Moonglow, Texas. Mary Mcbride

it wasn’t where he’d been swilling it earlier. His ratty lawn chair was empty.

      Molly glanced at her watch. She had a one o’clock appointment for a root touch-up. Maybe, since it was Tuesday and hardly anybody in Moonglow got her hair done this early in the week, Raylene could fit her in a little bit early.

      Raylene Earl wasn’t exactly a friend. Unable to disclose anything about her life prior to her arrival in Moonglow, Molly wasn’t in a position to make friends. Of course, that didn’t keep the hairdresser from talking her head off.

      Raylene’s hair was pink this week.

      “Well, I dunno,” she was saying. “They call it Sunset, so naturally I was expecting something on the gold side. You know, the way the sun sets here in Moonglow. I’m getting used to it now, but lemme tell you, it played hell with my Passionate Pink lipstick and nail polish. I’m wearing Strawberry Frappé now.” She waved a hand under Molly’s nose. “What do you think, hon?”

      “I like it,” Molly replied, her typical three words in exchange for Raylene’s hundred.

      “Yeah? I dunno. I think it looks like I stuck my fingers in a jam jar or something.” She pursed her lips, studying them in the mirror over the top of Molly’s head. “Buddy says why worry when they kiss just the same, but then what can you expect from a man who wears his skivvies inside out half the time and swears it doesn’t matter?”

      “Does it matter?” Molly got in her three words while Raylene dragged in a breath through her strawberry-frappéed lips.

      “Of course it matters. Good Lord, Molly, would you want somebody reading your waist size every time you bent over?”

      Molly laughed. “I guess not.”

      “Not that you’re not a tiny little thing, even if you do persist in wearing clothes that don’t show off your choicest parts. They’re having a sale at Minden’s this week. Thirty percent off everything, if you’re in the mood for a little change.”

      “Oh, no thanks.”

      What Raylene didn’t know was that Molly had already undergone a change of huge proportions. Kathryn had left behind a closet full of conservative suits and dark, understated shoes. There was no need to replace them. Nobody here wore suits except the banker and the undertaker, and those outfits tended toward odd colors and western cuts. In laid-back Moonglow, most people thought glen plaid was somebody’s name.

      Ordering online, Molly had slowly filled her closet with soft skirts, tunics, a few khaki shorts and slacks. It had taken her a while to get the colors right. Kathryn, with her dark hair, light blue eyes and fair skin, was a Winter, who looked best in blacks and whites and true reds. Blond Molly, on the other hand, couldn’t handle Kathryn’s colors. She had no idea what season Molly had turned into, but, to her dismay, she now looked best in shades she’d always detested. Washed-out blues, sherbet hues. So, in addition to hating her life, she hated her clothes.

      “Oh, I know what I meant to ask you the minute you came in,” Raylene said as she dabbed more bleach preparation on Molly’s roots. “What’s the deal with the trailer? You got relatives visiting from up north?”

      “No. Not relatives. A handyman is doing some repairs on my house. He’s from around here, I guess. At least, that’s what I assumed.”

      “Oh, yeah? What’s his name?”

      “Shackelford.”

      Raylene’s hands dropped to Molly’s shoulders. “Not Danny Shackelford!”

      “Well. Dan.”

      “Oh, my Lord!” Raylene whooped. “Oh, my dear sweet Lord.”

      In the mirror Molly saw a woman she hadn’t yet met come through the door. The hairdresser saw her, too, and immediately called out, “JoEllen, you’re not gonna believe who’s back. Not in a million, jillion years.”

      “Who?” JoEllen didn’t look all that interested until Raylene told her the handyman’s name, but once she heard it, she was whooping, too. “Danny Shackelford. If that’s not a blast from the past, I don’t know what is. How long’s he been gone, Raylene? Fourteen, fifteen years?”

      “More like nineteen,” Raylene said over her shoulder. “He took off right after old Miss Hannah passed away, and that’s been close to twenty years.” She met Molly’s eyes in the mirror. “How’s he look? You’ll break my heart if you tell me he’s got a potbelly and a receding hairline.”

      “He looks fine,” Molly said, lifting her shoulders in a little shrug beneath her plastic cape.

      “Fine! Oh, honey, you can do better than that. Now, what is it? Fine as in you wouldn’t kick him out of bed? Or fine as in you’d sell your soul to the devil to get him there?”

      JoEllen, the newcomer, chuckled while she poured a cup of coffee. “If memory serves, that wouldn’t be all that hard to do, Raylene.”

      “He was pretty wild, I take it,” Molly said, suddenly not all that comfortable with the thought of Dan Shackelford roaming like some feral beast through her house.

      “Wild?” Raylene exclaimed. “Well, let me put it this way. If Moonglow had had a zoo, Danny Shackelford would have been the main attraction. Right, JoEllen?”

      The two women drifted off to other topics then, with Molly putting in her occasional three words while her thoughts strayed repeatedly to the man lazing under the live oak in her backyard. A sleepy lion on some distant savanna, waiting for a slower, weaker creature to appear.

      Dan was putting in the last screw on the new brass lock of the double-hung window in the living room so he had a perfect view of Molly Hansen walking along Second Street on her way back from town.

      Her stride was long with her feet turned out slightly, like a ballet dancer. Her skirt swung softly around her shapely calves with each step. What idiot at WITSEC had thought a woman like that would be invisible in a town like Moonglow? She stood out like a diamond in a pile of wood chips.

      “God bless it!”

      The screwdriver slipped and gouged a chunk out of his thumb. A little reminder from the gods that he was here to do a job, not ogle a pretty blonde from a window. Then, a second later, as if to really drive home their point, the deities pinched the flesh of his thigh between the entrance and exit scars.

      “Yeah. Okay. Okay,” Dan muttered, grimacing as he finished tightening the screw on the lock. “I get the message.”

      He tossed the screwdriver into the paint-stained toolbox he’d bought early that morning from Harley Cates after it had occurred to him that a handyman couldn’t very well show up without the tools of his trade.

      Harley had recognized him right off the bat, which had been more than a bit disconcerting, considering he hadn’t seen the old codger in nearly twenty years.

      Dan had dug around in Harley’s barn for a while, deflecting the old man’s questions as best he could.

      “How much do you want for this old toolbox, Harley?” he’d asked him.

      “I’d ask twenty from a stranger, Danny, but since you’re Miss Hannah’s boy and all, I’ll take fifteen.”

      Dan had opened his wallet, relieved to see that he had the fifteen bucks.

      “You back to stay, son?” Harley asked, folding the fives and sliding them into his back pocket.

      “No, I’m just passing through.”

      “Don’t let much grass grow under you, huh? Shackelfords are like that. All but Miss Hannah, God rest her soul.”

      Dan looked out the window again now. Molly Hansen was pulling a little grocery cart behind her. He could almost hear Miss Hannah saying, “Don’t stand there like you’ve put down roots, boy. Where’s your manners? Go give that little girl a hand.”

      “Thanks,