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wide as she was tall. Thanks to a monthly dose of Miss Clairol, her hair had remained nearly the same bright red in the past three decades of her life as it had the first three. She had a deep dimple on either cheek and green eyes that could bathe a person in approval or dress them down with equal effectiveness.
    “Was that Andy I saw tearing off down the street?” she asked, her voice cracking under the remains of a cold.
    “Yeah,” Bobby Jack said, unable to keep the defeat from his response. He crossed the office and helped her unload, placing her things on her desk.
    “Hey, now,” Alice said, patting his shoulder with a hand arthritis was starting to get the better of. “They don’t know what they’re saying at that age. Their brain’s been temporarily taken hostage by hormones.”
    “Isn’t there something a doctor can prescribe for that?”
    Alice laughed, picking up her purse and putting it behind her desk, then walking over to give Florence a pat on the head. “If there was, I don’t know a parent who wouldn’t be lining up at Doc Barker’s door. Unfortunately, it’s one of those things you just have to swim through to get to the other side.”
    Bobby Jack sat down at his own desk, leaned back with his hands laced behind his head. “Why can’t they stay like they were when they were ten? Before all the puberty crap? At ten, you can have an honest conversation with them, and yet they still look at you like you might know a thing or two.”
    Alice lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “That, you’ll have to ask the man upstairs. So what was the upset between you, anyway?”
    “She wants to enter some ridiculous contest to win a date with a duke.”
    Alice raised penciled-in eyebrows. “Really, now?”
    “Like there’s even a remote possibility the thing is on the up and up.”
    “And? What’s the worst that can happen if it’s not?”
    He considered this, then shook his head. “She’ll end up feeling foolish.”
    “So let her.”
    “Let her?” Bobby Jack shot back. “What kind of advice is that?”
    “The only kind that’s going to get you out of the dog house.”
    “If it keeps her from making a mistake, I’m willing to stay there a while.”
    “Bobby Jack. You’ve got to let that girl start making some of her own mistakes. For the child’s whole life, you’ve been throwing yourself in front of her every time she gets ready to fall. How’s she ever going to learn what it’s like to have to pick herself back up when you’re no longer there to act as a mattress?”
    “You got plans for her to go somewhere or something?”
    “The last I checked you’re as human as the rest of us. At some point, you have to let them grow up, Bobby Jack.”
    He glanced out the window, saw Priscilla’s banana yellow Corvette pull into a parking space across the street. “Yeah, maybe. But first there’s something else I’ve got to do.”
    Florence at his heels, he stepped outside of the office onto the sidewalk, then jaywalked in front of Pete Thompson’s old clunker farm use truck. Pete, almost as ancient in appearance as the truck itself, shook a finger out his rolled down window and honked the horn.
    Bobby Jack just smiled and waved, as if he couldn’t hear Pete’s grumbling through the lowered window.
    Most days, Bobby Jack went to great lengths to avoid run-ins with his ex-wife, succeeding largely even though their respective businesses were right across the street from one another. When she’d sailed back into town a few years ago and opened up her Well-Kept Woman Day Spa and Salon right across the street from him, he’d considered moving. But he liked his office. As a matter of principle, if anyone moved, it should be Priscilla.
    In the parking lot, he stopped just short of her car, shoving his hands in his pockets to keep from giving in to the temptation to strangle her.
    “What the devil kind of nonsense are you trying to fill my daughter’s head with now?”
    “You mean our