by Karen Young
Nick shrugged free of Ferdy’s arm. “Screw you, Ferdy.”
“Ooh—ooh, did you hear that, B.J.? He’s talkin’ tough.”
B.J. gave a snicker. “Yeah, real tough.”
Ferdy jerked Nick’s baseball cap from his head and danced backward, just out of Nick’s reach as he grabbed for it. Then he tossed it to B.J., who leaped up, caught it and sailed it up into the air where it landed on top of a stack of fertilizer high in the nether regions of the store. Seeing the uselessness of making an issue of his cap, Nick turned abruptly, ignoring both, and headed for the carts parked nearby. It was plain bad luck running into them. They wouldn’t miss giving him a taste of their idea of fun.
Ignoring them, he struggled to get the unwieldy cart turned around while Ferdy grabbed the handle of another one. “Hey,” he exclaimed gleefully, “let’s play bumper cars!” With a motion to B.J. to clear a path, he made a beeline for Nick. With both boys pushing, the heavy metal cart was traveling at breakneck speed. Nick barely managed to jump aside with a second to spare.
“Are you nuts!” he yelled, confronting them. “That thing weighs a ton. You can do some damage horsing around like that.”
Ferdy feigned remorse. “Oh, gee. Did it almost get Mommy’s boy?” His expression morphed into malicious spite. “Or is it Coach’s boy now?” Ferdy looked at his sidekick. “Have you noticed Nicky and Ward getting real chummy with Coach lately, B.J.?”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed,” B.J. said with a sly grin. “They’re plumb tight.”
“It’s disgusting.” Ferdy lifted a bag of pesticide and tossed it casually from hand to hand. “You know, B.J., the way Nicky and Ward are so tight sharing Coach’s time and attention like that…well, it makes a person wonder what else they share. You ever think of that, B.J.?”
“Yeah, all the time.”
Nick stood them down, legs in an aggressive stance, fists stiff at his sides. “Does your mind stay in the gutter twenty-four hours a day, Ferdy, or just when you’re awake?”
Ferdy was still leering. “Did I get it right, Nicky?”
Bent on leaving, Nick reached for the handle of the cart in disgust. But Ferdy wasn’t ready to quit. His grin faded and his eyes went cold. “I wouldn’t count on moving into the first-base slot if I were you,” he said in a tone that had now lost all trace of humor.
“Yeah, and when you get to be coach, your opinion will count,” Nick said, refusing to be spooked. He shoved the second cart aside, clearing a path. “Until then, you know what you can do with it.” Turning his back on them both, he started again up the aisle. But he’d taken no more than three steps when Ferdy drew back and hurled the bag of fertilizer. Nick was hit hard in the center of his back. Caught off guard, he went down in a sprawl of arms and a shower of Triple 13, yelping when his elbow glanced painfully off the concrete.
“Oops,” Ferdy said, his voice soft and menacing, “Mommy’s boy has hurt himself, B.J.”
“Yeah, too bad,” B.J. giggled, his color high with excitement. Dancing from one foot to the other, his eyes darted nervously to the far end of the aisle.
With B.J. on the lookout for witnesses, Ferdy moved unhurriedly to shove the cart aside with one foot. “Coach is not gonna be happy to find Nicky all banged up on Monday when it comes time for those special lessons.” Shaking his head in mock sympathy, he reached down to give Nick a hand up.
“Go to hell.” Nick knocked his hand aside. His ears were ringing, but he’d be damned if he’d let these two goons know it.
“Nick!”
Shit. It was his mother. In a flash, Ferdy and B.J. sprinted to the corner in the opposite direction and disappeared. Shit again! Cam Ford was with his mom and just in time to see him sprawled on his butt, covered in fertilizer. He must look like a dumb dork.
“What is going on, Nick?” His mother stood with her hands on her hips looking royally pissed. Then, as he raised his eyes to explain, her expression changed. With a shocked cry, she went down on one knee and reached out a hand to touch his face. “You’re bleeding! What happened? Who were those kids we saw running away?”
“Two of the biggest jerks in the whole school,” he muttered. And, pushing his mother’s hand aside, he got to his feet, a little shaky and a lot embarrassed. “Hi, Cam.”
