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towns to the south to keep from driving to Lubbock and dealing with the traffic madness. Most small-town West Texans, used to the wide-open spaces, equated a trip to Lubbock with a trip to hell. If requested to do so, Joanna even provided shipping.
    She walked out into the store to talk to Bert, a wiry-haired older gentleman and a Hatlow native. “What needs disinfecting at the elementary school?”
    “Oh, nothing different,” Bert answered. “Just trying to keep the place clean and wipe out a few germs.” He reached into his shirt pocket and produced a purchase order from the Wacker County School District. “Those kids sure do mess things up.” He bent over the counter and filled in the blanks on the purchase order forms. “Makes you wonder what they’re like at home.”
    “I know what you mean,” Joanna said absently, though she really didn’t. She had no children. And at her age, unmarried and too busy to even think about kowtowing to some man, she wasn’t likely to have any.
    “I heard about Lane Cherry’s wreck.” Bert shook his gray head.
    “Yeah, I suppose everybody has by now.”
    “That boy’s gonna kill hisself one o’ these days.”
    Joanna had heard that comment about Lane for years, but she was unconvinced. He seemed to have nine lives. “I know.”
    “How’s Clova holding up under the strain?”
    “Oh, you know Clova. She’s the Energizer Bunny. She just keeps going and going.”
    “Do ya reckon Dalton will come back and help her out?”
    All of a sudden, everyone seemed to be interested in what Dalton Parker might do next. “Who knows? Maybe.”
    “I heard he’s over in I-raq taking pictures.”
    Joanna’s expectations plummeted. If he wasn’t even in the country, he wouldn’t be coming back to Texas to help out his mother anytime soon. Now what? she wondered. “Really? I hadn’t heard that.”
    The custodian gathered four plastic gallon jugs and brought them back to the cash register. “Gonna be a hot one today. We’ll be lucky if we don’t get one o’ them barn flatteners tonight.”
    Joanna glanced through the shop’s plate-glass windows and saw an overcast sky. The temperature had already climbed to ninetysomething before she left home. Bert was right. Conditions were coming together for a violent storm in the evening. She needed to get out to Clova’s early and pen up the hens.
    “How’s your egg business doin’?”
    “It’s okay, Bert. It’s doing okay. In fact, I’m out in front of my business plan. I’m hoping to show a profit this year.” An exaggeration, but not a total fib. She believed putting a positive spin on things did no harm.
    “How’re those hens gettin’ along with those donkeys?”
    Joanna had adopted two rescue donkeys from the Bureau of Land Management in New Mexico, having read that donkeys, while harmless to chickens, would frighten away other predators. “Great,” Joanna answered. “They’re buds.”
    Bert gave an old man’s heh-heh-heh. “I laugh ever’ time I think about donkeys and chickens grazin’ with the cows on that ranch. Lord, Earl Cherry’s prob’ly spinnin’ in his grave.”
    Joanna huffed. “From what I’ve heard about him, he’s lucky if that’s the worst that’s happening to him.”
    “Yep. Ol’ Earl was cut from a different cloth, that’s fer sure. I s’pose when he was livin’, he was awful unkind to his family.”
    As he lugged his purchases toward the front door, she stepped ahead of him, opened the door and held it for him.
    “You stay out of the weather, now, you hear?” he said.
    “I will,” she assured him.
    As she completed the paperwork on the sale of supplies to the school, her mother came in from the salon. Mom might work six days a week, but she kept banker’s hours. “Taking a break?” Joanna asked her.
    “I wish you’d make up your mind just what business you’re gonna be in, Joanna. Everybody in the shop was gigglin’ ’bout you sellin’ disinfectant from the same counter