Peggy Nicholson - Kelton's Rules

“He’s leavin’ now. We gotta get a move on.” Whitey whisked his snarling companion into the truck, clambered up, then poked his head out the window. “You sleep on it, Miz Lake, and give me a call, okay?” With a wave to the children, he rolled off toward the street.

“I can get him,” Kat declared, peering up into the branches. “If I had spiked boots like a lumberjack it’d be easier, but if somebody’d boost me up to that first limb…”

“Uh-uh.” Jack tugged on her ponytail. “You’re grounded, kiddo, and that means what it says. Both feet strictly on the ground.”

She gave him a disdainful look, or it would have been, except for those funhouse eyebrows. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the office?”

He showed his teeth. “I am. Soon as I set you up. Go get the extension cord out of the Jeep and plug it into the carport plug. You’ve got some sanding to do. Lots of sanding.”

Kat made a terrible face, but she knew when to stop arguing. Off she trotted.

Sky looked from the tree to the departing girl squeezing through the gap in the pickets. “Don’t you try and climb this, either,” Jack warned him. “He’ll come down when he’s hungry.”

“DC’s always hungry.”

“Then we’ll see him soon.”

Sky nodded doubtfully, then brightened. “Can I help Kat, Mr. Kelton?”

“Not for a minute. I suppose you can watch, but don’t let me hear that you helped, Skyler. Kat earned every inch and splinter of this job and now she pays up.”

They watched the boy hurry down to the gate, then through. “There was a fire?” Abby inquired after a pause.

“Mmm.” Jack hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans and braced his back against the tree trunk. “She snuck out on her baby-sitter last night, then went over to where I’m building a house, across town. Played with my butane torch and somehow set a can of kerosene on my workbench—and then the bench itself—on fire. Luckily Sheriff Noonan happened by while she was trying to beat out the flames.” And if Noonan hadn’t? His shoulders jerked in a shudder. “At this rate I’ll have white hair before I’m forty. I had a pet raccoon when I was a kid that could open any drawer, any cabinet, any package a human could, but Bandit wasn’t half this much trouble.”

“She is rather…high-energy.” Abby laughed softly. “What’s her punishment?”

“I stopped by my site and collected enough rough lumber to build a new bench. But it all needs sanding, then painting. Her eyebrows will grow in before she’s done with the eighty grit.

“And that reminds me.” He caught Abby’s arm—blinked at its silky warmth and slender definition—then eased her toward the gate. “I’ve decided to give her baby-sitter, Marylou, one last chance. But if you happen to see a red pickup parked outside my house anytime today—anytime this week—would you let me know? Marylou can entertain her boyfriend on her own time, not mine.”

“Of course.”

They’d halted, facing each other as they reached the gate. His fingers were strangely reluctant to leave her skin. Been too long, Kelton. He’d been too busy this spring, working every weekend, to chase women. “Well…”

“You’re headed to your office,” she murmured helpfully. “You’re a…contractor?”

He laughed and shook his head. “I build on my own time. Weekdays, I’m a lawyer—family law. Wills. Custody squabbles. Divorce.”

“Ah.” She took half a step backward, out of his grasp. “Oh, I—” If he’d announced he slept with snakes in the bed and ate kitty cats for breakfast, she’d have looked at him in much the same way.

Jack gave her a steely smile. Lots of people didn’t like lawyers. Just as well that Abby was one of them. Last thing he needed was to chase a woman in the midst of the Divorce Crazies. Been there, done that, honey, with the scars—and the kid—to prove it. “Have a nice day, Abby.”

“You, too. And…thanks for retrieving my bus.” She turned away before he did.

A lesser man might have slammed the gate. Jack closed it with a precisely calibrated firmness. The top hinge tore away from the post.

IT WAS BO-O-ORING sanding the planks. Kat had enjoyed the feel of a big, vibrating block sander in her hands for maybe five minutes—then it got old. And she’d felt kind of superior at how impressed Sky was that she knew how to use power tools, but then that good feeling had faded, too. Now it was nothing but rumble up the long plank laid out on two sawhorses in her yard, then buzz back the other way.

Each time she turned and faced Sky, who sat on the kitchen steps, she made a horrible face. Since she was using the enormous earphones her dad had insisted she wear to protect her hearing, she couldn’t hear Sky’s resulting laughter, but she could see it.

By the third time, he was making faces back at her. From then on it was a contest: who could make the grossest, most terrible face?

After what must have been hours and hours, Marylou came out on the stoop—her soap opera had probably stopped for a commercial—so Kat made faces at her.

Mushy, gushy Marylou. Kat had actually seen her stick her tongue—her tongue!—in Peter Sikorsky’s mouth last night. They hadn’t realized she was sitting at the top of the stairs while they were on the couch. Revolted by that disgusting spectacle, Kat had decided it was time to go. She’d crawled out her bedroom window to the branch of a tree, then to the ground and away.

And why don’t you go away, she silently told Marylou. Marylou was gooey nice to her when her dad was around. Other times they did their best to ignore each other. Kat touched the tip of her tongue to her nose, well, nearly to her nose, crossed her eyes and wobbled her head back and forth like a dizzy duck.

Marylou shook her head pityingly and went back indoors. Sky almost fell off the steps laughing.

