A Perfect Love by Lori Copeland

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.
    â€œHello!” 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