It was a slow news day for The Brookings Bugle, not that there was ever much excitement in this part of Oregon. A few seconds after that, she began to sing under her breath. After a few seconds, she took another sip of sweet, creamy coffee. “Dangerous!” Kate bellowed from the bathroom. “…love is…love is…love is…” She didn’t recognize any of them. “Love brightens…every color…Love makes everything…seem new, but…love is, love is, love is…” She paused for a sip and a closer inspection of the front page splash-photo, where firemen tromped through the smoldering ruin of some convenience store that had gone up over the weekend.

Concentration rendered her relentless singing to a slow mutter, but did not kill it. Her duty done (not without her daily twinge of guilt), Sarah picked up the rest of the paper and started reading it for real.

There were no jobs this morning, at least none that Sarah qualified for. “…and warms you through the night…oh well.” Love mends what life has broken…” With Kate’s coffee mug conspicuously placed on the cheap table, the newspaper reclaimed her attention. She noticed only that her sister had become intermittently present and so she got up to fix her a cup of coffee, black and bitter because Kate liked to torture herself that way, and to freshen her own, with plenty of powdered creamer and stale sugar because Sarah did not. Like Sarah’s own monotonous singing, it was a trait which had long ago faded into the background. Kate was always losing things and late for something. “Love is easy when it’s the first time,” Sarah droned as Kate rushed in and out again in search of a missing earring. She hadn’t done anything as deliberate as ‘pick’ it.

This morning’s serenade was an actual song and a fairly new one at that, but it could have been anything, really.

It was almost seven o’clock on a Wednesday morning, which found Sarah Fowler sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading the help-wanted ads and singing under her breath in no particular key. Any resemblance to actual persons, places or events are purely coincidental. Names, places, locales and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, photocopying or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the book is a work of fiction.

Cottonwood r lee smith