Chapter 11
Joyce Dillon's bleached blonde hair, showing none of its characteristic telltale roots, tossed recklessly as she rolled down the car window and rested a tanned arm the color of prairie wheat on the hot sill. Nimbly her fingers turned to a top forty rock station and, pumping the accelerator of her 1980 Porsche, she headed for the army base refugee camp.
Today was Wednesday, the day she offered her charitable good cheer to the Lawrence, Kansas army base recreational center for adolescent refugees. Singlehandedly, she masterminded a campaign to buy for next to nothing a couple of pool tables whose tattered green was considered unusable by the Johnson Pool Hall in town. After a behind closed doors meeting with the local distributor for Coca-Cola, she'd managed to finangle (with typical pre-Dillon zeal), seventeen cases of soda to fill the cooler each week ... which amounted to approximately three cans of cola per day for each adolescent between the ages of three and twenty-one, as she'd calculated it.
But what was a woman to do? Husband sitting behind bars at a detention prison, leaving her with an empty house, unused swimming pool, two cars of 1980 vintage and a pocketbook full of credit cards, what had a blonde haired divorcee to do with free afternoons? No more sitting around watching soap operas, guzzling wine, and getting depressed for this lady!
Like losing fifteen years off my life, she marveled, meshing the gears and zipping through the army base security gate with a nod of her blonde head. The guard waved her through; the ex-Mayor Dillon's wife had become a notable fixture at the refugee camp. Everyone recognized her flashy ovaled sunglasses and windblown blonde hair. Even the Gazette, famous for its anti-Dillon stance, granted her a favorable full page interview in the Sunday edition, heading it: "Joyce Dillon ... the Sister Teresa of the Refugee Camp."
The Federal Sponsorship Program was in full swing, and none hired more boys to clean her basement, scoop the leaves from her swimming pool, and scrub her floors than Joyce Dillon.
"What did she get out of it?" the Gazette queried.
Joyce twirled a blonde wave around a red lacquered fingertip, a crooked grin creasing her rouged lips ... her mind reeling back to the afternoon romp in Colonel Nelson's bed (poor man!). "Let's just say I've got a lot to make up for...."