Eyes narrowed, Cam’s gaze was directed toward the aisle where Ferdy and B.J. had split. “You know those two?”
“Yeah.” Nick was busy dusting pellets from his hands and off the seat of his jeans. “Like I said, they’re stupid and they like to try acting tough.”
“Why would they single you out, Nick?” Rachel asked with just enough motherly concern to make Nick squirm as she dug in her purse for a tissue.
“It’s no big deal, Mom.” He reached for the handle of the cart. “C’mon, let’s go load up those shelves and get this show on the road.”
“Nick—” His mother was planted firmly in front of the cart. “I asked you a question.”
“They were just looking for trouble and I was handy.”
“I think that was obvious, but they must have a reason. Tell me their names,” she ordered, coming at him with the tissue.
“Like I said, two jerks.” He turned his face from her but took the tissue and gave a swipe at his forehead, then stuffed it into his pocket. “Leave it alone, Mom.”
Cam touched Rachel’s arm to hold her off, but his eyes were on Nick. It had been some time since he’d dealt with a teenage boy, but he remembered enough to know that Nick wouldn’t appreciate any show of motherly concern in public. He was already embarrassed at Rachel stumbling upon the scuffle in the first place. “Looks like you’re coming up against some of the meanness we mentioned a while back,” he remarked.
“I can handle it,” Nick muttered, and reached for the cart.
“We’ll have to pay for the damaged bag,” Rachel said, still eyeing Nick anxiously.
Cam bent to get the bag and toss it onto the cart, then he caught Rachel’s arm and urged her forward. Even if he hadn’t seen how distressed she was, he could feel the tension in her.
Rachel allowed Nick to pass and followed him up the aisle with a troubled look in her eye. Cam guessed Nick would have to answer a boatload of questions when they got back home. He had a few questions himself, but not for Nick. It looked like problems were brewing in Monk Tyson’s sports program, and as they headed for the checkout, he decided to pay a visit to the coach and get a firsthand look at the situation.
Eleven
“What are you doing?” Marta asked. She stood in the doorway of Dinah’s garage where Rachel sat on a stack of cardboard cartons studying what appeared to be an illustrated instruction sheet for something. A slew of nuts and bolts were strewn about on the floor amid steel shelving and the connecting apparatus that went with it.
“What does it look like?” Rachel muttered, tossing the instructions down in disgust. “I’m installing shelves in the garage…if I can ever manage to figure out how to begin.” She stood up, looking at the scattered contents of the first carton as if studying the markings on a rattlesnake.
“Apparently you were correct in rejecting a career in engineering.” Marta, hands propped on her hips, surveyed the chaos. “This looks like a job for Nick. Where is he?”
Rachel threw up her hands. “Ward called. Kristin Gates and about six other hotties—their description, not mine—are hanging out at the mall. Both boys were practically panting to get over there, so I caved. They would have been useless, anyway.”
“True,” Marta said dryly. She bent and retrieved the instructions, scanned the paper briefly and began organizing the articles strewn around the garage floor. “These things are designed so anybody can put them together. Between the two of us, we can do it.”
Marta was known at school for being handy with a screwdriver. “Where were you going? I’d hate to ruin a fun afternoon,” she lied.
“Just killing time at the mall, but not with the same glee that drives Nick and Ward.” On her haunches now, Ma
rta deftly sorted through the items once contained in a plastic bag. “According to the instructions, you should have forty-two bolts with nuts and washers. You’ll need a wrench, too. I hope you have regular tools, not metric.”
“Who knows?” Rachel muttered, and without a clue as to what kind of tools Dinah kept in the tall storage bin, began searching for something that wasn’t designed for pruning live plants or digging in dirt. Before her divorce, she’d hired professionals to do most household repairs or installations, and today she longed to pick up the phone and call Buddy’s Fix-It. Alas, such indulgences were no longer in the budget. “I should have taken Cam up on his offer to help,” she grumbled, shoving aside gardening gloves, a small trowel and the remains of a dead chrysanthemum in a pot. “He certainly had an opinion while I was trying to decide which type to buy.”
