Kelton's Rules

“MO-O-OM, WE SHOULD GO back!” Perched on the bench seat behind his mother, Skyler smacked the Colorado road map.

“Sweetie, I know I took a wrong turn, but see what a gorgeous place we’ve found. Can you believe those mountains?” Abby Lake took one hand off the school bus steering wheel and waved to the right where distant peaks caught the late-afternoon sun. “Just wonderful, huh?”

Framed in her rearview mirror, Skyler was pink-faced and scowling. He pushed his glasses up his short nose and glared straight ahead at the two-lane country road. “You should’ve asked me before you turned. I’m the navigator.”

“You and DC looked so comfy back there, I didn’t have the heart to wake you.” Buckled in behind her on the one bench seat remaining in the stripped-out bus, Skyler had drifted off. He’d been smiling in his sleep, hugging DC-3, the enormous white tomcat that lay cradled against his chest.

Abby hadn’t seen her son smile like that in two months or more. She’d drunk in the sight, feeling like a wanderer in the desert who’d stumbled upon a stream at last—and knelt to scoop cool, clear water with both hands. Because maybe that smile meant the worst was behind them. Skyler would find his happiness again. And then, please God, he’d forgive her.

Stealing glimpse after glimpse in her mirror, memorizing the tender curve of her child’s mouth, the shape of the cat’s ear and the spray of his whiskers—she planned to sketch this scene tonight, once they stopped—somehow she’d missed her road, somewhere west of Durango.

“We should go back!”

“It’s sort of difficult to turn this beast.” Used to a compact car, Abby was still amazed by the huge turning radius of the ancient half-size bus. And it must be leaking power-steering fluid—a tight turn elicited a screeching protest that set her teeth on edge. Never should’ve bought this thing. “Besides, I think we’re coming to a town up ahead—Trueheart, if we’re where I hope we— Where I believe we are. If so, we can angle southwest again toward Cortez.” She reached behind her to pat his map someplace in the vicinity of the tiny dot with the charming name of Trueheart. “So we haven’t lost too many miles.”

“I mean we should go back to New Jersey. We should go home. This is stupid. I hate this place!”

“Oh, Sky, sweetie,” Abby murmured helplessly. Beyond the bug-spattered windshield, the road wavered and blurred. She blinked it clear again. “We can’t go back.” They had no “back” to return to. The divorce settlement had given her the suburban trophy house that Steve had insisted they buy two years ago when he’d left navy aviation to become a commercial pilot. But on a single income, she couldn’t possibly afford to keep a five-bedroom minimansion. Didn’t want it anyway.

Last week she’d sold it for a profit of twenty-thousand dollars, which would be their grubstake for a fresh start. A new life out west.

A life her ten-year-old son hated already.

“We could! We could be home in four days. Dad’s gotta be missing us.”

Want to bet? With Chelsea the Super Stewardess—oh, pardon me, flight attendant—to fly? And a new family on the way? He hasn’t spared us a thought. “Of course he misses you, sweetheart. But he can come visit you anywhere there’s an airport.”

“There’s no airport around here! Nothing but cows and…and cow poop and grass. It stinks!”

Also a sky like a vast, inverted bowl of blue bird feathers. Cerulean. Indigo. Turquoise at the edges. Mountains turning to blazing lumps of coal as the sun rolled down toward a jagged purple horizon. Breathtakingly beautiful country, if her son would only look. “Okay, but Trueheart’s not where we’ll be living, you know. Once we make it to Sedona—”

“I’ll hate that, too!”

Abby sighed, reached back to touch his knee, then grimaced as he flinched away. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that he was glaring out his side window, mouth quivering. Don’t cry, sweetie, oh, don’t! If I’d had any choice in this…

She’d do it all again. Not even for Sky could she have stayed married to Steven Lake once she’d realized the extent of his cheating. What a blind, trusting fool I was! She should’ve seen it coming. Any woman with two eyes in her head—the kind of woman who didn’t muddle her maps and end up blithely wandering off into the wilderness with the sun going down…

But Abby had never been that kind of woman—a woman who paid attention. She was always marveling over a pebble, or a dandelion, or a cloud, when she should’ve been turning out her husband’s pockets every time he returned from a cross-country flight.

“And I hate this stupid ol’ wreck of a bus! The radiator’s boiling over again. Didn’t you look at the heat gauge?”

Abby looked—yelped—and took a foot off the gas. “You’re right!” They’d filled the radiator only this morning and also the day before around noon. The mysterious leak seemed to be gaining on them with every passing mile.

Coasting to a stop—she hadn’t seen another car for ten minutes or more—Abby pulled over to the ragged shoulder of the road and blew out a breath. “Wonderful… Okay, where’s the water jug?” They’d used more water than gasoline, it seemed, these past two days.

“It’s back—” Skyler unbuckled himself and scrambled into the rear of the bus, which was crammed with boxes and baggage and a washing machine and all the other household essentials they couldn’t leave behind. Skyler’s model airplanes. Abby’s books and easel. DC’s litter box. “Uh-oh…”

“What?” She’d stopped on a long, gradual upgrade, so Abby shifted the floor lever carefully into first gear, stepped on the emergency brake pedal, then swung around. “What’s the matter?”

Sky held up an empty five-gallon jug. “The cap came off. Your sketchbook’s all wet.”

