Fancy Dancer by Fern Michaels

sounding more agitated by the moment. Maybe agitated was the wrong word. Maybe frustrated was the word he was looking for. The question at the moment, though, was why would she be expressing either emotion, considering her initial reaction to Jake? Definitely something to think about when he had more time. At present, though, he had to get home and get showered and changed so he could head to the courthouse to see what he could do for Jake. If anything.
    Alex folded the papers and jammed them into the pocket of his sweatpants. “I don’t know what, if anything, I can do, but I’m more than willing to take a shot at doing something. Jake didn’t say what he wanted me to do, did he?”
    “No, just to call you,” Fancy said. “Will you let us know what happens?”
    “Of course. Sorry you got your night’s sleep ruined.”
    “Sleep? What’s that?” Angel smiled. “It’s not something to worry about, young man.”
    “Well then, I guess I’d better get going, because I’ll have to go into the office first. I’ll call you when I know something.”
    Fancy walked Alex to the door. “Thank you for coming out, Mr. Rosario. I’m sorry about all of this. For whatever this is worth, Jake did not want to go with his father. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could tell that Jake was very angry with that man when they left the house. Parents and their children should not be adversaries, and that’s what it looked like to me from where I was standing. My mother thought the same thing.”
    Alex nodded. Not for all the oil in the Gulf of Mexico would he divulge Jake’s feelings about his father to this young woman and her mother. He simply nodded and left the house.
    It was still dark out as Alex drove home. His mother had probably left already for the restaurant. He felt a pang of guilt that she had to go to work so early in the morning, when it was still dark out, to get ready for the breakfast crowd. He felt a new appreciation for his mother.
    There was a little more traffic on his return than when he had left. The early birds who had to be at work by six were on the road and looking for a place to stop to fuel up on coffee before starting the daily grind.
     
     
    Fifteen minutes later, Alex was sprinting from his car to the back door. He smiled when he saw that his mother had left the porch light on for him. Once inside, he turned it off, a rule of his mother’s. We do not live to make the electric company happy. Translation: turn off the lights when you leave a room. After long years of practice, it was an ingrained habit.
    The kitchen smelled good. His mother had baked him some cinnamon buns. They were still warm. The coffeemaker was ready—he just had to press the button.
    Alex sat down at the table to wait for the coffee to drip into the pot. Damnation, he needed to think. Think! What was it Jake expected him to do? More to the point, what could he do? Obviously, Jake thought that there was something he could do; otherwise he would not have told Fancy Dancer to call him. What? He wasn’t a high-dollar attorney people listened to. He was a simple storefront lawyer who would never get rich practicing his kind of law. A month ago, he’d thought about moonlighting just to get a little ahead, so he could have a cushion if he fell on hard times.
    Alex was off his chair the moment he heard the last gurgle of coffee dripping into the pot.
    He barely noticed that he’d scalded his tongue or even how tasty the cinnamon buns were, because his head was buzzing like an angry beehive. He needed a diversion. He turned on the small television set his mother kept on the kitchen counter so that before she went to bed she could watch the soaps she was addicted to. He suffered through the weather report—overcast and cloudy with the temperatures in the low sixties. To him, the low sixties was shiver weather. He tucked the thought into his mind to dress accordingly, as the heating system in the storefront was less