A Perfect Love (6 page)

Yakov's Yiddish-speaking friends would have called him a shlemil, a simpleton, but Yakov didn't think the man
a fool. And in Buddy he recognized a challenge. Though the newlyweds were far from perfect, Mike and Dana both knew the Lord. Buddy, however, was as lost as a sea captain in fog. Worst of all, he seemed to have no interest in spiritual things.

Believing that honest work boosted a man's self-esteem, Yakov had asked Mike if Buddy could help around the house. Mike rejected that suggestion with a scornful laugh. “You don't know Buddy Franklin,” he said, shaking his head. “Dana loves him, but even she has warned me that he's a disaster waiting to happen. If it's valuable, he'll lose it. If it's working, he'll break it. If it's broken, he'll destroy it. No, I think we'll all be better off if we leave him be and let him find his own way in the world.”

Moving closer to the window, Yakov peered down the windswept road and wondered what direction Buddy Franklin would go.

As the soundtrack from
Dances With Wolves
poured from the stereo, Mike Klackenbush wrapped his hands around his coffee mug and stared at the flickering computer screen. His Van Gogh prints had been doing well this week, particularly the
Still Life Irises
and
The Customs Officer's Cabin, Morning Impression.
One of the Iris prints was now selling for forty bucks, not a bad price if one considered that Mike had purchased two hundred of those canvas prints for less than a dollar each . . .

A flash of movement caught his eye, and he reflexively turned toward the window. Buddy shuffled by, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched against the steady wind. A bit of white paper protruded from his pocket—the loan application, no doubt. A sheet of paper that was about as likely to secure a loan for Buddy as a four-bit print was to secure a million bucks for Mike.

Sighing, he leaned back in his chair, sipped his coffee, then lowered the mug to the covered diningroom table, his makeshift computer desk. Buddy wasn't a bad guy—Mike could have done a lot worse for a brother-in-law. Buddy was just . . . six feet two inches of nothing special. The man had no ambition, no drive, no common sense. The sharpest thing about him was the bend in his brow, and everyone from little Georgie Graham to sharp-tongued Olympia de Cuvier had taken Buddy's measure within five minutes of meeting him.

“Face it,” Mike drew his old sweater closer about him, “the man is a born mooch. You and Dana will be supporting him for as long as he wants to stay.”

Mike straightened as his computer chimed with an incoming e-mail. After clicking on the inbox, he read the query from an interested eBay bidder: “Is this print on canvas or paper? And how big is it?”

Biting back a caustic reply, Mike urged his fingers to diplomacy: “This print of
The Yellow Chair,
by Vincent Van Gogh, is on acid-free canvas. It's an 11 x 14 print, as is clearly stated in the ad, you moron.”

Grinning, he looked at his reply, highlighted “as is clearly stated in the ad, you moron,” then clicked delete. No sense in angering a perfectly good potential customer. After all, people didn't always read the ads, and the folks who did read didn't always pay attention to the words.

After scanning his reply, he clicked “send,” then settled back to watch Buddy's retreating figure through the window.

Dana would never kick her brother out. Mike had already racked his brain for plausible reasons they might ask Buddy to leave, and none of them would hold water with Dana. He couldn't insist they needed their privacy, for they allowed Yakov to live in the house with them, and he'd never been a problem. Furthermore, Dana would say, after three years of marriage they were no longer newlyweds.

He couldn't protest that they needed room for children, because he and Dana had decided to wait until they'd been married at least five years before considering the idea. As a certified elementary schoolteacher, Dana loved kids, but she also loved sending them home at the end of the day. Her hours were devoted to wee ones in the summer, when tourists deposited their children at the Kid Kare Center before taking off to tour the island, and during the remainder of the year she tutored Georgie Graham. At Christmas they had discovered there were two other school-age youngsters on the island, so in mid-April, when Dana declared a halt to her winter vacation, her classroom would be occupied by three students: Georgie, and Bobby and Brittany Gribbon.

