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someone in particular to whom you’re referring?”
    Bless her mother’s heart, she was an English teacher to the core. She was the only person Daisy knew who actually said
whom
—well, except for herself. The acorn hadn’t fallen far from the mother oak. Even when her mother was upset, her phrasing remained exact.
    Daisy shook her head, and wiped the tears away so she could face them again. “No, I’m not suffering from unrequited love. But I want to get married and have babies before I get too old, and the only way that’s going to happen is if I make some major changes.”
    “What sort of major changes?” Aunt Jo asked warily.
    “Look at me!” Daisy indicated herself from head to foot. “I’m boring, and I’m mousy. Who’s going to look at me twice? Even poor Wally Herndon wasn’t interested. I have to make some major changes to
me.”
    She took a deep breath. “I need to spruce myself up. I need to make men look at me. I need to start going places where I’m likely to meet single men, such as nightclubs and dances.” She paused, expecting objections, but was met with only silence. She took another deep breath and blurted out the biggie: “I need to get my own place to live.” Then she waited.
    Another sisterly glance was exchanged. The moment stretched out, and Daisy’s nerves stretched along with it. What would she do if they strenuously objected? Could she hold out against them? The problem was that she loved them and wanted them to be happy, she didn’t want to upset them or make them ashamed of her.
    They both turned back to her with identical broad smiles on their faces.
    “Well, it’s about time,” Aunt Jo said.
    “We’ll help,” her mother said, beaming.

TWO
    D aisy drove to work on automatic pilot. Luckily she had no stop signs to worry about and only one traffic light: one of the benefits of small-town life. She lived only five blocks from the library and, to save the environment, often walked to work if the weather was good, but the rain was still pouring down and during the summer the heat always got the best of her conscience anyway.
    Her brain fizzed with plans, and before she put her purse in the bottom drawer of her desk, she took out the sheet of paper on which she had scribbled the items she needed to tackle, to study them again. Her mother and Aunt Jo had been bubbling with excitement, adding their own ideas, and after careful thought they had all agreed that she should take care of the big-ticket items first. She had a healthy balance in her checking account,due to living with her mother and Aunt Jo and sharing expenses with them, not that the groceries and utilities ever amounted to that much, and the old house was long since paid for. Her car was an eight-year-old Ford, financed for three years, so she hadn’t even had a car payment for the past five years. The salary of a small-town librarian wasn’t great, even though she was director of the library, which was a glorified title that didn’t amount to anything, since the mayor’s office retained hiring and firing authority; she got to choose which books the library bought with its less-than-impressive budget, and that was about it. But when you put at least half, sometimes more, of even an unimpressive salary into savings every year, it added up. She had even begun investing in the stock market, after carefully researching her chosen companies on the Internet, and done very well, if she did say so herself. Not that Warren Buffett had any reason for jealousy, but she was proud of her nest egg.
    The bottom line was, she could easily afford a place of her own. However, there weren’t very many places available for rent in Hillsboro, Alabama. She could always move to one of the larger towns, Scottsboro or Fort Payne, but she wanted to stay close. Her sister had already moved to Huntsville, and though that wasn’t really all that far, about an hour’s drive, it still wasn’t the same as living in the same town.