Nell reached into the side of the cardboard box and withdrew the sales receipt. It was for over four hundred dollars.
“Wow!” Jecca said as she removed the sets and put them on thputohn Loce dining table. “Why did he get these?”
“I thought they were pretty,” Nell said.
Jecca knew her annoyance was with Tris, not with the child. “And they are pretty.” She smiled at Nell. “But if we’re going to go hiking we can’t take them all, can we? I bet Uncle Roan has a plate we could use. Preferably white.”
Roan was sitting at the counter, watching them. “The lower cabinet,” he said.
Nell pulled an old white plate from a tall stack and took it to Jecca. She had removed a few tubes of basic colors from the art sets, some pencils, the spiral-bound pad of paper, and two brushes.
“There,” Jecca said. “That’s all we need to create masterpieces. Didn’t I see that you have a backpack with you? Let’s put these things in it.”
Nell ran into the bedroom just as Tris’s door flew open.
“I can’t find my fishing gear,” he yelled from inside the room.
“Look under the bed,” Jecca called back.
“Thanks,” he answered.
Jecca went back to the kitchen to get fruit and muffins out of the fridge and she began putting it all on the dining table.
Roan was still sitting at the counter, watching Jecca as she lifted the chainsaw off and put it in the corner, out of the way. Within minutes the table was set.
“Breakfast is ready,” she called, and Nell came out and took a seat. Tris was next, his hair uncombed and wearing the old, worn clothes he always put on at the cabin, his shirt misbuttoned.
Jecca went to him, kissed him good morning, then said, “You spent too much on the art supplies. I sent you a list. Why didn’t you just get what I told you to?” She was rebuttoning his shirt.
“You’re cute when you’re fussing,” he said as he kissed her again, then looked over her head. “Are those crepes? I love those things!”
“Mrs. Wingate said you did and she made the batter.”
“Great. She puts Grand Marnier in it.” He put his arm around her shoulders and they went to the table. Tris held Jecca’s chair out for her.
“Come on, Roan,” Jecca said. “Have some breakfast.”
He got off his stool and stood for a moment looking at the three of them. They were a perfect picture of domesticity—and he felt totally unneeded. “I think I’ll—That I’ll—See you guys later,” he said as he went out the front door.
They watched as he got into his beat-up old pickup and drove away.
“It’s me, isn’t it?” Jecca said. “I know he doesn’t like me and—”
“Are you kidding?” Tris asked. “He woke up when I came in last night and saw that you’d put the chainsaw together. He kept me awake for an hour and a half talking about how great you are.”
“Really?” Jecca said. “An hour and a half? Talking about me?”
“Well maybe he did say he was having a bit of trouble with his book and wanted to talk about it.”
Jecca looked down at her plate.
Nell looked from one silent adult to the other. “Uncle Tris said Uncle Roan’s book is the most boring thing he’s ever heard in his life but I’m not to tell him that.”
Jecca didn’t want Nell to know she thought the same thing, but then Tris said, “What was the quote from Heidegger that was so profound that the psychotic criminal gave himself up?”
Jecca’s reserve broke and she started laughing. “Your poor cousin. No wonder he gets writer’s block. Doesn’t he know that the book-buying public isn’t interested in some guy who can outtalk the bad guys? People like action!”
“None of us has the heart to tell him,” Tris said. “So who’s ready to go hiking?” He looked at Nell. “Shall we take Jecca up to Eagle Creek?”
“Oh yes,” Nell said as they got up from the table and began clearing it. “But you’ll have to carry me for the last half.”
“In that case, only one.”
“Six,” she said.
“Then you can walk the whole way.”
“Okay, four,” Nell said in resignation.
“What . . . ? Jecca asked, but then she knew. They were negotiating how many animals and dolls Nell could take with her. “I’ll carry a couple of Rileys,” she said, and Nell beamed at her. “But your uncle has to carry every one of those boxed sets of art supplies that he bought for you.”
