Sweet Return Read Online Free PDF Page B

you sell perfume and permanent waves.”
    Just as Hatlowites made good-natured fun of Joanna’s egg business, they made fun of her other businesses, too. She tried to ignore the jeers. Multidimensional, she called herself. She wanted to live in Hatlow, but with the town having almost no job market, she’d had to figure out how to make a living on her own. If she hadn’t been able to mold it all together and make it work, she would have had to stay in Lubbock, where she had gone to college for a year and beauty school for another year and worked as a hairdresser and nail tech for a short time. Or she might have had to move to Amarillo, or, God forbid, Fort Worth. She would hate any of those options. “Mom, do you not have any customers this morning?”
    “I’m waitin’ on Ida Crocker. She’s comin’ in for a perm.”
    “Please tell me you asked her to leave Charlie at home.”
    Charlie was a miniature Yorkie weighing less than four pounds, but he barked louder than a St. Bernard and snarled and snapped at other patrons who came into the beauty shop. He usually left a deposit in some corner or under a station so that someone had to crawl under and clean up his souvenir after Ida left.
    “I always ask her, but she does what she wants. I hate to say too much. That dog’s all she’s got, and I need the business.”
    “Hm.” Joanna returned to her office, unlocked a file cabinet drawer and lifted out a small stack of invoices.
    Her mother followed and braced a shoulder against the doorjamb, blocking the doorway. “I heard Lane Cherry’s in a bad way. What’s Clova gonna do now?”
    Good question, Joanna thought, dropping into her desk chair and sorting the invoices on her desktop. “Whatever she has to, Mom. You know Clova.”
    “Suzy Martinez from the bank said she’s in real bad shape. Financially, I mean. She could lose that ranch.”
    Ah, gossip. The beauty salon was a conduit of unparalleled effectiveness in spreading it. With no fewer than three full-time hairdressers and their patrons present most of the time, every triumph and tragedy that occurred in Hatlow was picked apart and analyzed daily. Only occasionally in a malicious way, Joanna was always quick to point out.
    She didn’t look up from her sorting task. “Suzy shouldn’t be coming to the beauty shop and talking about the bank’s customers. That’s private information. I just wonder what she tells about my business.”
    “She don’t mean no harm. She’s just concerned.”
    “Mom, she has a vicious mouth and it’s scary that she has access to everyone in town’s financial information. Don’t you need to get ready for Ida?”
    “Yeah.” Mom looked across the store and out the wide display window. “And here she comes now. Carrying Charlie.”
    “Just try to make sure she hangs on to him,” Joanna said in her cranky voice. Suzy, a Farmers Bank employee, talking about Clova’s money, or lack of it, in the beauty shop had rankled her and compounded her bad mood. “Even if Charlie was a sweet dog instead of a pest, you know we can’t have even a little dog running around the shop. It’s unsanitary. He’s supposed to be a lap dog, so make him stay on her lap.”
    “My Lord, Joanna, I don’t know where you got such a bee in your bonnet about keeping everything so damn clean. You sure didn’t inherit that from me.”
    No kidding, Joanna thought, glancing up at her mother with an arch look.
    Alvadean pushed away from the doorjamb and went out into the beauty supply store. Joanna heard the front door chime, then heard her mother greeting Ida.
    Joanna booted up her computer, opened the file she had named EGGS and began to study the records. She did that often. As she perused the record of the baby chicks purchased compared to the hens lost or the ones that had stopped laying, her thoughts traveled back to how she came to own two hundred hens.
    She had Clova to thank. Two and a half years ago, at the older friend’s urging, Joanna