She’d been soaping every spare minute and didn’t have time to clean her equipment. She was also running low on oil and lye. She pulled off her goggles and gloves, then snapped off the radio. Yacht rock was a terrible choice.

“Stupid,” she muttered, not sure if she meant herself or that awful recipe. She didn’t have time for this. She couldn’t afford to lose even one batch, much less two in a row. If she kept having fails like this, it would soon wipe out her profit from extra internet sales and she’d be right back where she started.

The smart thing to do would be to forget about new recipes and go back to her old standards. Her mood was clearly affecting her craft, so she should go back to making the soaps she made when she was happy.

The only problem with that plan? She couldn’t find her journal. She’d looked everywhere in her apartment, her parents’ house, the garage, and Dad’s car. No matter how she tried to retrace her steps, she couldn’t remember where she’d had it last or what she’d done with it.

It wasn’t the first thing she’d lost and it wouldn’t be the last. In third grade, her parents had bought her four coats in a single winter, which was right around the time they started talking to her doctor about an ADHD diagnosis. She’d lost towels at the beach, her sandals at summer camp, and countless pens, umbrellas, and water bottles. Once, she’d lost an entire picnic ham, although that was an isolated incident.

But her soaping journal was different. It was a record of where she’d been. It was her thought process on paper. It was a mess, but darn it, it was her mess. Without it, she felt hollow and fragile, as if she’d dissolve in the next heavy rain.

She couldn’t make any of her best recipes. She could approximate a lot of them with online sources and her memory, but the finer details were in her journal.

She closed her eyes and pushed her fingers under her glasses to rub her eyes. Maybe she should call it a night. She trudged to the bedroom and opened the door, which was when she remembered that she’d put her sheets in the washer before work and had forgotten to transfer them to the dryer when she got home.

She’d been trying—unsuccessfully so far—to wash the scent of Theo out of them. After three tries, she was starting to think it was all in her head. Maybe she only imagined the smell of Theo when she was in bed.

She marched to the closet that held her little washer/dryer unit and yanked her sheets out of the washer. She held them to her nose for a moment. They smelled of cotton and laundry soap. She plunked them in the dryer and turned it on.

She rubbed her eyes again, and for a moment considered going to sleep on her bare mattress. But instead, she plopped on the couch with her laptop and opened Pinterest, looking for the recipes she’d bookmarked there. She had two more craft shows this year—a small one at the VFW hall and then the huge Logan County Handcrafts Expo the weekend before Thanksgiving. If she was going to have inventory, she needed to make things like bath bombs and bubble bars—things that went together quickly and cured fast.