Tris quit smiling. “Those things weigh more than Nell.”
Jecca shrugged. “That’s what you get for having a charge card bigger than your back muscles.”
Nell looked at her uncle for the next volley.
Tris shook his head. “I am outnumbered again!” He went to Jecca, bent over, put his shoulder into her stomach, and lifted her. He twirled her around while she was laughing. “Who has strong back muscles?” he asked.
“You do!” Jecca said, laughing. “But you do need to be put on a budget.”
He put her down so that she slid over the front of him. “I agree,” he said softly. “I think you should stay and put me on one.”
“Not again!” Nell said. “No more kissing. Let’s go!”
“Five,” Tris said, his face inches from Jecca’s, “but only if you disappear for ten whole minutes.”
Nell ran into the bedroom and loudly shut the door.
Tris’s mouth was instantly on Jecca’s, and she was as hungry for him as he was for he heshut the dr.
“I wanted you with me all night,” Tris said as he kissed her neck.
“I wanted to be with you.”
“Stay with me,” he said. “As long as you’re here, live with me.”
“Lucy and—”
“Then I’ll move in with you,” Tris said, his lips on her throat. “I want to come home to you. I want—”
“Time’s up,” Nell said.
Jecca pushed away from Tris and he turned from his niece so she wouldn’t see his physical condition.
“How do couples ever have the privacy to make a second child?” Jecca murmured.
“They sneak,” Tris said. “One time I had to extract the sharp end of a coat hanger from a woman’s hip. They were—” He broke off because Nell was listening. “Who’s ready to go painting?”
It was a two-mile hike up to where Tris and Nell wanted to go, and Jecca enjoyed every minute of it. They took their time. Jecca showed Nell how to use her little camera to make closeup photos, and Nell stopped often to snap pictures of whatever interested her.
Jecca knew that if she and Tris had been alone they would have indulged in only the physical side, but with Nell there they had to behave themselves.
“Where did you go to medical school?” Jecca asked Tris.
“Uh oh,” he said. “It’s first-date time.”
“A little late for that,” Jecca answered. “By now I should be asking you about your past girlfriends.”
He groaned. “I’d rather anything than that, so school it is.”
When Nell stopped to take pictures, Tris and Jecca continued their conversation from the car and asked each other questions about their childhoods, travel, friends, and finally, even past boyfriends and girlfriends.
Tris insisted he was a virgin until he met Jecca.
She looked at him.
“That thing you did in the chair on the first night . . . That made me feel brand-new to the art of—”
Jecca cut him off with a look at Nell.
Tris chuckled. “What about your relatives? Cousins, aunts, uncles?”
“None,” Jecca said, and told him that her mother had been an only child and her father’s older brother had been killed in Vietnam.
“And all four of your grandparents have passed away?” Tris asked.
“Yes. I think that’s part of why the Sheila War hurts my dad so much. He only has Joey and me.”
“And his grandchildren.”
Jecca sighed. ?
??Sheila doesn’t let Dad see them very often. She wants them to be . . .” She glanc221hoods, traed at Tris. “Doctors or lawyers, not men who work in hardware stores.”
They were sitting on a big rock at the side of the trail and watching Nell run about a field as she tried to get a butterfly to stay still long enough to photograph it. “Your poor dad,” Tris said. “Everyone around him has left him. Parents, sibling, and now it seems he’s even lost his son.”
Jecca had to look away for a moment. “I’m all Dad has left,” she said. “I feel bad that he’s stuck in a family war, so I do all that I can to look after him. I call him, e-mail him, except that he hates computers. I gave him a phone that gets e-mails and I visit when I can, but it’s not enough though. None of it is enough.”
Tris stood up and held out his hand to help her up. “You sound like you do more than most adult children do. Why don’t you get him to come here for a visit?”
“My dad take a vacation?” Jecca said. “Never has; never will. He’s a man who can’t bear to be idle. He gets fidgety on Sundays when the store’s closed. One time Joey jammed a bit up inside a drill because Dad was making us crazy because he was bored. Dad lectured Joey, then settled down to repair the drill. Joey said I owed him twenty dollars for babysitting Dad.”
