Closed Book

Merry is a quiet woman who has always been "a little different". Growing up, she had a very hard time making friends but was always the top of her class in school. After leaving home at 18, she found herself on various adventures until meeting Sid in art school, and the two of them joined forces to open an occult bookstore after Sid realized how Merry's focus could be used to run a successful business. Merry is the brains of the outfit. She always seems to know what to do when it comes to running the bookstore, and when she's not busy stocking shelves and managing the numbers, she does tarot readings in the back. For a woman who shows little emotion and is simply impossible to read, her clients are always satisfied with her readings. She is unintentionally serious and a bit frosty, and keeps her personal life and her past to herself. Even after 8 years of knowing her, Sid still feels like she has no idea who Merry really is.

Sid is, in most ways, the opposite of Merry. She's extroverted, charming, personable, and easy to get along with, not to mention an open book. Like Merry, she left her parents' home when she finished up high school and spent the late fifties and early sixties on the beat scene. Partly through the sixties, during the height of the hippy movement, she was introduced to the occult, and has been a Wiccan since discovering what that is, as part of her ongoing feminist quest and desire to be her most authentic self. It was her idea to open an occult bookshop. She gets harassed for being masculine a lot, but is never one to back down in the face of aggression and has won a fight or two, a fact which exhausts Merry. She's a romantic, flirtatious woman and always has a new lover at the apartment. Unknown to Merry, this is partly an attempt to make her jealous. Sid has been infatuated with the mysterious Merry since the moment they met, but still can't seem to figure her out.

Robbie is the owner of the new record store that opened up a few doors down from Sid and Merry's bookshop. It's a huge coincidence that Robbie is Merry's older cousin... and he also happens to be a big reason Merry left her hometown the moment she graduated from high school. Robbie, at 36, is a divorced father of three. His ex-wife is remarried and has custody of their children. Facing freedom of sorts, Robbie decided to pursue his dream career in music, but because he has no real musical talent, he chose to open up a record store instead. Robbie is a gruff and uncouth man with a "my way or the highway" attitude, although he's the kind of guy that acts charming and funny to get what he wants from the ladies, and disappears the next day. One might describe him as a man with few morals, and Merry wants nothing to do with him for good reason.

Sheila is Merry's mother. Merry is her oldest child, who she had at seventeen after an unintended pregnancy. Like Merry, she is a bit aloof, and never shared who she suspected was Merry's father. Coming from a rural farming town with little education, teenage pregnancies were common, and she had already been seeing Roy Lockwood, so after giving birth, he married her and adopted Merry as his oldest daughter. While private in terms of her personal life, Sheila has a strong sense of right and wrong, and isn't afraid to tell anyone. When Merry expressed a desire to go to college, she was against it, believing her daughter should focus on more traditional pursuits: marriage and a family. She lost contact with her oldest daughter, but after all these years, she gets word from her sister, Wanda - Robbie's mother - that her nephew discovered Merry's whereabouts, and she is determined to go and correct the mistakes they both made 12 years earlier.