The Trick To Getting A Mom. Amy Frazier

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СКАЧАТЬ much-worn overalls. Her hair—on second glance, Kit could see it was a little girl—looked as if it had been combed with an electric mixer. Strands stuck to a face so grimy and sweat-streaked, Kit almost overlooked the black eye. A scrapper for sure, this newcomer couldn’t be more than five or six.

      Kit felt an instant affinity for the kid. She herself had been a scrapper.

      “What’s your name?” she asked, stepping off the porch.

      “Alexandra Melinda McCabe. But my dad calls me Alex.” The child looked her straight in the eye. “You got any books?”

      Alexandra Melinda McCabe. The McCabes were an upstanding family in Pritchard’s Neck. Which one of them didn’t know better than to let a little kid run loose? And why wasn’t the child in school on a Tuesday? “What grade are you in?”

      “Three.” She was small for her age.

      “Why aren’t you in school, Alex?”

      “I got ’spended. For fighting.” Alex rammed her tiny fists on her hips. “That’s three questions I answered. Now, you. You got any books?”

      “No. I’m sorry. I have books in my apartment in Boston, but not here.” Babe had never been a reader. Men were her hobby. With Ed Crenshaw, she’d begun to specialize in younger men.

      “Where are your parents?” Kit turned the conversation back to Alex.

      “My dad’s working.”

      Kit never failed to feel a stab of empathy when she saw a young child on the street, unsupervised.

      “So your dad leaves you by yourself while he’s working?”

      “My Aunt Emily’s watching me.”

      Kit glanced up and down the street. “I don’t see her.”

      “She’s gonna have a baby. She’s lying down ’cause she can barely walk.” Alex shot Kit a don’t-push-your-luck look. “You ask as many questions as Ms. Simmons did before she ’spended me.”

      Kit suppressed a smile. She liked this kid. Liked her forthright manner and unconventional clothes. Her grime and her grit.

      “You’d better head home before your aunt worries about you.” She opened the cooler. “It’s hot. Want a soft drink to take with you?”

      Before Alex could answer, a pickup truck came to a sliding halt at the end of the driveway.

      “Alex!” A big, dark-haired man leaped out of the driver’s side, scowling. “Your Aunt Emily’s been worried sick about you,” he barked as he charged up the driveway. “She called me at the pound to say you’d disappeared. You were supposed to stay in her yard.” His anger rolled before him like breakers on the beach.

      Standing firm before his wrath, Alex pointed at the yard sale sign listing on its stake. “I saw the sign and came down for just a minute, Dad. To see if there were any Seafaring Cecil books.”

      Kit pricked up her ears at the mention of Seafaring Cecil. But she hesitated to speak, cautious about coming between the man and his daughter.

      “Alex—” the father’s anger quickly abated, replaced by weariness evident in the tiny lines fanning the corners of his eyes “—how could you see the sign if you weren’t already halfway down the street?”

      Alex fumbled in the pocket of her overalls. “With this.” She retrieved a folding telescope Kit recognized as one of the offerings on Seafaringcecil.com.

      The man seemed torn between exasperation and relief.

      “She’s only been here a couple minutes,” Kit offered. “She told me she needed to get back. So as not to worry her aunt.”

      Alex flashed her a grateful look.

      As the man turned his attention to Kit for the first time, she sucked in her breath. She would know those dark eyes anywhere.

      He held out a hand. “Sean McCabe.”

      Oh, yeah.

      Back when they’d gone to high school together, he’d been the cream of the crop, both scholastically and athletically. Every girl with a hormone to her name had lusted after him.

      And Kit had not been immune.

      Once, right before graduation, Sean had unexpectedly asked her out. Once and only once. And even then, he’d stood her up.

      Kit could have sworn he’d only asked her out as some locker-room bet. The guys were always trying to find out if she was as easy as her mother.

      At the unpleasant memory, Kit stiffened, but extended her hand, nonetheless. “Kit Darling.”

      As his big, work-roughened hand enveloped hers, a flash of recognition crossed his face. One corner of his generous mouth twitched.

      “Do you know this lady, Dad?” Alex tugged on her father’s jeans.

      Kit swallowed hard. No one in Pritchard’s Neck had ever called her a lady. With one innocent question, this little girl managed to lay bare a vulnerability Kit didn’t want exposed. Especially not to Sean McCabe.

      “We went to school together, punkin.” Sean spoke to Alex, but never took his eyes off Kit.

      Could he possibly remember how he’d stood her up as if she hadn’t mattered? He’d been such a big man on campus. So why was Mr. Most-Likely-To-Succeed standing before her now in a T-shirt, jeans and lobstering boots instead of pinstripes and wing tips?

      Kit withdrew her hand from his, unwilling to admit, even to herself, that he still made her pulse race.

      Standing surrounded by the castoffs of her mother’s reckless life, Kit felt on display and unguarded in front of the one person in this podunk town she’d ever allowed herself to admire.

      Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. She needed to wrap up Babe’s affairs and hit the road before she was tarred—once again—with her mother’s brush. But the problems she’d inherited from Babe required cash, and right now Kit had a cash-flow problem. She needed to stay in town long enough to liquidate what her mother had left behind to salvage her own credit rating. And to prove that at least, she, Kit, had character.

      The clouds on the horizon had grown thick and dark. An uncomfortable prickly tension charged the air.

      Alex sensed something was going on between her dad and this lady with the cool name—Kit, like the adventurer Kit Carson—but Alex couldn’t figure out what. Dad had said they’d gone to school together. He’d gone to school with lots of people in town, but he never looked at them the way he was looking at Kit.

      Dad didn’t pay much attention to looks and always urged Alex not to either. But it was hard not to with Kit. She had purply-red streaks in her hair, two gold hoops in her left eyebrow and a cool tattoo like a skinny vine on her upper right arm.

      Maybe Dad was interested in the motorcycle Alex had seen parked around the side of the house. When she and Dad read their adventuring books and planned their trips, they СКАЧАТЬ