No, Mike conceded, rubbing his chin, Dana wouldn't want children for a while. He had considered making a case for Buddy's departure by claiming a need for the entire carriage house, but even with the space divided there was plenty of room for Buddy's small apartment and the storage of Mike's eBay materials. Besides, the entire point of Mike's new business was to move stock in and out as rapidly as possible. If only one could do the same for brothers-in-law—

He smiled as a sudden mental picture filled his brain. An eBay ad, complete with a digital picture of Buddy, titled: One worthless brother-in-law, No Reserve, Guaranteed!

Guaranteed to take up space.

Guaranteed to eat five meals a day.

Guaranteed to stick like a burr.

Bidding begins at $1, so don't delay!

Who was he kidding? You could plate Buddy in gold and not get a single bid from anybody who knew him. Dana kept saying he'd change when he found a girl and wanted to settle down, but there was no chance of Buddy finding a girl on Heavenly Daze. The only single girl of marriageable age was Annie Cuvier, but she and the doctor's son had cast goo-goo eyes at each other all through the Christmas holiday, then they'd gone off to wherever they went when they weren't visiting the island.

No, Buddy was going to be his problem, his and Dana's, until the good Lord sent a miracle. In the meantime, however, Mike was not going to let his profligate brother-in-law get under his skin. He was going to prosper and make something of himself. Now that he had a computer, he was going to make some real money and show Dana that she had married a man who could support her.

Another e-mail chimed into his mailbox. Mike clicked on it, read that an auction had successfully closed, then clicked on the necessary links to send his standard message.

“Hello!” he began, “and congratulations on winning this auction! If you'll send me a money order or electronic payment, I'll get your beautiful art right out to you.”

He filled in a few details, clicked “send,” then zipped over to the eBay Web page to check on the list of his auctions. At the moment he had more than one hundred items up for sale, and he tried to keep them balanced so a few ended every day. Otherwise, things got hectic as auctions neared their close, for people always e-mailed him at the last minute with questions and payment details.

He folded his hands as the page refreshed and he saw that the bid on the Iris print had moved up another five dollars. Wonderful.

He had been a struggling graphic arts student when he met and married Dana. An Ogunquit girl, she'd been happy to move to Heavenly Daze, and when her mother died a few months after their wedding, Mike had been astounded to learn that Dana and Buddy were heirs to an estate held in trust (apparently the widow Franklin had known that Buddy couldn't handle any sizable inheritance). The trust fund now provided Buddy and Dana with two thousand dollars a month. The amount wasn't a fortune, but it did enable the Klackenbushes to live frugally and happily. They worked on the house themselves, Dana earned a small income through the Kid Kare Center, and for three years Mike had been content to help Dana with the school and work on restoring the historic house. He was especially proud of his work on the downstairs bathroom, the one used by all the kids in the day-care center. A septic line problem had limited them to one flush per hour until a few weeks ago, when Mike had rented a rooter and rooted the pipes clean.

But then he'd been bitten by the Internet auction bug. The first nibble came last summer. He'd been browsing the mercantile's magazine rack for some new home-improvement material when he spied Vernie working on her computer. She was exploring eBay, the world's largest Internet auction site, searching for collectible porcelain houses. While Mike watched, Vernie placed a last-instant bid and took a house right from under another bidder's nose.

Intoxicated by the adrenaline rush, Mike watched Vernie place another
bid, and another, and then he placed a bid himself, on a new pair of binoculars. He lost that auction, but it wasn't long before he was dropping broad hints about wanting a computer for the Kennebunk Kid Kare Center. After all, computers were educational, Vernie loved hers, and the Grahams were getting one . . .

He wanted a computer so badly he thought about buying one, wrapping it, and writing “To Mike, From Guess Who?” on the card. But Dana came through, presenting him with a state-of-the-art machine complete with zip drive, nineteen-inch monitor, and rewritable CD drive. After Christmas he set it up in the dining room and sat at the table for three straight days, teaching himself how to work all the bells and whistles.

Then he got serious about his business. From a wholesaler at
www.wholesaleart.com
he bought a box of art prints on canvas, and then, after they arrived, he listed each one on eBay, careful to describe each individual picture in glowing terms. By the end of his week as an eBay seller, he had tripled his initial investment, and Dana's bewildered look turned to pleased surprise.

