It was actually more for Jackie's sake that Stella wanted to buy the dog anyway. After the divorce, the forty year old mother had had to go back to the job she had left nineteen years earlier, when she had married Phil. It wasn't the sort of work that was suited to a woman of her age, but her voluptuously preserved figure had persuaded the manager of the "Double-X Theater" that Stella was still capable of pulling in the customers. What she did was sell tickets in the all-glass booth out in front of the movie theater, her brief costume luring men in off the streets to view the X-rated pornographic films that were shown inside. The hours were late and awkward – 2PM to midnight on weekdays, and 4PM until 2AM on weekends. Although she drove her 1969 Porsche, which she had won in the suit for divorce, to and from her job, Stella worried about leaving young Jacqueline alone in that apartment building. Anything could happen to the beautiful eighteen year old, and then she would be even more afraid of men than she was already!

As for herself, the concerned mother thought, just knowing that the dog was there at home would make her job that much easier. But she did hope that Kaiser's wariness of men wouldn't prevent her from having her own guests come in!

But how could she ask young Matt about that, without seeming to be some kind of dirty old lady hustler? Of course, in this particular case, she was peripherally interested in the handsome young dog breeder himself, but it wasn't always that way. The image of Stella Burnside as a cock-hustling slut was a conjecture of Phil Burnside's imagination and no one else's. It had been Phil who had imagined that all his old college buddies were after Stella's body, during the early years of their marriage. In fact, that was why, when Jackie was almost four, the Burnsides had broken ties with all their old friends, and bought a house in Carmichael, a suburb North of Sacramento.