Abby clenched her teeth on a groan and closed her eyes. Her sketchbook! She’d had three or four drawings in this one that she felt sure were keepers. She’d intended to mat and frame them once they reached Sedona, then use them as samples in her search for a gallery to handle her work. You couldn’t have found a safer place to put the blasted jug? She managed a shaky smile. “Well… Okay. No big deal.” Now what? “We’ll just have to find some water.” They’d crossed a narrow creek perhaps two miles back, down at the base of this long, long slope. The road had been gradually climbing up from the plains for the last twenty miles.

“I’m sorry.” Sky looked as crushed as she felt.

“Plenty more sketches where those came from.”

“If we’d stayed in New Jersey it never would’ve happened.”

“Well, we didn’t!” She held out her hand for the jug. “We didn’t,” she repeated, lowering her voice. “We’re just going to have to make the best of where we are, kiddo.” She swung open her door a cautious inch or two, checking underfoot for the cat, who also seemed bound and determined to bolt back east. “Want to come along? I think there might be a stream down there.” The roadside pasture also sloped gently down toward a distant line of trees.

“Uh-uh.”

“Well, I’ll lock this door then.” Not that there was anyone within miles to worry about. In fact, the real concern was how they’d find someone to help them if she didn’t locate water. How could a country be so big and so deserted? Not a fence, not a telephone pole, not a house in sight. Just enormous rolling slopes, rising in wave after dusty wave toward the far-off mountains. “I’ll be straight down there, if you change your mind.”

SKYLER STOOD, staring at the ruined sketchbook, while her footsteps crunched on gravel, then faded away. “Darn. Crap. Oh, booger, DC!” He could have found a better place to stow the water. Should have. Had he wanted that to happen, or was he just stupid?

His dad was always telling him to pay attention. Laughing and calling him Spaceshot when he forgot to do something or when he was clumsy doing it. Sky stooped for the cat. “I used to think Spaceshot was good.” A name for an astronaut, maybe, or a test pilot. He still remembered how it had stung when the true meaning finally dawned on him.

“Come’ere, luggums.” Arms filled with twenty pounds of cat, he rubbed his face through the thick white fur till a rumbling purr kicked into gear. “Like a big ol’ DC-3 humming along,” his dad used to say. “Fat thing.” He wandered forward to sit in the driver’s seat, holding the cat in his lap as he stared out through the windshield.

At nothing. There was nothing out there that mattered. “’Cept her,” he muttered grudgingly, turning DC’s head so they both peered down the hill to where his mom’s yellow T-shirt bent for an instant toward the ground. Picking flowers, when she ought to be looking for water. “Or maybe not.” Why should he care about her when this was all her fault? If she hadn’t gotten so angry at his dad, he’d never, ever have left them. He’d told Skyler that. “But what can a guy do?” Sky muttered, echoing the breezy words he’d heard so many times before.

I can drive us home where we belong.

Skyler blinked behind his thick lenses. He could hijack this stupid bus sometime, when his mom was taking a nap on the mattress in the back, as she did when she got too tired to see the road.

“Drive all the way back to New Jersey,” he gloated, picturing it as he ruffled DC’s fur, then smoothed it again. “She’d wake up and—zowie—there we’d be in the driveway.” Home. His eyes started to water. “Like we never left at all.”

If only he could drive.

He leaned over the cat to examine the pedals. Three instead of two like on his dad’s BMW and his mom’s old Taurus. Which she never should have sold. Not for this hunk of junk.

And this thing had a floor-mounted stick shift. It looked a lot harder to handle than the gear shift on his dad’s car, which he’d been studying all year, practicing in his mind. He’d planned to ask his dad if he’d teach him to drive this summer.

Instead here he sat, in the middle of nowhere. Hundreds and thousands of miles from his dad, his friends at school, his bedroom and his tree house out back. “So first you have to shift.” He tried it and was surprised at the big lever’s resistance. “Ooof—move, you stupid thing!”

DC stood up on his lap, tail swishing in irritation. Sky hooked his left forearm around the cat to steady him. “Help me out here, will you? Why won’t it—oh!” Spaceshot. Dummy. He’d forgotten the clutch pedal. You stepped on that, then you shifted. “Pedal, then hold it, then—ha!” The gearshift moved easily, with a soul-satisfying clunk!

“Yeah!” Sky shifted up, down, then over and up again, the way he’d seen his mom do it. Then down again on the other side. “And that’s fourth gear, when we’re really rolling.” Hey, this was easy! He shifted back to the middle.

“Now we have to turn it on.”

Did he dare? He stole a glance downhill, but his mom was out of sight in the trees. “She’ll never hear us if we run it for just a minute,” he assured the cat. Resting his chin on DC’s round head, he leaned forward to finger the key. She couldn’t possibly hear, but still… His mom didn’t get mad often, but when she did…

“Ouch!” Tired of being squashed, DC dug in his claws and slithered down from his lap. His double-wide tail slapped Skyler’s glasses, which as usual had slid to the end of his nose. “Hey, stupid hairball, watch what you’re doing!”

Cat and glasses hit the floorboard at once, with a clatter and a weighty thump. “If you’ve broken them—” Sky’s mom paid for his first pair of replacement glasses each year, then the rest came out of his allowance. This was pair number three and it was only June. “Crap!”