The Guardian

But hey, she told herself, that wasn't so odd, was it? They'd been together since Jim had died, just the two of them, and for the most part, Singer was pretty good company.

Singer, though, had been acting strangely ever since she started dating again, and he hadn't liked any of the guys who'd shown up at the door in the last couple of months. Julie had expected that part. Since he'd been a puppy, Singer tended to growl at men when he first met them. She used to think that Singer had a sixth sense that enabled him to tell the good guys from the ones she should avoid, but lately she'd changed her mind. Now, she couldn't help but think that he was just a big, furry version of a jealous boyfriend.

It was getting to be a problem, she decided. They were going to have to have a serious talk. Singer didn't want her to be alone, did he? No, of course not. It might take him a little while to get used to having someone else around, but he'd understand eventually. Hell, in time, he'd probably even be happy for her. But how, she wondered, was the best way to explain all this to him?

She halted for a moment, considering the question, before realizing the implications of what she was thinking.

Explain all this to him? Good Lord, she thought, I'm going insane.

Julie limped to the bathroom to start getting ready for work, slipping off her pajamas as she went. Standing over the sink, she grimaced at her reflection. Look at me, she thought, I'm twenty-nine and falling apart at the seams here. Her ribs hurt when she breathed, her big toe throbbed, and the mirror, she realized, wasn't helping things. During the day, her brown hair was long and straight, but after a night in bed, it looked as if it had been attacked by comb-teasing pillow gnomes. It was frazzled and puffed out, "under siege," as Jim so kindly used to put it. Mascara was smeared down her cheek. The tip of her nose was red, and her green eyes were swollen from the springtime pollen. But a shower would help with those things, wouldn't it?

Well, maybe not with the allergies. She opened the medicine cabinet and took a Claritin before glancing up again, as if hoping for a sudden improvement.

Ugh.

Maybe, she thought, she wouldn't have to work so hard at discouraging Bob's interest after all. She'd been cutting Bob's hair, or rather what was left of it, for a year now. Two months ago, Bob had finally worked up the nerve to ask her out. He wasn't exactly the best-looking guy in the world-balding, with a round face, eyes set too close together, and the beginnings of a paunch-but he was single and successful, and Julie hadn't been on a date since Jim had died. She figured it would be a good way to get her feet wet in the world of dating again. Wrong. There was a reason Bob was single. Bob wasn't only a triple bogey in the looks department, he'd been so boring on their date that even people at nearby tables in the restaurant had glanced her way in pity. His preferred topic of conversation on their date had been accounting. He'd showed no interest in anything else: not her, not the menu, not the weather, not sports, not the little black dress she was wearing. Only accounting. For three hours, she'd listened to Bob drone on and on about itemized deductions and capital gains distributions, depreciation and 401(k) rollovers. By the end of the dinner, when he'd leaned over the table and confided that he "knew important people at the IRS," Julie's eyes were so glazed that they could have flavored a dozen doughnuts.

It went without saying, of course, that Bob had had a wonderful time. He'd been calling three times a week since then, asking "if they could get together for a second consultation, hee hee hee." He was persistent, that was for sure. Annoying as hell, but persistent.

Then there was Ross, the second guy she dated. Ross the doctor. Ross the good-looking guy. Ross the pervert. One date with him was enough, thank you very much.

And can't forget good old Adam. He worked for the county, he said. He enjoyed his work, he said. Just a regular guy, he said.

Adam, she found out, worked in the sewers.

He didn't smell, he didn't have unknown substances growing under his fingernails, his hair didn't carry a greasy shine, but she knew that as long as she lived, she'd never get used to the idea that one day, he might show up at the front door looking that way. Had an accident at the plant, dear. Sorry to come home like this. The very thought gave her the shivers. Nor could she imagine handling his clothes to put them in the laundry after something like that. The relationship was doomed from the start.

Just when she was beginning to wonder whether normal people like Jim even existed anymore, just when she was beginning to wonder what it was about her that seemed to attract oddballs like a neon sign flashing "I'm Available-Normalcy Not Required," Richard had come strolling into the picture.

