One

      The note was in the sugar bowl, where he’d be sure to find it. Tucker read it through, swore, shook his head and swore some more. It was the last straw in a week that had been filled with last straws.

      “Dammit all to hell, Dad, this had better be a practical joke,” he muttered.

      The first straw had been Monday, when one of his subcontractors had gone belly-up. Then on Tuesday, right in the middle of Hanes Mall Boulevard at the height of rush hour traffic, one of his trucks had blown a transmission.

      To add to the misery, after a solid week of rain, the entire site was a mud hole. The paving was behind schedule, the framing crew, unable to work, had celebrated by getting drunk, starting a brawl and busting up a bar. Now two of his carpenters were in jail and a third was hobbling around on crutches.

      If he thought it would help, he’d get cross-eyed, rubber-lipped drunk himself, something he hadn’t done since his freshman year in college. If he thought it might solve a single one of his problems, he’d go out and buy himself a carton of cigarettes and a fifth of whisky and let nature take its course.

      But he didn’t smoke and other than the occasional beer, he didn’t drink, and besides, what good would it do to lock the barn door after the horse had bolted?

      He reread the note, which was scribbled on the back of an envelope with a carpenter’s pencil, judging from the smudges. It was short and to the point. “Bernice and I are honeymooning at the Blue Flamingo near Pilot Mountain. Don’t forget to deposit my check on the first. Harold.”

      “Ah, for crying out loud, Pop,” he growled. You’d think that at the age of seventy-four, a man would know better than to blow his whole damn social security check on one of these new virility drugs, start trawling the senior citizen circuit, and wind up marrying the first female he could talk into his bed.

      Tucker wanted to believe he’d behaved with a little more dignity when his own marriage had ended, if working his buns off to fill in the hours until he could fall in bed exhausted could be called dignity. At least he hadn’t done anything seriously stupid, much less dangerous.

      “Dammit, Dad, why’d you have to go and mess up now, just when we were getting back on track?”

      Tuck had been barely making it, back when his old man announced his decision to move back home. What with the divorce settlement, child support, school fees and the building business in a temporary slump, he’d felt lucky to find an affordable dump to move into.

      Shelly had got the house, along with just about everything else he owned. He’d been too numb to put up much of a fight. The anger had come later, when it was too late. By the time Harold had called to ask about coming back to North Carolina, he’d just begun to realize how empty his life was without a family to come home to.

      He’d figured that having his father back home would eat up some of the loneliness that crept up on him when he was too tired to work and too