The mayor"s copy of the budget, the pages now dog-eared and the margins filled with pencil scratches, lay open on the table before Harlan. Doris wandered by with a carafe and filled the cup he had just emptied. He had been alone all morning and, as if they knew better than to take their customary seats in the corner booth, the breakfast crowd had avoided sitting with him as he examined columns of numbers and filled page after page of a yellow legal pad with notes about squeezing the overtime budget of the public works department to save another fifty.
Harlan had spent at least ten hours studying the budget and had managed to scrounge together only eight hundred dollars. For all his faults, the mayor wasn"t wrong. It was a very tight budget and Harlan made a mental note to commend Shep on
