rattle your cage. I don’t even spend time online so what do I care?”
Eddie nearly growled. “I care. And I’m calling the damn lawyer to get somebody on this.”
“Um,” she said in a little girl type moan. “I think you meant dam of the three letter persuasion and not the four letter kind right.” Her wide eyes bucked to astronomical levels at least made his lips crack a smile.
“I love this kid,” Justin said.
“Me too. And we are going to fix this.”
She shrugged. “Okay. I shall let you do what you all do. But since I’m like family to you all you can’t go stressing yourself into a heart attack over this. Let’s just let lawyers do what they do and forget about the people who think I’m some uppity white-girl wanna be too stuck up for some imaginative black man they have conjured up to love and support and respect me if I would just open my arms to him.”
Both men laughed again. “You are so much like my daughter—laid back and go with the flow.”
She shrugged again. “I wasn’t always so laid back. The plane crash changed me. After mourning the loss of my family I had to realize life is just too short to live with stress, fear, and regrets. I won’t let anybody steal my joy from me.”
Both men smiled at her with sympathy and compassion in their eyes. Eddie patted her shoulder while Justin reached across the small space where her hand was on the desk to pat her hand.
“Now, you go deal with lawyers and Justin and I have to deal with the errant dangling D,” she said as she tapped the printout of the article in discussion before the storm about her blew in. This article had to go in June’s magazine and that meant it was going to print in less than forty-eight hours. It would have to get final approval, but it would still need to be mailed out early enough for everybody to get it so this was pretty much their final approval process. There was no way they were going to trash over forty-eight hundred early deliveries just because somebody dropped the ball. It wasn’t her company but even she knew that would be financially stupid.
Shelia had worked the full day but she hit the gym that night with a fury. She was a little angry. Her picture was online. She didn’t have any pictures there because there wasn’t a need for them to be there. She didn’t even advertise her fashionable skills either. She was a private person and always had been and some idiot had decided to take a picture of her and post it online with lies. Jeeze, a person couldn’t even walk from door to car without somebody being an inconsiderate rat jerk.
She did agree with both men that it had to come from within. Nobody really knew her. She didn’t socialize much in the state at all and it had been a while since she had really spent time in South Dakota for anything. Friends emailed her to see how she was doing, but she never wanted to go back to visit so it wasn’t as if they would know much about her life and drive all the way here to take a picture and slander her and then go for broke on libel and put the lies in writing. They weren’t those kind of people. Plus most of her friends there thought she should marry a Lakota anyway.
By the time she finished beating the red and white bag like it stole something from her she was hot, sweating like what her mother would call a six shooter, and exhausted. She had driven to the gym, which was good because had she ran there she wouldn’t be getting home without a nap on the ground beneath her.
Maybe she should take a trip back to reservation this year. She had missed a lot of the festivities she normally went to. She had missed some of her friends, but at the same time it would make her think a lot of her father. He always took her to see the tribal grounds, learn about her heritage and the goodness that was within her. She would sit on his lap and watch the dances. She had even learned some of the language that even some of the younger generation wasn’t sitting
Rebecca Hamilton, Conner Kressley