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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. She felt as if 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 seem to 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 business 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 a small entrepreneur, if she couldn’t afford to hire help, 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 free herself of guilt and a constant feeling of obligation, she needed her own little piece of real estate. In West Texas, land was cheap, 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. She tried to think of how she could find out whether that was true. She decided to call his California number again.
    This time, a woman who sounded like Betty Boop answered the phone. Joanna knew it was none of her business, but she couldn’t keep from wondering who the woman might be, because Clova had said he 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 ranch in the late afternoon, she didn’t see Clova anywhere outdoors in the places where she usually could be found, but both of the ranch’s pickups and the ATV that no one 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