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As the current target of Mel's disappointment was not one of the ones Elaine had supplied for her, she listened without interruption. In contrast to Mel's curling up, Elaine was sprawled with her legs over the back of the sofa, draped over the rest and taking up an amount of room that would have been inconsiderate had she not been aware that her houseguest was going to flop down with a pillow. She has been in the middle of sorting a stack of vintage postcards bought in bulk when Mel arrived, and she continued now, lazily distributing them into some boxes on the floor nearby.

"Men ain't s**t," she said vaguely, wrinkling her nose and turning over a card to see if anything was written on it, which seemed to be the first phase of whatever sorting she was doing. "But I gotta say they seem to be especially not s**t for you lately. I don't think it's you, though, unless it's your fault you're pretty enough to attract shallow assholes." Plunk, went the card into the box, and she lifted another. "But maybe it's something in the air. Last guy I went out with sent me a Venmo request the next day asking for what he'd paid for my drinks since I didn't go home with him. Maybe we need to join a mixed gender knitting club or something."

"I did a speed dating thing several months ago," she said. "All I got out of it was a new friend, but things could be worse. Maybe a running club would be good for you. Lots of highly motivated beanpole men with nice calves." She wrinkled her nose. Plunk. Plunk. "I'd rather die alone and ******** than run ten yards if I could help it, especially unpowered."

She did look, as she said it, like a picture of leisure. She often did: both Elaine and Joy had a certain aura of comfortable abundance that suggested they were designed for resting on cushions with a man's head on a soft and ample lap, possibly while being fed grapes - or cherries, knowing her - by some other pleasantly anonymous man-creature. She did not look to be made for running.

"But you're into that stuff. Maybe we should put up ads on the Connections app," she added drily, "because at this point even the batshit freaks we're tethered to the Cauldron with can't be much worse, and there seem to be plenty of beanpoles with nice calves among them as well." She turned a postcard towards her absently. It was somewhat risque, especially considering the era. "Look at that riding crop. I bet she never had to deal with insurance broker chat and drink refund requests."

Elaine, absorbed in the inspection of some faded handwriting on the back of a motel postcard, forgot for a moment that Mel, despite knowing about Joy, did not know about Lyonesse.

"I read some funny gossip in old diaries sometimes. High schoolers in the fifties were a wild bunch. Or did you mean from work?"

The words came out before she registered them, and she screwed up her face in dismay for a half a second before pushing past it as if she hadn't said it.

"I imagine not being able to keep your own money took the shine off the funny great-grandma stories," she said. "But I like when some 18-year-old named Betty bitches in her diary about how how she thinks Tommy likes his girls fast, and getting prudish about it while admitting she's been on dates with six different boys that weekend."

"Oh - yes - everywhere," she answered, mildly surprised at the suggestion that they wouldn't be. As if to demonstrate, she turned the postcard in her hands towards Mel again, showing it to be densely-covered in very tight cursive handwriting. " If they're really, really good you find them in library archives or scanned online. I found one once where she'd had a love affair with a patient on her ward during the Spanish Flu. Ended up turning it over to a historian at a university who was working on some sort of thesis. Probably never got used, but you never know.

"But usually: Grandma Betty dies one day and her kids don't want her box of random stuff so they send it to an estate sale, or a Goodwill. Someone picks it up and finds the good stuff and sticks it up online or into an antique store booth, and then I pick it up and find out what all the juicy gossip was seventy years ago, because I'm a nosy b***h even when all the principals are dead." This free admission, made without any embarrassment at all, seemed to suggest that she would not perhaps be as generous with her silence at Mel had been. Then again, however, both Elaine and Joy had sometimes evinced a remarkable talent for picking up on something uncomfortable and choosing to change the subject without pursuing it, so maybe it was easier to be nosy about women who'd been dead for a decade than friends.

"I love history," she said vaguely, her eyes skimming the cursive with practiced ease. "But I love the parts that are normal people going about their lives more than the big world-changing parts. I think sometimes history classes are all dates and armies and it crushes the love out of it just like English classes crush all the love out of something like The Mill on the Floss. Or - I guess you did hard sciences, right? Math and stuff?" She wrinkled her nose. "I guess there's no crushing the love out of that except by repetition."

"It's funny how both of us never wanna talk about work," pointed out Elaine mildly, but she didn't seem to want to change that, given that she pushed past it.

"I don't know. Next time I find a good Grandma Betty's Soap Opera journal I'll send it along to you," she said.

Elaine had frequently had, of late, a certain listlessness that came and went. Her usual cheer would be abruptly interrupted by some exhausted abstraction - transient, brief, but present. Then again, now that Mel was in the secret of Elaine's second life, she would know intimately, as Ekstrom knew, that there were a lot of reasons for that kind of malaise to chase around the people like themselves.

It came now, lingering for a few seconds of silence wherein Elaine's eyes were no longer looking at the postcard in her hand so much as through it, and it was shaken off with a sudden dimpled smile as she turned her attention to the dogs. "I was thinking of getting out of town for a while. A few days. Should I try and get up to enough trouble to bring back good gossip? And can you watch Petitcru, if I do? I'll pay," she added. Elaine had strong feelings about people doing work for free. "I'm starting to think I've swiped left on every eligible man in Destiny City. I need fresh blood."

She raised her eyebrows. "I am not opposed to a barter economy," she said, with a magnanimous air. "What can I do for you? Beat someone up? Teach you to walk in stilettos?"

This, even though she'd never worn anything but comfy sandals and slides around her. Another enigma, maybe.

"I said I didn't wanna talk about work," she answered with an airy playfulness. At least, she reasoned, having referred vaguely to working in hospitality might give some cover there. A travel agent or a concierge might be expected to wear heels.

"Do you know," she said abruptly, wrapping up the stack of postcards and folding her hands over her stomach instead, "in Arthurian literature there's this whole concept that a lot of stories revolve around, where someone asks for a boon, and then someone else agrees to it without asking what the boon actually is, and then it turns out it's something troublesome." She laughed at the ceiling. "So you know. A little leery to grant you a boon without details, but I wouldn't actually mind if it's for some guy's head on a pike or whatever. So OK. You watch Petitcru, I owe you a favor to be collected at some unspecified time in the future." And then, as an aside: "I wish frozen pot pies didn't take 45 minutes. Smells like Thanksgiving dinner in here and I forgot to eat lunch."