Free Charley's Web by Joy Fielding Page B

the same styles as thirty-year-olds. Even seventy-year-olds dressed like thirty-year-olds. And thirty-year-olds dressed like teenagers. No wonder everybody was so confused.
    “Times have certainly changed,” her mother commented recently while shopping for a birthday gift for Franny. “When I was young, I wouldn’t have dreamed of raiding my mother’s closet for something to wear.”
    “I wouldn’t know,” Charley told her. “Your closet was empty.”
    The conversation had come to an abrupt end.
    Had this blurring of the generations, this reluctance to let go of one’s youth, the outright refusal to get old, contributed in some way to the increased sexualization of the young? Could current trends in fashion, reflective as they were of society’s attitudes toward larger issues, be at least partly responsible for what had happened to little Tammy Barnet or Noah and Sara Starkey?
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” Charley muttered, pausing for a minute in the kitchen to jot down these ideas. (She kept pads of paper in every room in the house for whenever inspiration struck.) Even half-baked, the ideas were provocative enough to make for an interesting column at some future date. And it looked as if Charley’s future was going to be a little more free than she’d imagined last night.
    “It just wasn’t meant to be,” she repeated once more as she opened her front door, shielding her eyes from the bright sun that had replaced yesterday’s gloom. When she looked up, she saw Gabe Lopez in her driveway, leaning against her car. The pinched expression on his face told her he wasn’t waiting to wish her a good morning. What had she done now? “Something I can do for you, Mr. Lopez?” she asked, approaching cautiously.
    “You can stop harassing my workers,” he told her, his dark sunglasses preventing her from seeing his eyes. “I’m not running a dating service.”
    Charley felt every muscle in her body tense. “Okay. I guess that’s good to know.” She gritted her teeth to keep the word asshole from escaping. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get to work.”
    “I suggest you prowl for boyfriends in the personal columns,” Gabe Lopez continued, as if not convinced he’d made his point.
    “And I suggest you get the hell out of my way.”
    Gabe Lopez stepped back just enough to allow Charley room to open her car door. “Jackass,” she muttered, her fingers trembling as she pushed her key into the ignition. Backing out of her driveway and onto the street, she saw the worker in the yellow hard hat watching her from the roof. When she turned the corner, she glanced back. The worker was still there, still watching.
    “Mr. Prescott is in court this morning,” his secretary told Charley at just past eleven o’clock, “and I’m afraid he’s fully booked this afternoon.”
    Charley was somewhat gratified to note that although the forty-something-year-old woman was indeed an icy blonde, her hair was cut at an unflattering angle that accentuated her square jaw and did nothing at all for her overly tanned complexion. Her manicured nails, however, were a perfect match for the deep coral of her lips. “I was hoping I might catch him between appointments. Is he expected back before lunch?”
    The secretary checked her watch. “It’s possible. But he’ll be in and out. Why don’t I make you an appointment for later in the week?”
    “If it’s all right with you, I’d rather wait.”
    “I think you’ll just be wasting your time.”
    “I’ll take my chances.” Charley perched on the end of one of four dark green chairs that sat against the pale green wall.
    The secretary shrugged and turned her attention to her computer, trying to look busy.
    How did we ever manage without computers? Charley wondered absently, picking up a recent copy of Time from the stack of magazines on the small table beside her and thumbing listlessly through it. I certainly couldn’t function without mine, she thought, trying to