Tris laughed. “Your father sounds like a handful.”
“You have no idea,” Jecca said.
Nell came back to them, and they picked up their packs and started walking again. At last they went around a bend to see a truly beautiful place, with a deep stream running at the bottom of what was almost a mountain. Tall pine trees were at one edge, a field of wildflowers at the other end.
“We’re here,” Nell said and ran forward.
“Like it?” Tris asked.
“Very much,” Jecca said.
“Nell and I usually set up a day camp over there by those rocks. That okay with you?”
“Perfect. Why don’t you go fishing and let us girls make the camp?”
“I could help,” he said, but she could tell that he was dying to get to the water.
“You’d just be in the way.”
He kissed her in thanks and hurried off.
It was a joy to Jecca to unpack their bags, to spread out the blanket, and get the food out. On the bottom were the art supplies.
“Food or art first?” Jecca asked Nell.
“Art!” she said.
“We are kindred souls.” Jecca looked around, found a patch of wildflowers, and motioned for Nell to follow her.
As with nearly all children, Nell neither needed nor wanted any instruction. She let Jecca set everything up—which involved only putting a little glob of each watercolor in a circle on Roan’s white plate and filling a little plastic beach bucket with water—then the two of them went to work.
Nell learned by watcharn widthing what Jecca did. When Jecca made a quick pencil sketch of the landscape, then filled it in with color, Nell did the same thing. When Jecca stretched out on her stomach to better see a little flower, Nell was sprawled less than a foot away. Jecca used colored pencils and watercolors on the same drawing, and so did Nell.
“Hey!” Tris said softly from behind them. He was smiling down at them as they were stretched out on the grass like wood nymphs. Surrounding them were a dozen sheets of paper, each with a scene rich in color, drying in the sun.
“I don’t mean to break this up, but I’m starving.” He held up a string of four fat fish. “The hunter has come home.”
Jecca rolled onto her back and looked up at him. The sun was behind his head and he looked so good she thought he was the only thing she wanted for lunch.
Tris dropped the fish to the ground and lay down between the two of them. He stretched out his arms, and they both put their heads on his shoulders. “I am a happy man,” he said.
It was a perfect moment—until Tris’s stomach gave a loud growl.
“Chyme,” Nell said.
“Chime? Like a bell? That’s a nice way to put it,” Jecca said as she put her hand on Tris’s stomach.
“Chyme is the mix of food and digestive juices,” Tris said. “How about if I clean the fish while you guys build a fire?” He looked at Jecca.
“Can do,” Jecca said.
“I think,” Nell said solemnly, “that Jecca can do anything.”
Tris laughed. “You’re more right than you know.” His stomach gave another rumble. “Up! The hunter is hungry.”
“Come on, Nell,” Jecca said. “Let’s build a fire for our caveman.”
It didn’t take her long to put a pile of dry twigs together. They’d brought a grill lighter, so the fire started easily. Within minutes two fish were sizzling in a skillet and the blanket was covered with the containers they’d brought.
“He laughs a lot around you,” Nell said while Tris was gathering more wood.
“Does he?”
“Mom says Uncle Tris worries too much about work. Grandpa won’t let him even see the files at the office. He says that it’s too hard to be just one doctor in Edilean and that Uncle Tris needs a partner.”
Jecca started to say that maybe Tris should work somewhere else, like in a New York office, but she didn’t. All she had to do was look at Nell and she knew he couldn’t possibly leave.
“What’s that grim expression for?” Tris asked Jecca as he piled the wood by the fire.
“Just thinking,” she said. “Those fish look like they’re done.”
“So they are.”
Nell kept up a steady stream of chatter through lunch. “We need to 20;m" help Uncle Roan,” she said. “He’s not happy.”
“We can’t very well write his book for him,” Tris said.
