Kelton's Rules

She had. She’d shaved them off entirely—then redrawn them, with what looked like black ink from a felt-tipped pen. She’d drawn them the way a child usually pictures eyebrows, in continuous arching lines rather than short, hairlike strokes. Worse yet, she’d placed them a quarter-inch too high and given the left one a zany, quizzical slant. She looked like Groucho Marx, astounded.

“Yuck!” Skyler had come to join them. “You look weird! Loony!”

Kat bristled. “No loonier than you, goggle-eyes!”

Sky went as pink as the roses, and Abby fought the urge to rush to his rescue. His weak eyesight was a constant source of woe. Bullies at school had singled him out for attention, using his thick lenses as a point of derision, even snatching his glasses off his face.

But on this occasion, Sky had been the first to make a personal remark and so should pay the price.

“Least I didn’t burn off all my hair,” he retorted, unrepentant.

Oh, Lord, if he gave Kat the idea of shaving her head! “I wonder what Kat would look like in glasses?” Abby intervened hastily.

“Yeah.” Sky whipped them off and held them out. “I dare you! Let’s see if you look any better.”

Apparently “dare” was the magic word. Kat settled them on her nose and gave him a haughty glare.

Skyler smirked. “Now you’re a goggle-eyed loon.”

“And you’re another!” But Kat wriggled her brows, made a maniacal face—and Sky burst into giggles.

“If you c-could see what you look like!”

They trooped off into the cottage in search of a mirror and Abby let out a sigh of relief. Storm averted for now, anyway. Life would be so much easier this next week if those two got along. And Sky had been dreadfully lonely these past few days, mourning the loss of his friends on the East Coast. He was a bad mover, as she’d always been, shy and therefore slow to reach out, to make new friends.

Another reason Abby felt guilty. Was she totally crazy—utterly selfish—dragging him away from his hard-won pals? From the only town he’d ever lived in for more than a single year?

But what about me? She’d hadn’t chosen a new life; she’d been launched into it willy-nilly when Steve had left her for a young woman who was determined to bear his children.

But once he’d done that, didn’t Abby have the right to make the best life she could, someplace fresh and new and unencumbered by old hurts and worn-out dreams? Where she wouldn’t have failure rubbed in her face each time she encountered her replacement? Biting her lip, she cut another spray of roses, a handful of daisies, and shoved their stems into her pitcher. Then she stood, hugging the bouquet of flowers to her breast, staring vaguely around her at the overgrown yard and woebegone cottage. I wanted a new life for us, but look at this! This wasn’t part of the plan.

She raised her head at the sound of distant engines coming nearer. Then a parade of vehicles burst from beyond her far neighbor’s pine trees and came rumbling down the street. In the lead rolled an enormous, open-backed truck whose drab olive color and rugged design suggested some sort of military surplus. It towed a crimson bus—her bus—effortlessly behind it. Jack Kelton’s Jeep brought up the rear, a pile of lumber angled up over its stern. He lifted his hand in a jaunty wave.

Didn’t even think to ask me if I wanted my bus here—or somewhere else, she thought, half vexed, half amused. He’d simply decided what was best for her and forged ahead.

The truck turned down her driveway, while the Jeep continued on to Jack’s. When the vehicle stopped beside her, Abby stood on one wobbly tiptoe to peer into its cab.

“Ma’am.” A weathered old cowboy touched his battered Stetson. “Reckon you’d be Miz Lake?”

“Abby.” She stepped onto the running board to accept his extended hand, dry and gnarled as a knot of driftwood. “And you’re Mr. Whitelaw?”

“Whitey, and this ol’ cuss is Chang.”

In the dimness of the cab, Abby had taken the lump of white and orange at his side for a heap of rags. But now a rounded head reared up; two rheumy-brown pop-eyes considered her with an air of jaundiced malevolence. An ancient Pekinese. The dog lifted his black lip in a toothless snarl as she stretched out a hand to pat him—then changed her mind. “Pleased to meet you both, Whitey, but however did you drag my bus up that hill?”

“Huh! This truck could yank that oak out by the roots, if I asked it to—” He jerked a thumb at the swing tree. “Now, where’d you like your bus?”

JACK JOINED ABBY and the children to watch Whitey maneuver the bus farther into the backyard, working it around so that it was finally parked, hood toward the street, tail-lights a few feet from the listing toolshed that stood near the back fence. The bus was nicely shaded by trees, with a strong limb overhanging the engine, in case Whitey needed to set up a block and tackle.

