9 Ways to Fall in Love

by Caroline Clemmons

  "How's Clova holding up under the strain?"

  "Oh, you know Clova. She's the Energizer Bunny. She just keeps going and going."

  "Do ya reckon Dalton will come back and help her out?"

  All of a sudden, everyone seemed to be interested in what Dalton Parker might do next. "Who knows? Maybe."

  "I heard he's over in I-raq taking pictures."

  Good grief. How would Bert Marshall know such obscure information? Joanna asked herself.

  Her expectations plummeted. If Clova’s son wasn't even in the country, he wouldn't be coming back to Texas to help out his mother anytime soon. Now what? she wondered. "Really? I hadn't heard that."

  The custodian gathered four plastic gallon jugs and brought them back to the cash register. "Gonna be a hot one today. We'll be lucky if we don't get one o' them barn flatteners tonight."

  Joanna glanced through the shop's plate-glass windows and saw an overcast sky. The temperature had already climbed to ninety-something before she left home. Bert was right. Conditions were coming together for a violent storm in the evening. She needed to get out to Clova's early and pen up the hens.

  "How's your egg business doin'?"

  "It's okay, Bert. It's doing okay. In fact, I'm out in front of my business plan. I'm hoping to show a profit this year." An exaggeration, but not a total fib. She believed putting a positive spin on things did no harm.

  "How're those hens gettin' along with those donkeys?"

  Joanna had adopted two rescue donkeys from the Bureau of Land Management in New Mexico, having read that donkeys, while harmless to chickens, would frighten away other predators. "Great," Joanna answered. "They're buds."

  Bert gave an old man's heh-heh-heh. "I laugh ever' time I think about donkeys and chickens grazin' with the cows on that ranch. Lord, Earl Cherry's prob'ly spinnin' in his grave."

  Joanna huffed. "From what I've heard about him, he's lucky if that's the worst that's happening to him."

  "Yep. Ol' Earl was cut from a different cloth, that's fer sure. When he was livin', he was awful unkind to his family."

  As he lugged his purchases toward the front door, Joanna stepped ahead of him, opened the door and held it for him.

  "You stay out of the weather, now, you hear?" he said.

  "I will," she assured him.

  As she completed the paperwork on the sale of supplies to the school, her mother came in from the salon. Mom might work six days a week, but she kept banker's hours. "Taking a break?" Joanna asked her.

  "I wish you'd make up your mind just what business you're gonna be in, Joanna. Everybody in the shop was gigglin' 'bout you sellin' disinfectant from the same counter you sell perfume and permanent waves."

  Just as Hatlowites made good-natured fun of Joanna's egg business, they made fun of her other businesses, too. She tried to ignore the jeers. Multidimensional, she called herself. She wanted to live in Hatlow, but with the town having almost no job market, she'd had to figure out how to make a living on her own. If she hadn't been able to mold it all together and make it work, she would have had to stay in Lubbock, where she had gone to college for two years, beauty school for another year and worked as a hairdresser and nail tech for a short time. Or she might have had to move to Amarillo, or, God forbid, Fort Worth. She would hate any of those options. "Mom, do you not have any customers this morning?"

  "I'm waitin' on Ida Crocker. She's comin' in for a perm."

  "Please tell me you asked her to leave Charlie at home."

  Charlie was a miniature Yorkie weighing less than four pounds, but he barked louder than a St. Bernard and snarled and snapped at other patrons who came into the beauty shop. He usually left a deposit in some corner or under a station so that someone had to crawl under and clean up his souvenir after Ida left.

  "I always ask her, but she does what she wants. I hate to say too much. That dog's all she's got and I need her business."

  "Hm." Joanna said, in no shape to pursue an argument.

  She returned to her office, unlocked a file cabinet drawer and lifted out a small stack of invoices.

  Her mother followed and braced a shoulder against the wall, blocking the entrance. "I heard Lane Cherry's in a bad way. What's Clova gonna do now?"

  Joanna dropped into her desk chair and began sorting the invoices on her desktop. Weary of the question that seemed to have no answer, she said, "Whatever she has to, Mom. You know Clova."

