Pecan Springs and Thyme and Seasons were just the first of several major earthquakes in my life. After years of insisting that marriage required too many compromises, I married Mike McQuaid, whom I had met years before in a Houston courtroom. McQuaid is a former homicide detective, currently a private investigator with his own firm (McQuaid, Blackwell, and Associates) and an adjunct professor on the Criminal Justice faculty at Central Texas State University. We are the parents of two great kids. McQuaid’s son, Brian, will be a sophomore at the University of Texas this fall, majoring in environmental science. He lives with his girlfriend in Austin. Caitlin, my fourteen-year-old niece and our adopted daughter, lives with McQuaid and me in a big Victorian house on Limekiln Road, about a dozen miles west of Pecan Springs. We share the place with a gloomy basset hound named Winchester, a grizzled orange tomcat named Mr. P, Caitlin’s flock of chickens, and a legion of fugitive lizards escaped (or descended) from Brian’s collection of reptiles.
And then there’s Ruby. She is my business partner, sidekick, and owner of the Crystal Cave, the only New Age shop in Pecan Springs. Together Ruby and I jointly own and manage the tearoom behind our shops (Thyme for Tea) and a catering service we call Party Thyme. We also co-own (with Cass Wilde) the Thymely Gourmet, which delivers packages of healthy precooked food to upscale singles who want to eat right but don’t have the time (or don’t know how) to cook. Ruby has two grown daughters and a granddaughter, although you’d never know it to look at her. After an early divorce, she has managed to stay unmarried, although she is partial to intelligent men and cowboys. Just now, she is seriously dating a very nice guy named Pete who manages an olive ranch, a relationship that is complicated by the fact that the ranch is a couple of hours away and Pete’s job doesn’t allow him a lot of free time.
As you might guess from the fact that she owns a New Age shop, Ruby’s lifelong passions include astrology, tarot, and the Ouija board. I sometimes imagine the interior of her mind as a large crystal ball, with images materializing out of the shadows, disappearing, and then reappearing as something else entirely. Sorry if that sounds snarky—it’s not intentional. I admire Ruby’s intuition and empathy. She can actually scan people’s thoughts, although “off” is her default position on this ability. (She says she doesn’t like to pry into her friends’ secret lives.) I’ve known her to come up with some startling insights, based on ways of understanding the world that have nothing to do with the linear logic within which the rest of us poor mortals are trapped. While for me (and probably you), two plus two will only ever equal four, Ruby can just as easily make it eighteen-and-a-half—and more often than not, she’s right. Wacky, but right.
This might also be a good time to introduce you to our building, for it is a character in this story, too. As I said, I didn’t know much about 304 Crockett Street when I bought it, except that it was built of native Texas limestone sometime after the Civil War. In its first incarnation as a residence, it seems to have had two large rooms in the front, two behind, the loft above, and that lovely veranda across the front. There was a large garden on the east side of the house, and a stone stable for horses at the rear, on the alley.
Buildings change through time, just as people do, and the occupants have left their mark on this one, inside and out. At some point, a frame kitchen was added across the back of the house, the upstairs loft was partitioned into bedrooms, the veranda was removed, and the stable was converted to a garage. Later still, an architect bought the place and completely redesigned it. He turned the front two rooms into his office and studio, the back two rooms plus kitchen into an apartment for himself, and the stone stable-garage into a lovely guest cottage.
Ruby and I have changed this building, too. Her Crystal Cave takes up one of the front two rooms, and Thyme and Seasons the other. I lived in the architect’s apartment until I married McQuaid. Now, our tearoom occupies that space, and we’ve expanded and modernized the kitchen. The guest cottage has become a bed-and-breakfast—or a classroom for our cooking classes, when it isn’t occupied. The loft upstairs has had a full makeover. It is now Lori Lowry’s textile arts studio.
The loft was one of my better ideas, if I do say so myself—although the renovation was more extensive than I’d originally planned. The old wooden staircase had to be brought up to code (building inspectors are fussy about things like fire exits). The extra air-conditioning required some serious rewiring, and the windows had to be replaced. The flimsy interior partitions came out, revealing an expansive room with a pine floor and cypress rafters. There wasn’t enough light, so I had the contractor install a row of skylights in the roof and enough track lighting to comfortably illuminate the whole space.
The loft seems almost custom-designed for Lori’s studio and teaching space. The center part of the floor is filled with four floor looms, several
