just date without everybody shoving them down the aisle?”
“Around here?” Eve said. “Nope.” She turned to Cynthia. “You see Russell more than Shannon does. What’s he really like?”
“Hey!” Shannon said. “Don’t put her on the spot with a question like that!”
“I don’t mind,” Cynthia said. “He’s really good to work for.”
“He seems kinda uptight,” Eve said.
“Not really,” Cynthia said. “He’s just careful about things.”
“Like I said. Uptight.”
Cynthia just smiled. “And he’s a good dentist.”
“Well, that’s exciting.”
“And he’s really nice to his patients when they can’t afford stuff.”
“Really?” Eve said.
“The other day, I overheard him tell a patient who couldn’t afford a filling that he needed practice on that particular procedure, so if she’d let him do it, he’d only charge her half.”
That surprised Shannon. She’d always thought of Russell as the kind of guy who was a little too proud of his professional services to ever discount them.
“But his diet,” Cynthia said. “Now, there’s something that needs to change.”
“His diet?” Shannon said.
Cynthia shuddered. “He eats frozen stuff out of a box almost every day for lunch. The ones that are nothing but a scrap of chicken and a pile of vegetables.”
“Oh, that. He’s just careful about his health.”
“In other words, uptight,” Eve said.
“Will you hush?” Shannon said.
“One time I offered to share my homemade macaroni and cheese with him,” Cynthia said. “He looked at it as if it was poison.” She shook her head sadly. “Too bad. He needs comfort food more than any man I’ve ever met.”
Shannon thought about her favorite homemade comfort food—a scoop of chocolate ice cream on top of a Twinkie covered with whipped cream out of a can. If she and Russell ever did get married and he expected her to cook, he’d be out of luck.
A minute later, Tasha slid onto the barstool next to Eve and set her giant orange handbag on the bar. She wore a casual jersey dress cinched by a skinny silver belt. The dress hit her mid-thigh, but it looked even shorter when she wore the platform pumps she had on this evening. Silver chandelier earrings came within an inch of grazing her shoulders.
“You made it after all,” Eve said.
“I was supposed to do a dry run on Trina Dobson’s up-do for her wedding, but she canceled.”
“The appointment or the wedding?”
“Both. I don’t have the details yet. I’ll let you know.” Tasha looked at Shannon’s hair and frowned. “You have split ends.”
“Hello to you, too, Tasha.”
“Right there,” Tasha said, flicking the ends of Shannon’s hair. “And they’re only going to get worse.”
Shannon worried about a lot of things, but split ends wasn’t one of them. “I’ll be in for a haircut soon.”
“You’re also getting gray hairs.”
“It’s stress,” Eve said.
“It’s genetics,” Shannon said. “You have gray hairs, too. You just cover them up with your color of the week.”
Eve turned to Tasha. “Stress.”
Terri set Tasha’s usual Diet Coke on the bar in front of her. Tasha had told them once that alcohol was nice, but that nobody wanted to see what happened when she had one too many. And for a woman her size, she said, one was one too many.
“So what’s stressing you out?” Terri asked.
“Luke Dawson,” Eve said.
“Yeah, I heard he was back in town,” Tasha said. “Is he still as hot as he used to be?”
“Oh, you bet he is,” Eve said.
Shannon turned to her sister. “Will you let me speak for myself?”
“Okay,” Eve said. “Your turn. Is he as hot as he used to be?”
Shannon gave her sister a deadpan look, then shook her head and took another sip of her margarita.
“Who’s Luke Dawson?” Terri asked.
“A guy we went to high school with,” Eve said.
“Ah,” Terri said. “The one who’s working for Shannon now.”
Shannon slumped with disbelief. “Has everybody in the whole town heard about him?”
“Uh-huh,” Terri said. “And from what I hear, he’s bad to the bone.”
“Terri,” Eve said, “you’re bad to the bone.”
“True. Which is why I’ll never hold it against him.” She glanced over at a nearby table. “Uh-oh. Shonda’s getting slammed out there. Gotta go take an order.”
She swung around the bar and went to a table where four young women sat. They wore capris and sparkly sandals, and designer handbags hung over the backs of their chairs. The band had shut off the music so they could test sound levels, but the women’s chatter was almost as loud as the jukebox had been.
“We were heading for our girls’ weekend in Austin,” one of them told Terri. “And we saw this place