“I think,” Nell said as she took a bite of fish, “that he’s not very good at writing.”
Both Jecca and Tris tried to cover their laughter but weren’t very successful.
“Nell,” Tris said, “only you could get away with telling him that.”
“I don’t think I will,” she said seriously. “It might make him cry.”
Tris and Jecca looked at each other and smiled at Nell’s wisdom and compassion. No one liked to be told he lacked the talent to pursue his dream.
After lunch, Tris kissed both his “girls” good-bye and went a full twenty yards away to fish some more. Jecca thought he was a beautiful sight in his tall waders, his fishing line flashing in the sun.
Nell was anxious to go back to painting. “How about butterflies?”
“Good idea,” Jecca said. “But what if you draw butterflies and I draw you? Maybe you could help Kim sell her jewelry.”
“I’d like that,” Nell said.
They didn’t go far from Tris. Nell tried to make a painting of a little blue butterfly, and Jecca tried to capture the way Nell’s eyelashes—“like feathers” as Tris had said—brushed against the curve of her cheek.
They’d been working about an hour when Nell said, “In two weeks I’m going to a birthday party.”
“That’s great,” Jecca said.
“I don’t want to go.”
“Why not?” Jecca asked.
“It’s at my cousin Rebecca’s house. She’s the same age as me, and it’s for two days. Every year she only invites six girls to spend the night, and I am always one of them.”
“You don’t like Rebecca?”
“She’s okay. She’s only medium smart, but she doesn’t have to be because she’s a McDowell.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Jecca said.
Nell glanced across the woodland toward the stream and lowered her voice. “Uncle Tris says it makes no difference, but she’s rich.”
Jecca couldn’t help frowning. “Nell, I don’t mean to be a spoilsport, but you don’t exactly come from poverty. Your uncle buys you anything you want.”
“I know,” Nell said softly, then was silent and looked like she didn’t intend to say another word.
Jecca knew she’d broken a cardinal rule in dealing with kids: l
isten, don’t criticize. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll stop being an obnoxious adult. Tell me what the problem is.”
Nell took a moment before speaking. “Rebecca feels sorry for me.”
“Yeow!” Jecca said. “That’s awful. Why in the world would she feel sorry for you?”
“My dad fixes cars and her dad is a lawyer. We live in a little house and she lives in a mansion. And her mother makes her invite me.”
Jecca had to work to keep from spouting out her true opinion of the little snob. She had an idea that Nell’s extreme prettiness, her intelligence, and her overall likeability played a big role in this. It was highly probable that Rebecca McDowell was jealous of Nell.
But Jecca knew it was no use saying that and making Nell feel worse. “No hope of getting out of going?”
“Rebecca would tell her mother, then everyone at church would hear about it.”
“And you’d look bad,” Jecca said. “All right, if this is a must-do thing, then we need to figure out a way to make it better.” She thought for a moment. “What if you showed up with a fabulous gift that was better than anyone else’s? Something unique?”
“Last year her dad gave her a pony.”
“I was thinking that maybe I could come over and draw a portrait of each girl.”
“They’d laugh at me,” Nell said. “They’d say I was afraid to be alone with them.”
Mean girls personified, Jecca thought but didn’t say. “How much of this does Tris know?”
Nell looked alarmed. “Nothing! If you tell him he’d . . . he’d . . .”
“Right. Go in with guns blazing and you’d be thirty-six years old before you got over the embarrassment. Too bad they can’t all have heart attacks and Tris could come in and save them.”
Nell giggled. “Or Rebecca’s dad could get sick.”
“Even better,” Jecca said. “Tris would save him, then on the way to the hospital the ambulance would break down, and your dad would fix it and save him a second time.”
Nell stood up, her face showing her excitement. “Then Rebecca’s mom would be so grateful she’d take my mom shopping with her at the Dorfy store in New York.”
“Dorfy store?”
“That’s where Rebecca’s mom takes her twice a year. And the bag store.”