And miracle of miracles, even after a first date last Saturday, he still seemed . . . normal. A consultant with J. D. Blanchard Engineering out of Cleveland-the firm repairing the bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway-he had made her acquaintance when he came into the salon for a haircut. On their date, he'd opened doors for her, smiled at the right moments in the conversation, given the waiter her order for dinner, and not so much as tried to kiss her when he'd dropped her off. Best of all, he was good-looking in an artistic sort of way, with sculpted cheekbones, emerald eyes, black hair, and a mustache. After he'd dropped her off, she'd felt like screaming, Hallelujah! I have seen the light!

Singer hadn't seemed quite as impressed. After she'd said good night to Richard, Singer had put on one of his "I'm the boss around here" acts. He'd growled until Julie had opened the front door.

"Oh, stop it," she'd said. "Don't be so hard on him."

Singer did as he was told, but he'd retreated to the bedroom, where he'd pouted the rest of the night.

If my dog was any more bizarre, she thought, we could team up and work for a carnival, right next to the guy who eats light bulbs. But then, my life hasn't exactly been normal, either.

Julie turned on the faucet and stepped into the shower, trying to stem the tide of memories. What was the use of replaying hard times? Her mother, she often mused, had been fatally attracted to two things: booze and toxic men. Either one without the other would have been bad, but the combination had been intolerable for Julie. Her mom went through boyfriends the way kids go through paper towels, and some of them made Julie feel less than comfortable once she hit adolescence. The last one had actually tried to have his way with her, and when Julie had told her mother, her mother, in a drunken, teary rage, had blamed her for coming on to him. It wasn't long before Julie found herself without a home.

Living on the street had been terrifying even for the six months or so before Jim came along. Most everyone she met used drugs and panhandled or stole . . . or worse. Scared of becoming like the haunted runaways she saw every night at the shelters and in the doorways, she searched frantically for odd jobs that would keep her fed and out of sight. She worked every menial job she saw offered and kept her head down. When she first met Jim at a diner in Daytona, she was nursing a cup of coffee with the last of her pocket change. Jim bought her breakfast and on the way out the door said he'd do the same thing the following day if she returned. Hungry, she did, and when she challenged him about his motives (she assumed she knew his reasons and could remember gearing up for quite the embarrassing public tirade about cradle robbers and jail time), Jim denied any improper interest in her. And at the end of the week, when he was getting ready to head for home, he made her a proposal: If she moved to Swansboro, North Carolina, he would help her get a full-time job and a place to stay.

She remembered staring at him as though he had bugs crawling out of his ears.

But a month later, considering she didn't have much scheduled on the old social calendar, she showed up in Swansboro, thinking as she got off the bus, What in the world am I doing in this nowhere town? Nonetheless, she looked up Jim, who-despite her persistent skepticism-brought her over to the salon to meet his aunt Mabel. And sure enough, she found herself sweeping floors for an hourly wage and living in the room upstairs from the salon.

At first, Julie was relieved by Jim's lack of apparent interes

t. Then curious. Then annoyed. Finally, after running into Jim repeatedly and dropping what seemed to her quite shameless hints, she broke down and asked Mabel if she thought Jim found her unattractive. Only then did he seem to get the message. They went on a date, then another, and the hormones were surging after a month together. Real love came a short time later. He proposed, they walked the aisle in the church where Jim had been baptized, and Julie spent the first few years of their marriage drawing smiley faces every time she doodled by the phone. What more, she wondered when considering her life, could anyone want?

A lot, she soon realized. A few weeks after their fourth anniversary, Jim had a seizure on the way home from church and was rushed to the hospital. Two years later, the brain tumor took his life, and at the age of twenty-five, Julie found herself starting over once more. Add in Singer's unexpected appearance and she'd reached the point in her life where nothing surprised her anymore.

