Wolf Creek Father. Penny Richards

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?”

      Brady nodded. “I don’t like it when she points out my mistakes in class. Everyone stares at me.”

      Colt racked his brain for what their mother might have told them. “Behaving badly doesn’t change things,” he said at last. “You still feel bad and Miss Grainger feels frustrated. She has a job to do, and she’s doing her best to help you. If you don’t do your part, how can you expect to do better?”

      The boy shrugged.

      He turned to Cilla. “What’s your excuse for jumping into the fray?”

      Her shoulders drooped. “I don’t know!” she cried. “I just get really angry sometimes, and I don’t have anyone to talk to about how I feel.”

      Colt started to say that she had him, but they’d already established the fact that he wasn’t really there for her. “Explain what you mean,” he said.

      Cilla gave a shake of her head, the loose dark curls, so like her mother’s, bouncing with the movement. “The girls at school talk about how they do things with their mothers, and it makes me sad and angry because I don’t have a mother to do things with. And Miss Grainger makes me madder than almost anyone, because she’s so sweet and happy all the time. She’s never sad. She never gets mad. Sometimes I just want to see if I can make her lose her temper.”

      Colt could attest that the pint-size schoolmarm had a temper to equal anyone’s, but had learned to handle it...for the most part. Feeling like a total failure, he found himself wishing he’d never opened this Pandora’s box, but he knew he couldn’t stop now. There was still a lot to get into the open, a lot to understand.

      “One more thing, and then we’ll talk about how we’re going to change things.”

      “Sir?” they both said, sitting straighter.

      “What about the bad things you’ve said and done to the ladies I’ve been squiring around town?”

      “Who says we do?” Brady challenged, a belligerent tilt to his chin.

      “I’ve talked to them all, and every last one says the two of you treated them differently when I wasn’t around. What about it, Cilla? You say you miss having a mother, so why do you