“Oh! Oh, Da Deeee!”
Celia’s plaintive cry was filled with that sorrowful timbre that alway worked on her father. She had stumbled on it as a toddler and, through diligence and determination, had tuned it to perfection by the time she hit her teens. All it took was timing. Too soon and he could resist, to late and the opportunity would have been lost. But deployed at just the right moment the results were guaranteed. The properly timed and executed call had yielded a closet full of the latest trendy clothes, replenished of course often enough to protect her position on the leading edge of fashion. The shiny red thing in the garage that went so fast and *looked* so good had taken a double dose, one to procure a trip to look and another to get the sweet old man to sign on the dotted line. And then there was all the latest electronic gadgetry, especially all those sexy things that looked so good. Celia always studied the manuals, well, not the *manuals*, but those startup thinggies that told how to turn them on. After all, they did look so much better when the screens had some color on them.