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she said. “And I’m afraid that we were forced to have our weekly staff meeting without you.”
    Amelia’s eyes narrowed. Obviously, the woman was going to make things hard for D.J. She would be on eagle-eyed watch for any trouble, any error, any weakness, and she would use that against D.J. while she was on probation. Amelia was going to try to get her old job back any way she could. That was as clear as if she’d said it aloud. She didn’t need to verbalize. D.J. could easily interpret the woman’s body language, and it was saying something like, “I’ll get you, my pretty. And your little dog, too.”

102. Miscellany of Philosophy
    S cott took his early-morning run along the banks of the small green brook that meandered along the west edge of his hometown and gave the community its name. The path was well worn by hikers, joggers, walkers and those in search of a good fishing spot. Scott had been up and down it so many times, in so many seasons, in every kind of weather, that he really no longer saw the stands of tall native grass or the hard, leathery fruit on the hedge apple tree. He didn’t hear the throaty call of the meadowlark singing for his ladylove or the trickle of the water as it passed among the stepping-stones.
    He had taken up running in high school to combat sexual frustration. He could never have imagined back then that at age thirty he’d still need it...and for the same reason. He felt like moaning aloud. Instead he picked up the pace.
    Scott rounded the corner and at the fork in the path, took the incline that led around the edge of the nearby cemetery. A sturdy stone wall fronted the area, but on the side where he ran, no one had bothered to build one. There were no grazing cattle to get in and no sleepwalking ghosts to get out. Near the southeast corner, he spared a glance in the direction of his father’s final resting place. Even now, more than a year later, the loss still ached. His dad had been a great man. Not in the sense of money or power. John Sanderson had been fair, trustworthy and hardworking. He was a man to be counted upon to step up and help. And it didn’t matter to him if the need came from a neighbor or a stranger. He was honest, almost to a fault. And you could tell him anything and he’d never judge, never even bat an eye. He’d been the one person his son could speak to in confidence.
    The worst thing about Kansas, his father had said on that long-ago morning when Scott had made his embarrassing confession, is that with the exception of death or the weather, we grow up thinking everything bad that happens to us is somehow our own fault, even when it is not.
    That had turned out to be the truth. But the truth had not set him free.
    At the blacktopped street, officially named Cottonwood Avenue, but known by everyone in town as Cemetery Road, he paused. To his right a path cut through a scraggle of overgrown milkweed to his parent’s home. He needed to check in on his mother. It had been almost a week since he’d seen her and she wasn’t the type to call and say she needed something. Then he remembered what Maureen had said about the new librarian rooming with her. That could be good. That could be very good.
    Scott smiled as he turned north toward his own home. Verdant was already wide-awake and people would be making their way to the drugstore very soon. He’d have to stop by his mother’s later on.
    A half hour later, promptly opening the pharmacy doors, he was showered, groomed and appropriately dressed in his side-button shirt with the standing band collar. His name was embroidered on the pocket, but the style was strictly his dad’s. While his colleagues wore white coats, scrubs or even their favorite golf shirt, at Sanderson Drug the uniform of the day was still stuck in the 1960s.
    Scott was okay with that. The shirts were comfortable, incredibly inexpensive and looked amazingly formal. Medical compounds that spilled or splashed could be destructive to