Along Came Trouble(28)

But their nonrelationship was about to get a lot more complicated. If her reaction to the locks was a fair barometer, by mid-afternoon Ellen probably wouldn’t even be speaking to him anymore. Which dramatically reduced the odds he’d need to repeat last night’s painful exercise in self-control.

Caleb drilled out the cylinder hole. It dropped to the deck with a puff of sawdust. As he swapped the big hole saw for a smaller one, Henry peeked at him from the kitchen.

“That man is?” Henry asked. Ellen came up behind him and laid one protective hand on his shoulder.

“That’s Caleb, honey. I already told you that.”

“Doin’?”

“He’s installing a new lock on the door.”

“Cabe has a drill!”

“Yep, he has a drill.”

“Use it for?”

“He’s making a hole for the lock to go in.”

“Henry do it. Henry use a drill.”

“No, sweetie, you need to stay over here with Mama.”

But Henry was a toddler—his mother’s denial was all the provocation he needed to wiggle out of her grip for a closer look. When the bit punched through for the bolt hole, Caleb backed it out and offered up the warm plug of wood to Henry, who took possession of the treasure with a huge, dimpled smile. Apparently all it took to get on Henry’s list of people worth cozying up to was the right tools.

Caleb wished Ellen were that easy.

“You want to help out, buddy?”

“You don’t have to do that,” she protested. “He’ll just get in the way.”

“Nah, it’s fine. I have nephews. They always want to help when I’m fixing things.” And it always makes Amber like me better when I take her kids off her hands for a while.

Fishing around in his tool chest, he found the small pair of safety glasses. “If you want to stand close, you have to wear these to keep your eyes safe. Can I put them on you?”

A solemn nod from Henry. Caleb slid the glasses over his ears. “There you go. Now have a seat. I need somebody to look at these directions and tell me what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Henry plopped down on the threshold and began paging through the instruction book with a serious expression, stopping every now and then to ask “This is?” or “That is?” He soaked up Caleb’s explanations with an impressive attentiveness for such a little guy.

“How old did you say he is?”

Ellen lingered near the kitchen, clearly unable to decide what to do with herself. She was still angry, but he guessed she didn’t want to spoil Henry’s fun without a good reason. “He turned two in May.”

“Good vocabulary for a kid his age.”

“Yeah, talking is pretty much his primary function.”

“Want your steamroller,” Henry said.

“It’s in your room, Peanut.”

Henry left and came back a minute later with an assortment of plastic construction trucks, which he put to work in the sawdust.

“You can go do something else,” Caleb told Ellen. “If he gets bored and starts causing trouble, I’ll holler.”

She didn’t want to. It was written all over her face. She wanted Caleb to leave her house alone, leave her kid alone, leave her alone.

Whereas what he wanted to do was burrow as deep into her life as he could get.

Insane, he told himself. You met her yesterday.

But sometimes life didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. Caleb had spent enough time in combat to get used to the idea that there weren’t any rules, really. There was just life. And life was for the living.

“I promise not to let him run around with the screwdriver,” he said.

She sank to the floor with her back against the kitchen doorjamb, eyes fixed on him. “I guess I’m not willing to take my chances.”

“Suit yourself.”

Caleb chiseled out a mortise and screwed in the latch plate. Henry made rumbling diesel-engine sounds and crashed his trucks into one another.

Cute kid. He had Ellen’s blond hair and round cheeks, but those big blue eyes must have come from his daddy. Who Caleb really needed to check out.

Ellen’s ex was on his to-do list, but the list kept getting longer. He’d lost most of the morning to the plumbing job over at the apartments, and then to the runner Carly and Ellen had decided to take. By the time he was done with these locks it would be noon, and he still had to chew out Carly and replace the lock on her back door, plus find an hour to get over to Ellen’s mother-in-law’s place and figure out what it would take to keep Henry safe over there for the weekend.