“Cam Ford, the brooding and brilliant novelist, went with you to Home Depot?” Now Marta was incredulous.
“No, of course not. Nick and I ran into him there.”
“Well, why didn’t you take him up if he offered, for Pete’s sake?” Resting on her heels, Marta glanced across the way to where Cam was doing something to the windows on his front porch. “Look, he’s on his porch right now. We can just give him a shout.”
“He was just being polite, Marta.”
“I don’t see Cam as a man who offers to do something just to be polite. Most of the time he’s anything but polite.”
“He’s not so bad…once you get to know him.” Rachel threw up her hands in defeat. “I can’t find anything that looks like real tools.”
Marta took another moment to study Rachel’s face, then turned to search for a small container to hold the nuts and bolts. “Dinah’s bound to have the basic stuff somewhere. It’s just a matter of looking hard enough.”
“Yeah,” Rachel said, and pulled at an innocent-looking box, thinking she’d found the tools, but the bottom had rotted out of the box and loose potting soil cascaded out, landing on her feet. Wrinkling her nose, she stomped dirt off her sneakers. “This, I assume, is not it. Doggone it, where’s Nick when I need him?”
“Like all men at that point, otherwise occupied,” Marta said, and, with a wide smile, suddenly pulled a long brace punctuated with holes from the pile on the floor. “Hah!” she said, falling into a warrior position and brandishing the steel bar like a pirate with a cutlass. “Bring on those pesky shelves, woman. Who needs men when we have intelligence, strength of purpose and feminine ingenuity to get the job done?”
“Maybe we don’t need them,” Rachel said, “but they sure would come in handy.”
“Not a problem,” Marta said, returning to her task. “I tell you, we can do this.”
Reading the printed instructions again, Marta picked up the first of the steel shelves, ready to begin assembling. “Where do you want them set up?” she asked.
“Anywhere but my bedroom,” Rachel said, finally locating a small box that had to be Dinah’s tools. She set it on the floor and popped it open. “Pray that what we need is in here.”
“That flat plastic tray holds the wrenches,” Marta said, appearing beside her. Rachel let her help herself, and to her intense relief, Marta unhesitatingly plucked the proper tool from the motley collection. “We’re all set,” she said. “How ’bout you start opening the other cartons, but don’t scatter the hardware like you did from the first one.”
“I didn’t do that, Nick did!”
“Whatever. We don’t have extra pieces. The Chinese expect Americans to be able to follow instructions, therefore, from their thrifty point of view, there is no need to supply more than forty-two nuts and bolts if that’s what it takes to do the job.”
“So that’s why it looks like a Chinese puzzle,” Rachel muttered.
Marta laughed. “C’mon, it’ll be a piece of cake.”
“No, the piece-of-cake-type shelves were plastic,” Rachel grumbled. “I foolishly let myself be persuaded by three macho men to get the steel variety.”
“Three?” Marta questioned. “Nick, Cam and who else?”
“Oh.” She gave Marta a sly glance. “Didn’t I mention I also ran into Pete?”
“Pete who?” Marta stood holding one of the shelves, ready to attach it to the brace.
“How many men do we know named Pete?” Rachel asked, leaning casually against the counter, her feet in dirty sneakers crossed at the ankles.
“Pete Singletary was at Home Depot in Rose Hill?” Marta asked, setting the shelf down slowly.
“Big as life and twice as sexy.”
Marta made a contemptuous sound. “Isn’t Rose Hill a bit out of his jurisdiction?”
“It’s very much in his jurisdiction now,” Rachel said, enjoying herself. She still believed that Marta had never truly gotten over Pete, in spite of her decision to break her engagement and her hasty marriage to Jorge Ruiz a few months later. Infidelity, she now knew, was a cruel betrayal, but Marta and Pete had been dealing with some sticky problems that might have been worked through. “Pete is our new police chief,” she told Marta.
Marta’s mouth dropped. “You’re kidding.”
Rachel put both hands on her chest. “Cross my heart.”
Shelves forgotten, Marta sat down on top of a short step-ladder. “What happened? He would never voluntarily leave DPD and especially not to relocate to sleepy little Rose Hill. He lived and breathed that job in Dallas. What’s up with him leaving? Did you ask?”
