Honey Pie (Cupcake Club) - By Donna Kauffman Page 0,26

to the gulls, the sound of the water, and imagining what kind of life he’d have if he could do anything he wanted.

Turned out what he wanted to do was fix cars. He was good at it. Even better than his father and his grandfather. Plus, cars didn’t drink, they didn’t punch, kick, scream, or shout. They didn’t make his life a living hell. Instead they’d been the one thing that made his life tolerable. They made sense. If they were broken, it was just a matter of figuring out what was wrong and fixing it. And it felt damn good to know he could fix something. Because he sure as hell couldn’t fix his family.

Dylan had been running the shop pretty much by himself by the time he was sixteen. Mickey was never around, and only came by when he needed to take money from the office safe or steal parts he could sell for booze or drug money. He’d never had any real interest or inclination to work on cars . . . or to work at all.

Their father had passed away from a heart attack right after Dylan’s twenty-first birthday, and Mickey had finally landed himself in prison eleven months later. Only then had Dylan felt like his life was his own, to do with as he pleased. Unlike Dick, Mickey wasn’t ever getting out. Dylan had tried to see him, see if maybe hitting bottom, losing their dad, and being the only family they each had left had finally shaken some sense into his brother. Mickey had refused to see him. And, family or not . . . Dylan hadn’t tried again. What was done was done. Mickey had lasted twenty-two months inside before getting himself killed.

So, for a peaceful ten years now, it had been Dylan, the shop, and the sailboat. Well, and Lolly. Dylan hadn’t wanted the damn dog, but she’d been hanging around the docks all last summer, and as the fall had turned into winter, she ended up crawling under his bay door to sleep in the garage at night. And if, after a while, Dylan left some scraps from his lunch or dinner behind, who was to say if she helped herself to them, too?

Then the fire had happened. An electrical fire in a neighboring building got out of hand. It had been a chilly, windy night, and sparks had flown, burning bits of the engulfed building had landed on the old roof of the garage, and it had gone up, like so much tinder.

That same night Dylan had learned a thing or two about himself. The only thing he’d about killed himself to save before the building went completely to ash, was the damn dog. Even the boat, fortunately under tarp for the winter, hadn’t been the first thing on his mind when the call from the fire chief had woken him up. Just the damn dog.

Part black and white border collie, part who the hell knew what, she wasn’t the standard of canine beauty by any stretch, but that didn’t matter to Dylan. Almost five months later, her fur was coming back in where it had been singed off on her side and left hind quarter where the burning beam had fallen on her. She still limped a little and even though the vet said she likely wasn’t more than a few years old, she slept more than she used to. The vet bills had been staggering, but old Doc Jensen had asked Dylan only one time if he wanted to put the homeless mongrel down. Apparently something in Dylan’s expression had the old doctor nodding . . . and seeing to the dog’s needs.

When asked her name, Dylan had answered on the spur of the moment. He’d always given the dog a hard time, complaining that she was always lollygagging about. And Lolly had just popped out. He hadn’t even been aware that he’d already been thinking of her by a name until that moment. If anyone asked, he’d referred to her as the thousand dollar mutt—because that’s what it had cost him to fix her up. He’d figured she owed him companionship after that, so it was only fair he keep her with him so she could fulfill her end of the deal.

He glanced over at the peacefully sleeping mutt. “You’re sleeping on the job,” he called down to the dog, but he smiled as he turned back to the boat and his prized new piece of