Winter Roses. Diana Palmer

      Merrie chuckled. “To stop him from driving himself to them. Didn’t I mention that this is his second new XJ in six months?”

      Ivy lifted her eyebrows. “What happened to the first one?”

      “Slow traffic.”

      “Come again?”

      “He was in a hurry to a called meeting of the board of directors,” Merrie said. “There was a little old man driving a motor home about twenty miles an hour up a hill on a blind curve. Stuart tried to pass him. He almost made it, too,” she added. “Except that Hayes Carson was coming down the hill on the other side of the road in his squad car.”

      “What happened?” Ivy prompted when Merrie sat silently.

      “Stuart really is a good driver,” his sister asserted, “even if he makes insane decisions about where to pass. He spun the car around and stopped it neatly on the shoulder before Hayes got anywhere near him. But Hayes said he could have killed somebody and he wasn’t getting out of a ticket. The only way he got his license back was that he promised to go to traffic school and do public service.”

      “That doesn’t sound like your brother.”

      Merrie shrugged. “He did go to traffic school twice, and then he went to the sheriff’s department and showed Hayes Carson how to reorganize his department so that it operated more efficiently.”

      “Did Hayes actually ask him to do that?”

      “No. But Stuart argued that reorganizing the chaos in the sheriff’s department was a public service. Hayes didn’t agree. He went and talked to Judge Meacham himself. They gave Stuart his license back.”

      “You said he didn’t hit anything with the car.”

      “He didn’t. But while it was sitting on the side of the road, a cattle truck—one of his own, in fact—took the curve too fast and sideswiped it off the shoulder down a ten-foot ravine.”

      “I don’t guess the driver works for you anymore,” Ivy mused.

      “He does, but not as a driver,” Merrie said, laughing. “Considering how things could have gone, it was a lucky escape for everyone. It was a sturdy, well-built car, but those cattle trucks are heavy. It was a total loss.”

      “Even if I could afford a car, I don’t think I want to learn how to drive,” Ivy commented. “It seems safer not to be on the highway when Stuart’s driving.”

      “It is.”

      They snacked on cheese and crackers and finger sandwiches and cookies, and sipped coffee in perfect peace for several minutes.

      “Ivy, are you sure you’re cut out to be a public accountant?” Merrie asked after a minute.

      Ivy laughed. “What brought that on?”

      “I was just thinking about when we were still in high school,” she replied. “You had your heart set on singing opera.”

      “And chance would be a fine thing, wouldn’t it?” Ivy asked with a patient smile. “The thing is, even if I had the money to study in New York, I don’t want to leave Jacobsville. So that sort of limits my options. Singing in the church choir does give me a chance to do what I love most.”

      Merrie had to agree that this was true. “What you should really do is get married and have kids, and teach them how to sing,” she replied with a grin. “You’d be a natural. Little kids flock around you everywhere we go.”

      “What a lovely idea,” she enthused. “Tell you what, you gather up about ten or twelve eligible bachelors, and I’ll pick out one I like.”

      That set Merrie to laughing uproariously. “If we could do it that way, I might get married myself,” she confessed. “But I’d have to have a man who wasn’t afraid of Stuart. Talk about limited options…!”

      “Hayes Carson isn’t scared of him,” Ivy pointed out. “You could marry him.”

      “Hayes doesn’t want to get married. He says he likes his life uncluttered by emotional complications.”

      “Lily-livered coward,” Ivy enunciated. “No guts.”

      “Oh, he’s got guts. He just doesn’t think marriage works. His parents fought like tigers. His younger brother, Bobby, couldn’t take it, and he turned to drugs and overdosed. It had to affect Hayes, losing his only sibling like that.”

      “He might fall in love one day.”

      “So might my brother,” Merrie mused, “but if I were a betting woman, I wouldn’t bet on that any time soon.”

      “Love is the great equalizer.”

      “Love is a chemical reaction,” Merrie, the nursing student, said dryly. “It’s nothing more than a physical response to a sensory stimulus designed to encourage us to replicate our genes.”

      “Oh, yuuuck!” Ivy groaned. “Merrie, that’s just gross!”

      “It’s true—ask my anatomy professor,” Merrie defended.

      “No, thank you. I’ll take my own warped view of it as a miracle, thanks.”

      Merrie laughed, then she frowned. “Ivy, what are you eating?” she asked abruptly.

      “This?” She held up a cookie from the huge snack platter that contained crackers, cheese, cakes, little finger sandwiches and cookies. Mrs. Rhodes loved to make hors d’oeuvres. “It’s a cookie.”

      Merrie looked worried. “Ivy, it’s a chocolate cookie,” came the reply. “You know you’ll get a migraine if you eat them.”

      “It’s only one cookie,” she defended herself.

      “And there’s a low pressure weather system dumping rain on us, and you’ve had the stress of Rachel worrying you to death since your father’s funeral,” she replied. “Not to mention that your father’s only been dead for a few weeks. There’s always more than one trigger that sets off a migraine, even if you don’t realize what they are. Stuart gets them, too, you know, but it’s red wine or aged cheese that causes his.”

      Ivy recalled one terrible attack that Stuart had after he’d closed a tricky big business deal. It had been the day after he’d attended a band concert at Ivy and Merrie’s school soon after the girls had become friends. They were both in band. It had been Ivy who’d suggested strong coffee and then a doctor for Stuart. He’d never realized that his terrible sick headaches were, in fact, migraines, much less that there were prescriptions for them that actually worked. Ivy had suffered from them all her life. Her mother and her mother’s father had also had migraine headaches. They tended to run in families. They ran in Stuart’s, too. Even though Merrie hadn’t had one, her father had suffered with them. So had an uncle.

      “The doctor gave Stuart the preventative, after diagnosing the headache,” Merrie commented.

      “I can’t take the preventative,” Ivy replied. “I have a heart defect, and the medication causes abnormal heart rhythms in me. I have to treat the symptoms instead of the disease.”

      “I hope you brought your medicine.”

      Ivy looked at the chocolate cookie and ruefully put the remainder down on her plate. “I forgot to get it refilled.” Translated, that meant that she couldn’t afford it anymore. There was one remedy that was sold over the counter. She took it in desperation, although it wasn’t as effective as the prescription medicines were.

      “Stuart has pain medicine as well as the preventative,” Merrie said solemnly. “If you wake up in the night screaming in pain because of that cookie, we can handle it. Maybe when your father’s estate is settled, Rachel will leave you alone.”

      Ivy shook her head. “Rachel won’t rest until she gets every penny. She convinced