The kids giggled and Claire smiled, picturing a battered Riley chucking a bike tire at a suspect.
Her kids were crazy about him, she thought. All through dinner, they laughed at his jokes, they plagued him with questions, they vied to tell him their own stories. She might have thought he would find their simple experiences boring, but Riley acted as if a story Owen told about breaking up a playground fracas was the most fascinating anecdote in the world.
Claire didn’t know why she should find it surprising that her kids loved him. Riley had always been good at charming people. Why wouldn’t he be? He’d grown up with five indulgent older sisters who probably offered plenty of opportunities for him to practice working the charm.
She had watched his technique in various incarnations dozens of times. She could vividly remember one day when Angie had spent an entire summer afternoon making macaroons, simply because he had mentioned with a passing sort of sigh that he’d woken up with a craving.
As the next oldest sister to him and probably the one most susceptible to sibling rivalry, Alex had been the most immune. She had accused him of manipulation—but even she could fall prey if she wasn’t careful.
Riley could nearly always sway people to his point of view by wielding that charm that made everyone want to be around him, at least until he turned into the moody, unhappy teenager he’d become after his father left.
The children tried to prolong the dinner as long as possible, but eventually everyone was full and Chester had planted his haunches beside Claire’s chair and waited, a clear indication he needed to go out.
“I got him, Mom,” Owen said, pushing his chair away from the table.
“Thanks,” she answered.
Owen opened the door for the dog, then returned to the table to clear away his plate, which seemed to be the signal for everyone that dinner was finished.
“I guess we better clean this up,” Macy said. She stood and began to help Owen. When Claire started to rise, Riley froze her with a death glare.
“If you try to clear a single dish, I’ll be forced to handcuff you to the chair. Don’t think I won’t,” he said, his voice stern.
Both Owen and Macy apparently thought that was hilarious. Claire wasn’t nearly as amused as she was forced to sit idle and watch Riley and the kids joke around as they scraped dishes, packaged leftovers and loaded the dishwasher.
Riley was drying a pan with one of the pretty embroidered dishcloths when he took a careful look out the window above the sink. Was Chester digging up her flowers again, as he sometimes did when a particular capricious mood struck?
“Looks like you’ve lost some shingles from your shed, probably from all the wind and rain we’ve had.”
She frowned. “I hadn’t noticed.” Usually when she was at an angle where she had a vantage point over the window above the kitchen sink, she was focusing on staying upright on the crutches and not on the shingles of her shed roof. “Have many blown off?”
“I can’t tell for sure. It’s too dark, but I can see a couple missing in the porch light.”
“Oh, dear.” Just one more thing she had to add to her fix-it list.
“It shouldn’t take long to fix. I bet Owen and I could take care of it in an hour. Don’t you think, dude?”
“Maybe even a half hour,” said her son, who never met a competition he didn’t try to conquer.
Claire didn’t know what to think. What game was Riley playing? She dearly wished she had some idea of the rules so that she didn’t feel as if she were floundering completely in foreign seas.
Why did he seem to feel so compelled to help her every time she turned around? Why would he want to give up an hour of his life to fix the roof on her garden shed? Even as the cautious grown-up tried to figure it out, the silly junior high girl inside her squealed and did a happy little dance.
“I’m going to go work on my homework,” Macy announced, bored with talk of shingles.
“Let me know if you need help with anything.”
“It’s algebra.”
“Okay.”
“You’re worse at algebra than I am, Mom.”
True enough. “Between the two of us, we usually figure it out.”
Macy shrugged and headed from the room, Chester, whom Owen had let in a few minutes earlier, following behind. The reminder of her maternal responsibilities was exactly what she needed right then to give the mature grown-up the advantage and send the giddy girl to her room where she belonged.
“Thank you for the offer to fix the roof,” she said to Riley when Macy left. “But you really don’t have to do that. I told you I have a handyman. Handy Andy Harris. Do you know him? His family moved here about five or six years ago.”
“Don’t think I’ve met him yet.”
“He’s a nice guy. His wife comes into the store quite a bit.”
“So you pay him to fix things, then she comes in and spends the money on beads?”