"If he were any dopier, he'd have to be reclassified as a vegetable. Why did you have to bring him?"

"Well, it was that or put him in the kennel, and he's never been to a kennel. He'd think we'd abandoned him, poor old guy. Watch it or I'll give you one of his pills." She slipped into a bad Peter Lorre imitation: "I have drugs and I know how to use them."

"I've worked hard at nursing along this bad mood. Don't you dare try to take it away from me," Mel snarled.

Jane waved this warning off. "Until you've had a teenage daughter, you don't know what a bad mood really is. You haven't even got to the learner permit stage of tantrums. I think there's a town just ahead. There might be something open where you could get a cup of coffee," she added.

They took the off-ramp and found a single, glaringly lighted convenience store open. Mel went in to buy coffee while Jane studied the map of Colorado. Yes, another twenty miles, maybe thirty, she thought, then cringed as she looked up and saw Mel talking with the convenience-store clerk. Lots of pointing. Hmmm. He was asking directions. Not a good sign. Men never seemed to resort to asking for help except when really stressed. And then they didn't listen anyway.

This was a side of him she hadn't seen in the year and a half they'd been dating. Well, dating in a manner of speaking. They'd first met when Jane's next-door neighbor and best friend, Shelley, found a dead cleaning lady in her guest bedroom and Mel was the detective assigned to the case. More often than not during that first year, Jane and Mel had met as witness and police officer. Or police officer and neighborhood busybody, as Mel would probably interpret it. He was always the cool, calm bachelor and Jane was the frazzled, widowed mother of three, trying to keep her whole life from flying off in random bits of car pools, PTA business, teenage fits of angst, and algebra homework. Being the one not going to pieces was rather refreshing!