Nowadays, she thought, it was the little things in life that mattered. If the highlights in her past set the tone, it was the day-by-day events that now defined who she was. Mabel, God bless her, had been an angel. She'd helped Julie get her license so she could cut hair and earn a decent, if not extravagant, living. Henry and Emma, two good friends of Jim's, not only had helped her fit into town when she'd first moved here, but had remained close even after Jim had passed away. And then there was Mike, Henry's younger brother and Jim's best friend growing up.

In the shower, Julie smiled. Mike.

Now there was a guy who would make some woman happy one day, even if he seemed a little lost sometimes.

A few minutes later, after toweling off, Julie brushed her teeth and hair, put on some makeup, and slipped into her clothes. Since her car was in the shop, she'd have to walk to work-it was about a mile up the street-and she put on a pair of comfortable shoes. She called Singer just as she was locking the door on her way out, nearly missing what had been left for her.

Out of the corner of her eye, she spied a card wedged between the mailbox and the lid, right next to the front door.

Curious, Julie opened it, reading it on the porch as Singer burst from the woods and trotted up to her.

Dear Julie,

I had a wonderful time on Saturday. I can't stop thinking about you.

Richard

So that was the reason Singer went bonkers last night.

"See," she said, holding out the card so Singer could see it, "I told you he was a nice guy."

Singer turned away.

"Don't give me that. You can admit you were wrong, you know. I think you're just jealous."

Singer nuzzled against her.

"Is that it? Are you jealous?" Unlike with other dogs, Julie didn't have to bend down to run her hand down his back. He was bigger than she had been when she'd entered high school.

"Don't be jealous, okay? Be happy for me."

Singer circled to the other side and looked up at her.

"Now c'mon. We have to walk because Mike's still fixing the Jeep."

At Mike's name, Singer's tail wagged.

Two

Mike Harris's song lyrics left a lot to be desired, and his singing voice didn't exactly make recording executives beat a path to his door in Swansboro. He did, however, play the guitar and he practiced daily, hoping his big break was just around the corner. In ten years, he'd worked with a dozen different bands, ranging from the big-haired noise of eighties rock and roll to the mamas-trains-and-pickup-truck style of country music. On stage, he'd worn everything from leather pants and boa constrictors to chaps and a cowboy hat, and though he played with obvious enthusiasm and the band members couldn't help but like him, he was usually pulled aside after a few weeks and told that for some reason it just wasn't working out. It had happened enough times for even Mike to know that maybe it wasn't just a personality conflict, though he still couldn't bring himself to admit that he might not be any good.

Mike kept a notebook, too, and scribbled down his thoughts in his spare time with the idea of using these impressions in a future novel, but the writing process was more difficult than he'd first imagined it would be. It wasn't that he didn't have ideas, it was that he had too many ideas and couldn't figure out what should and shouldn't go in the story. Last year, he'd tried to write a murder mystery set on a cruise ship, something Agatha Christie might have written, and it included the usual dozen suspects. But the plot, he thought, wasn't quite exciting enough, so he'd tried to jazz it up using every idea he'd ever had, including a nuclear warhead hidden in San Francisco, a crooked cop who was witness to the JFK assassination, an Irish terrorist, the Mafia, a boy and his dog, an evil venture capitalist, and a time-traveling scientist who'd escaped the persecution of the Holy Roman Empire. By the end, the prologue had run to a hundred pages and the main suspects hadn't even arrived on the scene yet. Needless to say, he didn't get any further on it.

In the past, he'd also tried drawing, painting, working in stained glass, ceramics, wood carving, and macrame and actually assembled some free-form art pieces in a burst of inspiration that kept him away from work for a week. He welded and wired scraps from old car parts into three towering, off-balance structures, and when he was finished, he sat on his front steps, staring with pride at what he'd done, knowing in his heart that he'd finally found his calling. That feeling lasted for a week, until the town council passed a "no junk in the yard" ordinance at a hastily called meeting. Like many people, Mike Harris had the dream and desire to be an artist; he just didn't have the talent.

