Peggy Nicholson - Kelton's Rules

One week, she reminded herself. No more than a week.

PIZZA FOR BREAKFAST wasn’t such a bad idea, after all—if you ate it outside on a blanket, on a glorious sunny morning in southwestern Colorado.

Picnic completed except for a last cup of coffee, Abby limped along the weed-choked perennial border between her cottage and Jack’s. Once upon a time an ardent gardener must have lived here. The remnants still bloomed: several sprawling rambler roses, a late lilac of an exceptionally gorgeous shade of violet, a clump of daisies splashed white against the rioting green. Blue flag irises unfurled their petals to the sun, while at their feet, ruby and white alyssum duked it out with the dandelions. A bit of unkempt heaven just begging her to reach for pen and ink and watercolors.

Kat and Skyler had insisted that DC-3 should join their feast, and now Sky lay on the blanket with the tomcat crouched on his chest like a rampant lion. Abby cut another branch of blowsy pink roses, arranged it in a chipped blue stoneware pitcher she’d filled with water, then glanced around. “Where’s Kat?” Just a minute before, the girl had been perched on the old swing that hung from the branch of the gigantic oak tree shading the back of their house.

“Went to get something at her place,” Sky said as he stroked a knuckle down DC’s outstretched throat.

How close an eye was she supposed to be keeping on this girl? Normally, Abby wouldn’t have thought twice about allowing a visiting neighbor’s child to wander back home, back in suburban New Jersey. But here in Trueheart she didn’t know the rules or the dangers.

As far as she’d been able to see last night, the town was safe as could be, near idyllic. Small enough that strangers, good-intentioned or otherwise, would be instantly noticed. So small that any adult would know all the children—and more to the point, their parents. Her cottage was on a narrow road serving perhaps twenty nineteenth-century houses set on deep, old-fashioned lots that had been laid out at a time when each family probably tended a vegetable garden or kept chickens and a milk cow out back.

“Maybe you should go find her,” Abby suggested. She wouldn’t have dreamed of entering Jack’s domain uninvited, but somehow Sky wouldn’t seem quite such an intruder.

“Don’t need to.” Her son nodded at the fence, where Kat was just now wriggling between two missing pickets. Abby swallowed a laugh. The girl hadn’t bothered to deviate thirty feet out of her path toward the street, to where a garden gate stood ajar under an arching, rose-smothered trellis. Kat was a straight shooter in every sense of the word, Abby was finding. Another trait she’d inherited from her blunt-spoken father.

And where is her mother? Abby had wondered that several times already this morning. Not that it was any of her business. “Oh…Kat,” she murmured helplessly as the girl arrived beside her to offer a pair of garden shears.

“Do you want to use these? They were in our junk drawer.”

“Much better than this old knife,” Abby agreed, accepting them. “Thank you. And I see you…fixed your eyebrows.”

Kat’s brows had been scorched to ash in whatever fire had burned her poor little hands in several places. Abby had attempted to question her while she’d smoothed antiseptic cream on her burns then rebandaged them. But beyond claiming that she’d been welding last night, Kat had scowled and refused to elaborate.

“They were so icky I figured I’d shave ’em,” Kat confided now.

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?”