Jack nodded approval, then glanced down at his daughter and flinched. “Katharine Kelton, what am I going to do with you?” To look at her, you’d never guess that her mother had been—was—a beauty. As feminine as a pink powder puff or a feather-trimmed, high-heeled mule.

Kat stuck out her stubborn chin. “I like ’em better this way.”

“Glad to hear it, ’cause if that’s my pen you used, it’s permanent ink.” He sent Abby a rueful look, meant to show he had no hard feelings. You watched the Kat every minute of the day, which, of course, was impossible, or you learned to live with the consequences.

“Oh, I’m sure we can get it off, whenever she likes,” Abby murmured, laying a slim hand on Kat’s shoulder.

The lightest of touches, but it seemed to align woman with girl, consigning Jack to the outside of an invisible circle. Leave her to me, said that gesture.

Fine; so he would. He hadn’t a clue what to do with Kat and it got worse every year. He turned to Sky for some masculine support—and groaned out loud. The kid gave him an embarrassed smirk from under an inked-on mustache, ? la Adolf Hitler. “Whatever.” Too much to hope for that Abby would bring a note of sanity to the neighborhood. She was just a new kind of craziness.

He pulled her aside, noting as he did that her ankle was still swollen but apparently functional. “Whitey says the gears are stripped. That means a new transmission, plus the new exhaust. And he thinks your radiator is shot—rusted through at the bottom.”

She’d crossed her forearms under her breasts, as if to hold herself together. “Yes, I knew about the radiator.”

It took real effort to keep his eyes focused on her face. “He can work on it for fifteen dollars an hour plus parts, if you like. That’s less than half of what you’d pay a city mechanic. But he thinks maybe you should junk her. Sell her for whatever you can get.”

“Darn…” Abby tried for a smile. “What a sucker I was. If she hadn’t been such a wonderful color…”

Jack frowned. “Come again?”

“I fell in love with that crimson. It’s why I bought her. I could just picture her parked in front of those red-orange cliffs you see in Arizona Highways with that blue desert sky. I even brought along some green-and-purple striped canvas to make an awning for her.”

“That would’ve been…bright,” he allowed. You’re losing me here, Abby. You make life decisions based on color? Still, he felt himself leaning toward her, she looked so little and lost. “But maybe it’s time to let her go. Buy something a little more practical.” Like a car. “You could rent a truck to get you and your belongings to wherever you’re going, then—”

“Sedona. That’s where we were headed.”

Sedona. He should’ve guessed. Sedona, Arizona, where all the hippies and mystics and misfits and tofu-eaters and New Age scam artists congregated, drawn by power vortexes and drumming circles and too many juice bars. Well, that explains a lot.

“I have a friend out there, a Feng Shui consultant, who owns some land. She was going to let us park our bus on her property. We were going to live in it for the summer while we built something permanent. An adobe, I was thinking.”

Ah, yes, he’d seen this so many times before. A clear case of the Divorce Crazies. “Have you, um, ever built a house before?”

“Well, no, but how hard can it be?”

Jack turned with relief to Whitey, who’d been unhitching the bus and now stumped over to join them, his moth-eaten Pekinese waddling at his worn-down boot heels. “You tell her what I said?” He leaned aside to spit a stream of brown tobacco juice, then pulled out a yellow bandanna to dab primly at his mouth. “Gettin’ the parts is gonna be the hardest thing. Might take some fancy scrounging. There’s a yard over on the reservation. Seems t’me they had an ol’ bus or two.”

“Do you…have any idea how many hours it would take…to fix her?” Abby asked.

How much it would cost, she meant. Jack wondered what kind of settlement she’d gotten. Whether she’d had a competent lawyer. Dithering soft women like this one always seemed to hire kindly bumblers, while their husbands hired sharks.

“There’s no telling. I’d put one foot in front of t’other till she’s done or till you say ‘whoa.’”

She stood, arms clasped tightly around her middle. “Could you tell what caused the brake to fail in the first place?” she said at last. “Or how it popped out of first gear?”

Whitey and Jack exchanged a quick, wry glance, then the old man shrugged. “Driver error.”

“But I wasn’t—” Her eyes widened. “You mean, Skyler? Sky did this? I know he tried to stop it, but you think he—”