“Well, that’s what he said, didn’t he, Mom?” Joanna returned defiantly.
“So you know about lesbians then, do you, Jenny?” Bob Brundage asked, gently nudging himself into what had been only a three-way conversation.
“ ‘Course,” Jenny answered offhandedly.
“Did you learn about that from your mom or from school?” he asked, carefully avoiding the icy disapproval stamped on Eleanor Lathrop’s face “Or do the schools in Bisbee have classes in the birds and the bees?”
Knowing Eleanor’s attitude toward mealtime discussions of anything remotely off-color, Joanna observed this abrupt turn of conversation in stunned silence. What in the world was Bob Brundage thinking? she wondered. Was he deliberately baiting Eleanor by encouraging such a discussion? But of course, since Bob didn’t know Eleanor well, it was possible he had no idea of her zero-tolerance attitude toward nonparlor conversation, as she called it.
On the other hand, maybe he did. As he gazed expectantly at Jenny, awaiting her answer with rapt attention, Joanna caught what seemed to be a twinkle of amusement glinting in his eyes
At that precise moment, she made the mistake of taking a tiny sip of water.
“Mom told me some of it,” Jenny
Bob Brundage raised a questioning eyebrow. “You don’t? What do you call it, then?”
Jenny sighed. “When it’s about men and women, we call it the birds and the bees. But when it’s about men and men or women and women, we call it the birds and the birds.”
“I see,” Bob Brundage said, nodding and smiling.
“Jennifer Ann!” Eleanor gasped, while Joanna choked on the water, sending a very undignified and unladylike spray out of her mouth and nose into a hastily grabbed napkin. When she looked up at last, Bob Brundage winked at her again.
“Such goings-on!” Eleanor said, shaking her head. “And in front of company, too. Jenny, you should be ashamed of yourself.” Eleanor picked up the newspaper and handed it over to a still-coughing Joanna. “If you’re willing to let your daughter see this kind of filth at her tender age, then you’re going to have to be the one to give it to her. I certainly won’t be a party to it.”
Joanna took the paper and stuffed it into her purse.
“And you’d better decide what you want to order,” Eleanor continued. “Bob and I have already made up our minds. We had plenty of time to study the menus before you got here.”
Obligingly, Joanna picked up her menu and began looking at it. She held it high enough that it concealed her mouth where the corners of her lips kept curving up into an irrepressible smile.
Bob Brundage may have been a colonel in the United States Army, but he was also an inveterate tease. Even now, while Joanna studied the menu, he managed to elicit another tiny giggle of laughter from Eleanor Lathrop, although the previous flap had barely ended.
To Joanna’s surprise, instead of still being angry, Eleanor was smiling and gazing fondly at Bob Brundage. Her doting eyes seemed to caress him, lingering on him as if trying to memorize every feature of his face, every detail of the way he held his coffee cup or moved his hand.
And while Eleanor studied Bob Brundage, Joanna studied her