  "Suzy Martinez from the bank said she's in real bad shape. Financially, I mean. She could lose that ranch."

  Inwardly, Joanna sighed. The beauty salon was a conduit of unparalleled effectiveness in spreading tales. With three full-time hairdressers and their patrons present most of the time, every triumph and tragedy that occurred in Hatlow was picked apart and analyzed daily. Only occasionally in a malicious way, Joanna was always quick to remind herself.

  She didn't look up from her sorting task. "Suzy shouldn't be coming to the beauty shop and talking about the bank's customers. That's private information. I just wonder what she tells about my business."

  "She don't mean no harm. She's just concerned."

  "Mom, she has a vicious mouth and it's scary that she has access to everyone in town's financial information. If she worked at any other bank, she’d get fired. Don't you need to get ready for Ida?"

  "Yeah." Mom looked across the store and out the wide display window. "And here she comes now….And she’s carrying Charlie."

  "Just try to make sure she hangs on to him," Joanna said in her cranky voice. Suzy, a Farmers Bank employee, talking about Clova's money, or lack of it, in the beauty shop had rankled her and compounded her bad mood. "Even if Charlie was a sweet dog instead of a pest, you know we can't have even a little dog running around the shop. It's unsanitary. If the state inspector popped in, he’d probably write me up. Charlie's supposed to be a lap dog, so make him stay on Ida’s lap."

  "My Lord, Joanna, I don't know where you got such a bee in your bonnet about keeping everything so damn clean. You sure didn't inherit that from me."

  No kidding, Joanna thought, glancing up at her mother with an arch look.

  Alvadean pushed away from the wall and ambled out into the beauty supply store. The front door chimed, then Joanna heard her mother greeting Ida.

  She booted up her computer, opened the file she had named EGGS and began to study the records. She did that often. As she perused the record of the baby chicks purchased compared to the hens lost or the ones that had stopped laying, her thoughts traveled back to how she came to own two hundred hens.

  She had Clova to thank. Two and a half years ago, at the older friend's urging and offering of a small parcel of land rent-free, Joanna started with fifty pullets. Little by little, despite a constant battle with predators and the missteps of learning how to cull the roosters and retain and manage the hens, the flock of fifty had grown to two hundred.

  Why Clova had wanted to see her in the egg business, Joanna didn't know, but she had a suspicion. She thought it might have something to do with the fact that Clova was a lonely person whose two grown kids ignored her. Joanna believed she longed for company. Clova looked at her sort of as the daughter she never had and figured the chickens living at her place would ensure that Joanna would be out to the Parker ranch often.

  Now Joanna had a variety of hens, a few exotics along with a majority of the more common breeds of layers. She ended up with blue eggs, green eggs, even some she called "khaki" and many brown eggs. The exotic hens didn't lay as well as the more traditional layers, but it was fun to take "Easter eggs" to market. Her customers in Lubbock and Amarillo liked them, too.

  She collected three dollars per dozen at wholesale or five dollars at retail. Customers didn't balk at the prices. That fact blew Joanna away. A few years back, she wouldn't have believed someone would pay more than forty cents an egg for a dozen free-range eggs. But there it was. Another fad. The American way.

  In spite of those numbers, she wasn't making a fortune. The bus
iness barely paid its way, and during some months, she had to dip into the funds from the beauty salon or the retail store to pay for something related to the egg business. She fretted day and night over how to make more profit from the eggs. If the business made more money, she could hire someone to work at it full-time and not be so tied down herself. But alas, she knew only too well that as a small entrepreneur, if she couldn't afford to hire help, she had to be willing to do any and every task required.

  Sometimes she felt guilty about using Clova's land rent free, but every time she looked at the egg business's financial records, that guilt slunk into the background. The plain truth was that if she were required to pay rent to Clova or anyone else, the egg business would be in the hole monthly.

  To rid herself of guilt and a constant feeling of obligation, she needed her own little piece of real estate. Land was cheap in West Texas, but now, the chance of her finding enough extra money to buy some of it was almost nonexistent.

