“Aren’t you a fucking hero.” Dean started toward the door of his truck, then stopped and turned. “I should kick your ass.”
He wouldn’t stand there and take a beating for something he’d done a decade and a half ago. “It was a long time ago. And, like you said, she chose you.”
“Screw you, Kowalski.”
Dean managed to relocate half the gravel in the drive with his tires, spinning and fishtailing his way down to the road. Ryan watched him go, then scrubbed a hand through his hair. That hadn’t been fun.
“Was that my dad?”
Shit. Nick had come around the house, probably in time to see Dean’s minivan turning the corner. Hopefully not in time to hear any of the conversation. “Yeah. He wanted to pay me for the damages, but I told him you were working it off.”
“Ma told him that already.”
“I guess he just wanted to see for himself.” He couldn’t control what Dean might tell Nick later, but he certainly wasn’t going to explain what just happened. “How are those shutters going?”
The kid couldn’t figure out how to hang the shutters on the wire hangers that Andy had made up as a makeshift drying rack, so Ryan went to help him. Then he checked on Dill and Matt. They almost had the upstairs bathroom window in place, but the lodge was old and, even though he’d paid extra for custom-ordered sizes, it needed a lot of shimming.
Satisfied his crew was working, he went back to his own project, which was preparing to frame in a new back door off the kitchen. The old one was narrow and wooden and the new steel replacement was wider, which meant stripping away some siding and reframing the hole.
It was tedious but easy work, leaving his mind free to wander back to his confrontation with Dean Carpenter and the burning question he couldn’t answer. Why hadn’t Lauren ever told Dean?
*
Lauren didn’t see Ryan when she stopped at the lodge to pick up Nick, which was just as well. Her nerves were shot, work had sucked and half the town had already heard her kid was a fledgling criminal.
She had to admit she was a little disappointed, though. Under the embarrassment her son had caused her, the thought of seeing Ryan again made her feel jittery, like a schoolgirl who knew she’d see the boy she liked as they passed between classes.
But it was Andy Miller who walked Nick out to her car and leaned against her door. She rolled down the window while her son got in the passenger side. “How’d he do, Andy?”
“Pretty good. Ryan had him painting shutters—so, nothing too physical, but it was nothing the rest of us wanted to do.”
“Good. The more tedious the work, the more reluctant he’ll be to get in this kind of trouble again.” She glanced sideways at Nick, but he was smart enough to keep his eyes on his hands.
He was quiet all the way home, actually, and it worried her. Feeling guilty and being contrite, she expected, but she didn’t want him to beat himself up, either. And they didn’t dwell on things, as a rule. If there was a crime, there was punishment and they moved on.
“My dad went to the lodge,” he said as she pulled into their driveway.
“Today?” Why was Dean at the Northern Star?
“Ryan said he wanted to pay for the damages, but he wouldn’t take the money.”
Lauren didn’t think Dean had that kind of money to waste, but his son working off a debt to Ryan Kowalski probably dinged his pride. “Did you talk to him?”
“No, he was leaving when I went around the front of the house. He peeled out, too. Gravel went everywhere.”
So he’d left mad. “Don’t worry about your dad. You’re doing the right thing now and that’s what’s important.”
That seemed to pep him up a little, and he told her about his day at school while they ate the stew she’d dumped in the slow cooker that morning. They’d be using that a lot, she thought, until Nick was let off the hook at the lodge.
“Do you have homework?” she asked when he went straight to the television after dinner and turned on the game system.
“I did it at the lodge. Rose checked it for me.”
She didn’t think he’d lie about that since it was too easy to get caught, but she made him show it to her anyway just so he’d know she was watching. Then she went down to the basement and started another load of laundry before going back out to the car to get the book she was reading from the backseat where she’d tossed it.
The cell phone in her pocket rang as she reached in and she almost hit her head on the roof of the car. Muttering under her breath, she pulled it out and looked at the incoming number. It was Ryan.
She desperately hoped he hadn’t changed his mind about Nick, because she really needed new snow tires. Even if she and Dean went halves on the damages, it would be tight. “Hello?”
“Hey, you busy?” Even if his name hadn’t come up on the caller ID, she would have recognized his voice. It was the one that made her shiver.
“Nope.” She grabbed her book and went to sit on the front step. “What’s up?”