The next time Kat completed her dreary circuit and looked his way, she stopped short and grinned. Sky was standing on his head on the top step, with his mouth twisted into a sneer, which looked like a loony smile upside down.

She switched off the sander. “Not bad.” She would have to try a headstand like that, with her forearms down on the ground. If he could do it, surely she could, too. “Where’d you learn that?”

“My mom does yoga.”

“And she does that?” Kat was impressed.

While she changed to a fresh square of sixty-grit paper, Sky turned right-side up again and came to stand beside her, running his palm gingerly along the board. “Still pretty rough.”

“Yeah,” she agreed glumly. “I have to sand ’em all—” she nodded at the stack of planks “—with sixty grit, then eighty, then Dad’s still deciding about one hundred. I’ll be sanding till I go back to school in September. Till Christmas!” Or maybe she’d die of boredom first.

“He’s pretty tough,” Sky observed.

“Yeah.” But he was fair. Like Justice, the blind lady with the scales that he always claimed he was dating on those rare occasions when he dressed up and went out at night—leaving Kat stuck with Marylou.

“Tough is good,” she defended him when Sky looked too sympathetic. “Navy SEALs are tough.”

“Not as tough as navy aviators.”

“Huh! They’re much tougher.” Someday she’d be a SEAL, just like Demi Moore in that movie, if she didn’t become—

“No way! Pilots have to handle terrorists and thunderstorms and icing on the wings and—” He shrugged. “They take care of people every day. My dad’s a pilot.”

“Really? In the navy?” Kat felt a twinge of envy. Her dad only worked in a stupid office.

“Um, no,” Sky admitted, fiddling with the sander. “He used to be, but now he’s a commercial pilot. Flies for American Airlines. He flies all over the country.”

That was still way cooler than sitting in an office, filling out forms. “Is that where he is right now, flying?”

“Yeah…” Sky didn’t look up. His hands had stilled on the sander. “That’s…why he couldn’t come with us. But he’ll catch up with us later on. Sometime soon. He can fly to meet us just about anywhere.”

“There’s an airport—a little airport—here, outside of town. But I guess he couldn’t land his jet.”

Sky shrugged. “That wouldn’t stop Dad. Sometimes for fun he rents a twin-engine plane, a Cessna. I was—I am going to learn to fly. He’ll teach me when I’m older.”

Kat could think of nothing to match that. So she put her earphones back on, crossed her eyes and twitched her upper lip and nose like a chewing rabbit, then sanded away.

The next time she swung around with an even better face, Sky had wandered off to the carport and stood kicking the tires of her dad’s winter car, the Subaru he’d accepted in trade for some legal work. Sky looked as bored as she felt. If only she weren’t grounded, she could take him around Trueheart. Show him the creek that ran through the center of town and how she could catch fish with her hands. They could buy ice cream at Hansen’s.

It would be nice to have a friend in Trueheart. She and her dad had only moved up here from Durango last fall. The girls were all mushy and prissy and talked about nothing but boys. The guys were more interesting, but then she’d tackled Sam Jarrett, a really big eighth-grader, in a football game last October. She’d sat on his foot and wrapped her arms and legs around his calf and ridden him almost to the goalposts before she’d brought him down. But instead of being impressed, the other boys had fallen all over themselves laughing. Ever since then, they just smirked when she asked if she could play. And Sam flat-out hated her. She sighed, realized her sandpaper had gone dull and stopped.

Sky appeared beside her with another square all cut to size and ready.

“I’m going to sail away on a tall ship someday soon,” she confided as she fastened it into place. “Like Rafe Montana’s daughter, Zoe. She sailed all over the ocean counting whales and dolphins. I’m going to be a ship captain someday, for Greenpeace, and I’ll save the whales.” If she didn’t become a navy SEAL; it was a hard choice.

“Cool.” Though Sky didn’t sound very interested.

But maybe he had a stomachache or something. He looked sort of funny and distracted, the way her dad had the time he’d eaten the bad taco. Her stomach rumbled at the thought of food. Or maybe Sky was just hungry.

The next time Kat stopped, she opened her mouth to ask if he’d like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but he spoke first. “You know how to weld?”

“Uh-huh. Um, well, sort of. I’m teaching myself.” She’d learned the most important lesson last night. You should never leave your torch on, then set it near a can of kerosene while you crouched down for the piece of steel you’d dropped.

“Cool. What are you going to weld?”

“I’m making—I was trying to make—a brand. But the metal wouldn’t bend. Guess I didn’t get it hot enough.”

“Guess not.” Sky nodded judiciously. “Why do you want a brand?”

She gave him a mysterious smile. “I’ve got something needs branding.”

“SO IT’S…going to need a little work,” Abby finished her carefully edited tale, trying for a note of brisk optimism. She never should have called her mother, but she’d promised to stay in touch. Phoning her friend Lark in Sedona to report their delay had given her the momentum, but it was now fading under her mother’s grilling. Seated in the swing, she held the cell phone to her ear and glanced overhead. Forty feet up, looking like a snowy, feather-fluffed owl perched in the crook of a branch, poor DC returned her rueful gaze. His rounded eyes were black pools of dismay. He could no sooner climb down this tree than he could fly.