Bert raked a little faster, and I hoped he wasn’t revising his opinion about my sanity. “Was there a reason for this visit?” he asked, without looking at me.

“We never got that far,” I said.

Bert glanced in my direction.

“Nothing happened,” I told him firmly, and without delay.

He grinned. “I never said it did,” he replied. “Give Russell one of them frankfurters, will you? He missed his breakfast.”

I slid off the stool and went around behind the bar, glad to have something physical to do, however mundane. “You shouldn’t let him eat stuff like that,” I said. “One of these days, he’s going to blow an artery.”

Bert got out the dustpan and leaned down to rake the pile into it. “Poor dog gets nothin’ but diet kibble at home,” he said. Bert’s girlfriend, Sheila, ran a tight ship. “One sausage ain’t gonna hurt him.”

I opened the door, speared a frank and plopped it onto a paper plate.

Russell watched, salivating, as I cut it into bite-sized pieces with a plastic knife. “Like you don’t give him one every morning of his life,” I chided, but I set the plate down in front of Russell and smiled as he snarfed up the grub.

“My aunt Nellie saw a ghost once,” Bert ruminated, raking again. “It was her dog, Fleagel the beagle. He lived for seventeen years, and Nell swore she found crap on the same old place on the stairs for ten days after he croaked. She said that was how she knew she was going to die. When the beagle came back, I mean. Sure enough, a few weeks after the sighting, she bit the dirt, right in the middle of a game of blackout bingo.”

I gazed across the bar at him, hands resting on my hips. With anybody else, I would have felt self-conscious in my jeans, rumpled nightshirt and Sponge Bobs, but Bert was different. Like a brother. “That was a pretty insensitive remark,” I said.

“Aunt Nellie was a pretty insensitive woman,” Bert answered, without missing a beat. “If Uncle Dutch hadn’t been too embarrassed to call the cops on her, she’d have been run in on a domestic violence charge. The only thing she ever loved, far as I could tell, was that dog of hers.”

I returned to my stool but sat facing Bert, with my back to the bar. “We both come from dysfunctional families,” I reflected. “Maybe that’s why we get along so well.”

Bert chuckled, shook his bald head. “You know what worries me, Mojo? I can follow your logic, back-asswards as it is. Your brother went to prison for killing your folks. I was raised by two drunks and a pack of Labrador retrievers. We’re a pair to draw to, you and me.”