  At one point, Joanna had held the Pollyanna-ish notion that the egg venture might grow into a business she could sell, then invest the proceeds in a retirement fund. She needed a retirement fund, having started to consider that she might be alone and self-supporting until the day she died.

  Thinking about the Parker ranch took her mind back to Clova's problems and hearing Bert say that Dalton Parker might be in Iraq. How could she find out whether that was true? On a huge sigh, she decided to call his California number again.

  This time, a woman who sounded like Betty Boop, answered the phone. Couldn’t be a wife. Clova had said Dalton was divorced now. The phone answerer reported that he had gone to run errands, so Joanna repeated the same message she had left on his voice mail earlier and added, "I would really, really like to talk to him."

  * * *

  When Joanna reached the Lazy P in the late afternoon, she didn't see Clova anywhere, but both of the ranch's pickups and the ATV that neither she nor Clova could start were parked in their shed near the barn. Joanna walked over to the house, knocked on the screen door and called out.

  Clova came to the door and invited her in. "I was just makin' a sandwich for supper. Come on in and eat with me."

  Joanna followed her into the kitchen and Clova proceeded to build a sandwich, complaining about store-bought produce as she stacked tomato slices, then crispy bacon onto two slabs of homemade bread. Yum.

  Supper over, Joanna helped straighten the kitchen, then went to her egg-processing room, which had been an unused, tumbledown outbuilding Clova had let her convert. Joanna used the room to wash and store the eggs until they could be delivered to their respective markets.

  After studying egg operations in the library and online, she had designed the interior herself. A friend who worked as a mechanic had saved her a few dollars by bringing his steam washer out and steam cleaning the floor and walls. She hired a handyman to insulate the walls and ceiling and hang new wallboard. Then she painted the room herself with a soft blue enamel paint so she could easily wash the surfaces. The room's finish was one of the many expenses that had been covered by the money she had borrowed against her home—light blue ceramic tile half way up the walls, gleaming white tile on the floors, stainless steel sinks, coolers and refrigerators and utility carts, a sterilizer in which to wash her tools and equipment.

  For the most part, she was pleased with the project. She felt a surge of pride every time she walked into the clean, brightly lit blue room. Just like her businesses downtown, she had done the best with what she had to make her egg operation look professional.

  She had already put on her work clothes before she left the shop in town, so all she had to do was pull on a pair of canvas gloves. From the utility storage shelves against the back wall, she took wire baskets and a blue plastic bucket in which to put any broken eggs she might pick up and moseyed out to the nests.

  "Evening, ladies," she said to a few hens scratching and pecking near the gate. "Let's go see if you girls have been busy while I've been gone."

  Three of them trailed along with her as she gathered eggs. People had told her that chickens, with little-bitty brains, were stupid. They might be, but her hens had personalities.

  Some of them had become pets. Dulce, an Ameraucauna named by Alicia, was one that had. Alicia had originally named her Pequeño Pollo Dulce, or Sweet Little Chicken, but Joanna talked the teenager into shortening the name to Dulce. The hen would hop up on Joanna's lap, and if Joanna rubbed her head with her finger, Dulce would cluck and sing. Often, the little white hen faithfully followed her, pecking and clucking, all through the egg gathering.

  Joanna usually gathered eggs morning and evening. Frequent emptying of the nests prevented breakage and egg eating by the hens as well as too many egg losses to predators she couldn't keep out—snakes and skunks and bobcats. Because Alicia had collected some of the eggs this morning, the afternoon's gathering would be all for today.

  From two hundred chickens, she collected an average of fourteen dozen eggs per day. She lost a few in the washing process and rejected some misshapen ones. Sometimes she set a carton aside for Clova or Mom and a few more to sell to locals who came into the beauty shop to buy them. But she hadn't found many Hatlow citizens willing to pay five dollars for a dozen eggs.

  Today she would end up with roughly twelve dozen to add to the order she was accumulating for the Better Health stores in Lubbock and Amarillo and a couple of restaurants near the college. That number would net about thirty-six bucks a day, not much profit for the amount of work she did. If she was going to make it big as an egg farmer, she needed to find some superhens that could lay more often than every three days or she had to have more than two hundred producers.