Now he was determined to put his profits back into the business, to buy more prints in bulk and resell them for ten and twenty times his investment. Yakov, who had expressed his willingness to help in any way possible, handled the auctions that had closed—he pulled and recorded checks and money orders from the incoming mail, and then rolled and packaged the prints in cardboard mailing tubes. So far, in only their second week of operation, Michael's Fine Art had brought in more than $1,500 . . . which was probably more than Buddy Franklin had earned in his entire civilian life.

Mike rubbed hard on his mouth, trying to erase the proud smile that had crept to his lips. A man shouldn't feel pride, especially when it sprang from comparison to a relative, but he couldn't help it. Buddy was a wastrel, a do-nothing, a mooch, and a bum. But as long as Dana didn't insist that Mike involve him in the art-print business when the bank refused his loan, he could stay in the carriage house. After all, he was family.

The computer flickered for a moment, then a rectangle flashed on the screen, informing Mike that his dial-up connection had been broken. Would he like to redial?

Confound that phone line! Mike gritted his teeth, then lifted his gaze to the ceiling. Dana had probably picked up the upstairs phone. Having only one phone line had never been a problem before, but now he could see that he would have to have another installed. His business depended upon having a stable and secure Internet connection, so as soon as Dana hung up, he'd call the phone company and arrange for the installation of another line.

After all, if used for business, it'd be a tax-deductible expense.

Chapter Four

F
eeling proud and sassy, Tallulah de Cuvier wriggled through the doggy door of Frenchman's Fairest, then trotted out to the front lawn. Though the air was chilly, the sun shone bright and clean from the east, coloring the sky pink and gold.

Tallulah sniffed, parsing the scents of wood smoke, humans, and sea birds. Butchie the bulldog had walked here recently, probably to mark the post supporting the historical marker outside Tallulah's house.

That dog had never had any manners. He peed in the most obvious places, ate garbage, and had even been known to eat squirrels and sea gulls . . . Tallulah shivered at the thought of such atrocities.

Sitting on her haunches, she watched the sun as it lifted through a hazy sky, then pricked her ears forward. Ferry time.

Springing to her feet, she trotted to the dock, where Russell Higgs was washing gadgets in a smelly liquid. Tallulah breathed in a whiff of the stuff in his bucket, then jerked her head back and barked. Russell bent to scratch behind the mutt's ears. “That's gasoline, Tallulah. Best keep your nose out of it.”

With pleasure. She thumped her tail.

Russell bent lower, and—ahhhhh—continued scratching. “Where's your buddy Butch this morning?”

In bed, where the lazy slug spends most of his time. Butch wouldn't get up early for a side of beef, but me, this ole girl would pile out of her warm box on a nippy January morning for the mere scent of a fresh cruller.

She gave Russell her best smile, then lifted her gaze toward the horizon. There was the ferry, right on time. By golly, she was going to Ogunquit and she was going to have a cruller, her first in a month on account of Caleb's sudden concern for her weight. This morning Caleb had forgotten to latch the doggy door, and Tallulah had made a break for it. She felt as though she'd been in the Betty Ford Cruller Center the last few weeks. She strained to peer over her trimmer backside. Shoot. Her hindquarters didn't look that much thinner, but she'd rather have the crullers.

Rising to her feet, she watched Russell bathe little gid-gets and gadgets in the bucket of liquid stink. The handsome lobsterman was nice. On good days he shared his tuna-salad sandwich with her. Other days he walked up to the house to eat lunch with his wife. Those two were real interesting to watch. Always nuzzling and holding paws.

“So how are you this morning, Tallulah?”

Ah, Russell had time to do a bit of neighborin'. She stood up on her hind legs, her front paws fanning the air.

“What's up, girl? Looking for a treat? You should try my house—I didn't finish my breakfast. There was so much racket going on I had to get out of there.” The corners of his muzzle drooped.

Well, he just needed a cruller. That'd fix whatever was ailin' him.

Tallulah dropped to all fours and checked on the ferry's progress. The big boat was moving slowly across the water, cutting through the waves as if it had all the time in the world. Didn't Captain Stroble know she was hungry?