By Jeff Eckenrode

The woman at the counter looked like she'd wandered in from the business park across town.

She had fair skin with blonde, frizzled hair. Her blue eyes were accompanied by makeup done with the same precision as everything else about her.

Her blazer was pressed but starting to lose its morning crispness, badge lanyard still around her neck, holding a single gummy in its packaging like it might go off.

She had the specific, practiced multitasking energy of someone permanently one phone call away from three other places she needed to be, though for once, all of her attention was on the gummy.

"I need you to talk me out of this," she said, staring at the gummy with equal parts fear and reverence.

Berny leaned in, all patience. "Talk you out of buying it, or eating it?"

"Either. Both. Last time I had one of these, I ended up having a very long conversation with my ceiling."

"What happened?" Berny asked, gently, the way she asked most things.

"Nothing happened. That's the problem." The phone buzzed again. Diane silenced it without looking, the reflex of a woman who'd been doing this all day. "I ate it, nothing happened, so I ate another one. And then it all happened. At once. Like it had been saving up."

"That tracks," I said, without looking up from restocking the shelf beside them. "Edibles don't hit like smoking does. Smoking's fast, in and out through your lungs in minutes. Edibles have to go through your stomach first, then your liver, and your liver actually turns the THC into something a little stronger before it ever reaches your brain."

"So it's not just slow. It's sneaky," Diane said, looking up from the gummy with eyes that belonged to a puppy who'd just been told the vet visit wasn't optional.

"It's slow and then it's not sneaky at all," I said. "It just feels sneaky because you already ate the second one by the time the first one shows up."

She looked at the gummy again, now with fresh suspicion, like it had set a trap for her and was proud of itself about it.

"So what, I just wait?"

"You wait," Berny said, reassuringly.

“For how long?”

"Usually somewhere between half an hour and two hours, depending on the—"

"How long, though?”

"That's what I'm telling you. It depends on the person, whether you've eaten, all kinds of—"

"So you don't know?”

"I know it depends," Berny said, her patience holding like that of a monk.

Diane let out a sigh audible enough to disturb the shelf display. "That's not reassuring."

"It's honest, though," I said. "Which is the closest thing I've got to reassuring."

She turned the gummy over again, weighing it like a woman deciding whether to put the pin back in the grenade or just throw it in a lake.

"Can you just tell me the safe dose? Like, a real number? One I don't have to think about?"

"There isn't one number," Berny said. "That's kind of the whole point. Start small, wait it out, see how you feel before you have any more. That's really the whole strategy."

"That's not a strategy. That's just patience," Diane said, a hint of accusation rising in her voice, like patience was something Berny had personally invoiced her for.

"Yeah," I said. "It's mostly patience."

Her phone buzzed a third time. She stared at it like it had purposefully chosen the worst possible moment, then silenced it again without checking.

"Fine," she said. "I'll eat half. And then I'm going to sit very still and not trust anything for two hours."

"Honestly," I said, "that's the best decision I've seen anyone make with one of these all week."

Diane turned and stepped out the shop door and onto the busy sidewalk, phone already back out and pressed to her ear before the door had fully closed, looking cautiously optimistic in spite of herself.

Berny watched her go. "I give her forty minutes before she calls back asking if it's supposed to feel like this."

"Thirty," I said. "She struck me as an over-achiever."

The Second Guess