Penny Richards - Wolf Creek Father

He’d also talked with the young women he’d courted, and when pressed, they’d each acknowledged that Cilla and Brady were the real reasons behind their breaking things off.

The onus was definitely on him. It wouldn’t be easy, and it wouldn’t happen overnight, but he was nothing if not determined. Or maybe that was hardheadedness, something he’d passed on to his children.

Colt’s gaze sought the small white house situated at the edge of town. Smoke billowed from the open parlor windows. A giant fist seemed to grab his heart. Fire! Gripped with sudden panic, he broke into a run, sorting impressions as he went. No tongues of flame licked at the curtains, and he didn’t hear the pop and crackle of burning wood. The house didn’t appear to be on fire, so what was going on?

Breathing heavily, he pulled open the screen door, flinging it against the outer wall and rattling the windows in their frames. A thick fog of smoke and the stench of charred bacon assaulted him. Narrowing his burning eyes and waving his hand in front of his face in a futile attempt to dissipate the acrid air, he made his way to the kitchen. A quick look around the room told him he’d been right. There was no fire. Thank heaven.

Cilla stood at the open back door, an old apron of Patrice’s tied around her waist as she fanned the air with it, as if the feeble effort might clear the room faster. Brady stood bent over with his palms on his knees, hacking and coughing. A cast-iron skillet lay in the yard beyond the covered porch, where Cilla must have thrown it, its charred contents scattered about. The neighbor’s mutt approached a piece of the bacon, nudged it with his nose, whimpered and backed away. Colt wondered if it was still hot or if even the dog found it unpalatable.

“What happened?” he asked, nearing the two culprits.

They both looked at him, smoke-induced tears streaming down their cheeks. “I was trying to fix you some supper,” Cilla said, her blue eyes, so much like her mother’s, filled with remorse and trepidation.

Newly aware of how they played on his sympathies, and with the unexpected declaration coming so close on the heels of his talk with Ellie, little warning bells began to sound inside his head. Why was Cilla attempting to cook when she seldom had before? Was this one of those attempts to “butter him up,” as Ellie suggested?

“Why?” he asked, taking them each by the arm and ushering them out into the fresher air of the summer day.

Wide-eyed, Brady looked at Cilla, who was dabbing at her watering eyes with the hem of the apron. Colt waited.

Cilla finally looked at him, a limpid expression in her eyes. “I was going to fix you some bacon and pancakes since it’s your favorite and you hardly ever have them.”

Oh, yes. Definitely buttering him up. Colt hooked his thumbs in the belt loops of his denim pants. “That’s mighty nice of you,” he said, “but why today of all days? Are we celebrating something?” He looked from one child to the other with feigned nonchalance.

“Uh, no, not really. We just thought it would be a nice thing to do, since you work so hard and everything.”

Never one to put off an unpleasant chore—unless it came to his children—Colt decided it was time to get on with it. No more dillydallying. After all, he was turning over a new leaf as a parent. “Then is anything wrong? Did something happen?” he asked with an inquisitive lift of his eyebrows.

Cilla stared into his eyes for long seconds, and turned to her brother with a sigh. “He knows, Brady.”

“Who told you?” Brady demanded, whipping up a healthy indignation.

“Miss Grainger.”

“That mean old tattletale!” Brady cried, his voice strident with outrage. Cilla gave an unladylike snort.

“Let’s go sit under the oak tree,” Colt said, gesturing toward the shaded area. “Maybe the house will air out enough to go back inside in a bit.”

When they were settled beneath the gnarled limbs of the tree, Colt stretched out his long denim-clad legs and crossed them. Where should he start? He decided to approach the situation the way Patrice would have. The trouble was, he had no notion of how she might have handled things.

“It’s way past time the three of us had a talk,” he said, deciding to jump in feet first.

“About what?” Cilla regarded him with wide-eyed innocence.

Colt pinned her with a look that said without words that she knew what was coming. She dropped her gaze and plucked at the apron still tied around her waist.

“We need to talk about you and Brady and the fact that the two of you are gaining quite a reputation. And not a good one, I might add.”

The children darted glances at each other.

“First let me explain that my position in town is an important one. It makes me look bad when the two of you are mixed up in one unpleasant incident after another.”

“What does it mean that you look bad?” Brady asked.

“It means that the whole town thinks that I’m a bad father. They think I don’t care about you enough to teach you how to behave, and that I’m allowing you to be hurtful, disrespectful and destructive.”

“But you do care!” Brady cried.

“Well, you know it and I know it, but folks in town think I’m letting you grow up with no discipline and no instruction on how to be good people.”

“That’s silly!”

“Is it?” he challenged. “Actions speak louder than words, son, and all they know is what they see, which doesn’t make any of us look good.”

“How are we destructive?” Brady asked.

Colt looked directly at Cilla. “Miss Grainger’s glasses are ruined. They can’t be fixed, so she’ll have to have new ones, and I’ll have to pay for them.”

Cilla’s gaze dropped to the hands clasped in her lap.

“And her hat was ruined in the scuffle.” He gave his daughter a look that said without words that he knew exactly how the hat had been damaged. “I’ll have to repay her for it and a new pair of gloves. The worst thing, though, is that she might have been hurt badly if her head had struck the corner of the counter.”

No one spoke for a while. Finally, Colt asked, “Do either of you even know why you do what you do?”

Cilla and Brady exchanged hangdog looks.

Cilla finally spoke. “When you come home at night and you’re in the same room with us, it doesn’t feel as if you’re really here,” she said, staring at the hands twisting in her lap. She glanced up and met his troubled gaze. “Sometimes it’s like you’ve gone off in your mind somewhere. When you scold me for something, you pay attention to me,” she confessed, looking up at last. “For a little while, anyway.”

Colt felt a stabbing pain in the vicinity of his heart. This was much worse than he’d thought. He attempted a light tone that fell far short of the mark.

“See? That’s what I mean. Everyone in town is right. I don’t pay enough attention to you. I need to change that.” He looked at his son. “Brady, why did you shove Miss Grainger?”

Brady stuck out his lower lip.

“Did she do something to upset you?”

“She said she was disappointed because I haven’t been reading this summer.”

“And so you pushed her?” Colt asked in an incredulous tone.

Brady nodded.

“Well, she should be disappointed,” Colt said, though the admission galled him no end. “I told her that I’d work with you on your reading this summer, and I haven’t been very consistent with it. It’s something we need to fix.”

“Pa! It’s summer,” the boy wailed.

“I understand that, but Miss Grainger is concerned about you falling behind in school. She wants your reading to improve so all your grades will get better. She told me that you get disrespectful when she tries to explain things to you, and you don’t listen. True?”