Times are tough for the antique dealers working on Worth Row. This is not to say, however, that it is by any means quiet on the Row, a place where bathtubs double as lawn furniture and adultery, bribery and larceny are commonplace. From the quirky to the certifiable, it seems that everyone has something to hide -- from their cus- tomers, spouses and even themselves. But when a violent storm strikes, causing fire, a heart attack and grand theft, it stirs up more than just the earth it hits. Suddenly, long-buried truths are flowing faster than the flooding rains, and when the dust and smoke finally clear, everything is righted at last. With a strong, rich and uproariously funny voice, Joe Coomer resurrects the magic of his previous novels, Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God and The Loop, and turns the utterly ordinary into the stunningly extra-ordinary. With a splendid cast of characters and the cleverest canine in comedy, Apologizing to Dogs is a hilarious, heartwarming and wonderfully human tale, proving that no matter how old you get, there's always something worth holding on to, fighting for and loving with all your might. Richard Wallace The Seattle Times This is neo-Southern Gothic country, and nobody writing today does it better and funnier than Joe Coomer. Lori Leibovitch The New York Times Book Review Reading Joe Coomer's new novel is like watching an entertaining sitcom -- its characters are too zany to be real, but they're irresistible nonetheless....Coomer manages to squeeze a fascinating range of human experience into one little street in Texas. Kirkus Reviews Thirty years' worth of secrets, most having to do with sex and love, are exposed in the course of one frantic day in this deftly plotted mix of comedy and romance....Coomer manages it all with a surprisingly light, often witty, touch....A sharply observant and engaging entertainment. Joe Coomer is the author of Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God, The Loop, Sailing in a Spoonful of Water and an award-winning book of nonfiction, Dream House. He lives in Texas and Maine. Friday, October 3 8:17 Verda in her tight pants out to get her paper. She has a habit of pulling her dress out of her rear crack when she gets up out of a chair and I noticed she did the same with the pants after she'd bent over to pick up her paper. I was on my front porch watering my pot plants. The bar was cool that day and he was thirsty and that was all he was thinking about, that and whether or not he'd remembered to tighten down the clamp on the condensation drain of unit number four. If it leaked they'd call. No, that wasn't right. He'd go back first thing in the morning and check on it. He'd spent the day installing six commercial air-conditioning units at a new business on Hulen Street. His elbows rested on the bar and his two front teeth sat on his lower lip like a washer and dryer, the washer having wobbled away on spin cycle leaving a gap between his teeth large enough to see a pink wad of lint which was his tongue. After each gulp of beer, he poked the lint back with the wing bone of a chicken. He'd sucked on a chicken bone for as long as he could remember, so long that some people called him Bone rather than Marshall. He didn't mind. He'd tried and failed to give up the bone, but the bone was stronger than he was. It wasn't such a bad habit. Chicken wings were cheap. His teeth were as white as a dog's. But he knew that the bone frightened women. They stared and then winced and acted as if the bone were in their own mouths. So he avoided people, installed air-conditioning units, heat pumps, ran the ductwork, and took all the solace and flavor he could from his bone. There had been this way of life since he'd graduated from high school seventeen years earlier. He'd scored eighteen points in his final game at Northside High. He was a six-foot-eight, 160-pound second-string center, and when the other boy broke his ankle at the beginning of the second half, Marshall bit through his own bone and went in. He could recall each of the nine baskets but never brought this up in conversation. Lots of people thought he was called Bone for his slender build, then they'd see the bone. The bone he sucked on that evening was relatively fresh. He could still taste the marrow leaching through the epiphysis. The first thing he noticed that had anything to do with Aura was her drink. Down at the far end of the bar was a short, squat glass containing an aquamarine liquid protected by a little umbrella. It looked as if someone had slit open a blue freezer pack and drained it into a glass. Behind the drink, in shadow, something caught the light. It flashed again and once more. Something like a nickel spinning in midair. For a moment he forgot the bone and it tumbled between his two front teeth, slipped off his lower lip and bounced on the bar. He put it back in his mouth as carefully as he might reinsert a false eye. A hand came out of the shadows and took the