Mike could, however, fix practically anything. He was the consummate handyman, a veritable knight in shining armor when puddles formed beneath kitchen sinks or when garbage disposals went on the blink. But if he was a good handyman, he was a modern-day Merlin when it came to anything with four wheels and an engine. He and Henry co-owned the busiest garage in town, and while Henry handled the paperwork, Mike was in charge of the actual work. Foreign cars or domestic, four-cylinder Ford Escorts or turbocharged 911 Porsches, he could repair them all. He could listen to an engine, hear pings and clicks where others couldn't, and figure out what was wrong, usually in less than a couple of minutes. He knew manifolds and intake valves, shocks, struts and pistons, radiators and wheel base adjustments, and he could set from memory the timing on practically every car that had rolled in the shop. He could rebuild engines without having to look at a manual. His fingertips were stained permanently black, and though he knew it was a good way to make a living, he sometimes wished he could take a fraction of that talent and apply it to other areas of his life.

The traditional ladies' man reputation associated with mechanics and musicians had passed Mike by. He'd had two serious girlfriends in his life, and since one of those relationships had been in high school and the other with Sarah had ended three years ago, a case could be made that Mike wasn't looking for a long-term commitment, or even a commitment that might last through the summer. Even Mike wondered about it sometimes, but these days, no matter how much he wished otherwise, it seemed as if most of his dates ended with a kiss on the cheek while the woman thanked him for being such a good friend. At thirty-four, Mike Harris was remarkably well versed in the tender art of embracing women in brotherly hugs while they cried on his shoulder about what a jerk their previous boyfriend had been. It wasn't that he was unattractive. With light brown hair and blue eyes and an easy smile to go with his trim build, he was good-looking in an all-American kind of way. Nor was it that women didn't enjoy his company, because they did. His lack of luck had more to do with the fact that women who dated Mike sensed that a relationship with them wasn't what Mike was really looking for.

His brother, Henry, knew why they felt that way; so did Mike's sister-in-law, Emma. Mabel knew the reason as well, as did practically everyone who knew Mike Harris.

Mike, they all knew, was already in love with someone else.

"Hey, Julie-wait up."

Having just reached the outskirts of Swansboro's old-fashioned business district

, Julie turned when she heard Mike calling. Singer looked up at her and she nodded.

"Go ahead," she said.

Singer galloped off, meeting Mike halfway. Mike stroked his head and back as they walked, then scratched behind his ears. When Mike stopped moving his hand, Singer bobbed his head up and down, wanting more.

"That's all for now, big guy," Mike said. "Let me talk to Julie."

A moment later, he reached Julie as Singer sat beside him, still going after the hand.

"Hey, Mike," Julie said, smiling. "What's going on?"

"Not much. I just wanted to let you know your Jeep is done."

"What was wrong with it?"

"The alternator."

Exactly what he'd said the problem was on Friday when she'd dropped it off, she remembered. "Did you have to replace it?"

"Yeah. Yours was dead. No big deal-the dealer had plenty in stock. I also fixed the oil leak, too, by the way. I had to replace a seal near the filter."

"There was an oil leak?"

"Didn't you notice the stains in your driveway?"

"Not really, but then I wasn't looking."

Mike smiled. "Well, like I said, that's fixed, too. Do you want me to grab your keys and bring them by?"

"No, I'll get 'em after work. I don't need 'em until later. I've got appointments all day. You know how Mondays are." She smiled. "So how'd it go at the Clipper, by the way? I'm sorry I couldn't make it."

Mike had spent the weekend playing grunge rock with a group of high school dropouts who dreamed of nothing more than meeting babes, drinking beer, and filling their days with MTV. Mike was at least a dozen years older than any of them, and when he'd showed Julie the baggy pants and ratty T-shirt he would wear for the show last week, she had nodded and said, "Oh, that's nice," which really meant, You're going to look absolutely ridiculous up there.

"Okay, I guess," he said.

"Just okay?"

He shrugged. "It wasn't my type of music anyway."

She nodded. As much as she liked him, even she didn't like his singing voice all that much. Singer, though, seemed to love it. Whenever Mike sang for friends, Singer howled along with him. It was a toss-up, according to local opinion, as to who would be the first to make it to the big time.