“No, I didn’t. But you’ll get a chance to ask him yourself,” Rachel said, looking beyond Marta’s shoulder. “He’s walking up the driveway as we speak.”
Marta whipped around just as Pete Singletary stepped around Kendall’s bike—left on the driveway as usual—and entered Dinah’s garage. The afternoon sun was at his back, so it was impossible to read the expression on his face. But Rachel guessed he must have recognized Marta’s car and stopped.
“Afternoon, ladies.” He glanced at the litter on the garage floor. “Looks like the two of you have a major project going.”
“Hi, Pete,” Rachel said, and for the second time that day, flashed him a warm smile. “I guess you had less trouble installing your ceiling fan than I’m having with these shelves.”
“I guess,” he said, before turning to his ex-fiancée. “Marta. Good to see you.”
“Hello, Pete.” Marta’s cheeks were flushed and she looked as if she’d like to escape, but Pete’s six-foot-two-inch frame blocked the only way out.
He glanced at the wrench in her hand. “I see Rachel’s got you working.”
“Um, right.” She gave a quick look around at the material strewn on the garage floor. “We were just about to get started.”
A hint for him to clear out, Rachel guessed. But not if she could help it. “I was just telling Marta about seeing you at Home Depot today.”
“Yeah,” Marta said, with a tilt to her chin. “And she mentioned your new job. Are congratulations in order…or not?”
His smile was slightly off center. “I guess you might think that, considering. It took a while, but I’ve managed to overcome my obsession with DPD.” He studied his feet a second or two, then met her eyes. “So yeah, congratulations are in order. I never wanted a job more than I wanted this one.”
She studied him in silence. “In that case, congratulations.”
He held her gaze, then said softly, “Thanks. So,” he added, turning back to Rachel, “can I give you gals a hand here? I put these exact shelves up at my fishing camp a few weeks ago. They’re a little tricky and I found it goes a lot faster if there’s a helper.”
“And did you have one?” Marta asked in a tart tone.
“Nope, which is why I know I needed one.”
“Luckily, there are two of us,” Marta said. “We can manage.”
Rachel handed him a screwdriver. “Don’t listen to her. I don’t even know if my mother’s got the right tools to get the job done, but if you need anything that’s not on hand, I’ll be happy to jump in my ca
r and make another run to Home Depot to get it. Heck, I’ll run to Dallas to get it if you’ll help.”
“Then you don’t need me,” Marta said, ready to toss the wrench in her hand on the floor.
“I do,” Rachel said, catching her by the arm. “You heard him. It takes two. If I have to go get something, he’ll need you to stay and help.”
“What’s the problem, Marta?” Pete said in a tone that made even Rachel’s heart quiver. “I promise not to bring up the past.”
“Bring up anything you please,” she said, snatching up the pot with nuts and bolts. “Nothing you say or do matters to me anymore.”
“If that’s true, you won’t object if I lend a hand here,” he said in a tone as bland as milk. He bent and lifted a single shelf. “We always worked well together, so I’ll just put this piece in place and hold it steady while you fasten the first of the braces to it. Or would you rather be the helper and let me handle the tools?”
He was amused, although he wasn’t about to let Marta see him smile. Rachel, however, could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice. And so could Marta.
“I don’t make a good second banana anymore,” Marta snapped.
Rachel had to fight to keep her own smile from showing. It was such an intriguing turn of events, spiced with the real possibility that the tension between the two of them might suddenly erupt like spontaneous combustion. She hoped there wouldn’t be bloodshed. “What can I do?” she asked in an innocent tone.
“How about you mind your own business,” Marta muttered, but in a voice meant only for Rachel.
“Right. Okay.” Rachel dusted her hands and gladly withdrew from the project. “I’ll just go to fix us something to drink,” she said brightly. “What’ll it be, guys? Coffee? Iced tea? Beer?”
“Beer for me,” Pete said without hesitation.
“Diet. Soda,” Marta gritted. To Pete, she gave a lift of her chin, indicating the next piece she needed. Pete did as instructed, but took his own sweet time doing it, letting his gaze travel over Marta from the top of her head to her neat white sneakers before releasing the piece to her.