  * * *

  Before Dalton was ready to leave his office, Candace came in. Apparently she had recovered from her snit. "She doesn't sound old," she said.

  Funny how they both knew what she meant without her actually saying it. Since his return, she had started to show a possessive streak and insert herself into what he claimed as "his space." He didn't recall her being that pushy before he left.

  "No, I guess she doesn't," he replied warily.

  "Are you going to call her back?"

  He had never discussed his family with Candace. Or with anyone except for his ex-wife long ago. "I don't know," he answered sharply.

  She angled a sultry pout in his direction. "Well, aren't you the big meanie." She came to where he stood and edged between him and his desk, rubbing her belly against his fly. "Dalty, I don't like women calling you," she said softly.

  "Candace, for chrissake, my brother's—"

  Her mouth on his halted what he would have said. He let her tongue play with his until things started to progress South and she had tugged the button of his jeans undone. His hands resting on the rise of her hips, he pulled back and looked at her. "Baby, I'm hungrier than hell. Where are we on those steaks and that salad?"

  She frowned and pushed out her lower lip, then moved away from him, rubbing herself against him like a pet cat as she went. "It's all ready. All you have to do is cook it."

  "Great," he said cheerily, hoping to ward off the fight he could see bubbling close to the surface.

  She sauntered toward the door, moving just slowly enough to let him take a good long look. She knew he would, too. A mane of whorls and swirls in a dozen shades of gold fell to the middle of her back. He let his eyes feast again on the tanned, perfectly heart-shaped ass that was bare except for a very tiny white bikini. White high-heeled shoes gave it a sexy swing. A white barely there halter top showed off her perfect tan and her sculptured tits. Candace Carlisle's very presence in a room made grown men slobber. She was, inarguably, the best-looking woman he had ever slept with. She wasn't a bad lay, either.

  But in too many ways, she was brain-dead.

  Exactly when his needs in a woman had transformed from the physical, he couldn't say, but lately a part of him he didn't understand seemed to require more than a raunchy roll in the hay.
Hell, he had even been able to spend three months overseas without getting laid once, which he still didn’t understand.

  Feeling like a chickenshit for his surliness—his screwed-up family wasn't her fault—he dropped the phone message on his desk, making a mental note to decide what to do about it later. He headed for his bedroom but stopped off at the bar in the rec room for a sip of Jack Daniel's. He stood for a few seconds and savored the burn all the way down. He hadn’t had good whiskey on his trip and he had missed it.

  He traded his jeans for a swimsuit and followed Candace out to the sunny backyard. Two thick porterhouses waited on one end of the barbecue grill and Candace was setting the table under the fiberglass patio cover. He walked over beside her, cupped a handful of firm ass cheek and squeezed. She leaned into him, and the scent of coconut sunscreen and hot woman surrounded him.

  "How well did she know you in school?" she asked.

  He arched his brow rather than voice his irritation. Trying to explain to Candace was too much trouble. He knew from experience that explanation would turn to argument. He replied by covering her mouth with his for another kiss and felt his penis thicken.

  When the kiss ended, she looked up at him with hooded eyes, her lips wet and vivid. Her hand came between them and she rubbed him through his swimsuit. "We don't have to eat right now," she said softly.

  "Baby, you're something else," he murmured.

  A knowing smile tipped the corners of her mouth. She knew she didn't have to do much to give him a hard-on. "So?"

  "So. We screwed half the morning."

  "But this is afternoon."

  "And I need my strength. Let me do some laps, then I'll cook the steaks." He slapped her bottom and said against her ear, "Don't let it get cold. I'm working on a comeback."

  He left her and dove into the lap pool that spanned the width of his backyard. God, he had missed this swimming pool those months in the desert.

  He swam in a smooth, steady crawl, pacing himself and thinking about Candace and his own restiveness. He had met her last year at a publicity photo gig. Not an assignment he normally hired out for, but the money had been too good to turn down. The shoot ran late and Candace had offered herself as a dinner companion. Then one thing had led to another.