“Sensible?” she supplied, doing her best not to sound too snide or catty. “Reasonable? Thoughtful? I’m afraid those are pretty foreign concepts to Mister Spotted Horse. I learned that the hard way. His way is to overreact to everything, and his overreaction is one of the reasons we broke up.”

She got a sudden suspicion from the way her father’s eyes narrowed that he was about to bring in personal matters.

She wasn’t mistaken.

“You know,” he said carefully—and a little hopefully, “your mother and I always kind of hoped you’d get a little more serious about David.”

She dashed his hopes by groaning. “Puh-lease! He was way too busy being the Big Man in the Movement.” After a moment of consideration, she decided to let him in on a little personal secret that had finally stopped hurting. “I never told you what it was that finally precipitated my breaking up with him. He quoted Huey Long at me.”

“Huey Long?” Dad replied, puzzled. “Wasn’t he a Black Panther or something? What was the quote? How could that break you two up?”

“You’ll know how when I tell you.” She cleared her throat. “I was trying to point out why bailing out of college was a bad idea, especially for someone who claimed he wanted to do some good for our people. I even pointed out how much good I could do, being both in criminal investigation and in the Movement. He said, word for word, ‘the only place for a woman in the Movement is on her back.’”

Her father stared at her for a moment, and his face spasmed. “I don’t imagine you put up with that—” he choked, trying not to laugh.

She shrugged. “For his pains, I egged him into trying to shove me around, then I put him on his—to let him get an idea of how it felt.”

That was too much for her father; he broke up laughing, and she grinned, feeling just a little smug now that the confrontation was old, old news. It had hurt at the time. What had hurt even more was that she had known, then and now, that it was meant to; David had an uncanny ability to pick the most hurtful words possible and use them.

“Well, he thought the reason I was taking tai chi was just to keep the fat off my hips and make me a good dancer. Boy, did he get a surprise!”

Her father chuckled. “I’ll bet he did. And I’d be the last person to tell you he didn’t have it coming, after a crack like that.”

She shook her head. “Needless to say, when I told him as much, he called me a flint-hearted bitch—among other things—I called him a male chauvinist pig—among a lot of other things—and we called it quits.”