The Second Chance Café (Hope Springs, #1) (21 page)

“The friend you mentioned before. Who turned out to be not much of one.”

“Yeah. Him. His parents had planned a family vacation, but he didn’t want to go. My folks said he could spend the
week at our house, and he took full advantage of every minute he was there.”

“Advantage of your parents? Of you?” She paused. “Of your sister?”

He ground his jaw, thinking of Indiana, how he’d failed her, and how much better things had been since he’d decided to pay for that crime by removing himself from the family circle and making sure he never failed them again. “He tried. One night when my parents had gone out to some…saving the planet benefit rescue dinner thing. Indy fought him off, and used my dad’s shotgun to force him out of the house.”

He sensed Kaylie’s eyes widening, heard her sharp intake of breath before she asked, “And you didn’t know? Or hear?”

“Indy’s room was downstairs. Mine was up. So was Dakota’s. We were playing video games in his, and had the sound system maxed out. We couldn’t hear anything but what was coming through the speakers.”

“Did your sister tell you? After he was gone?”

He shook his head. “I finally realized Robby hadn’t come back with the pizzas he’d gone to get out of the oven. I went downstairs, found Indiana sitting at the table with the gun. I ran back for Dakota, and she told us what had happened. Made us swear not to tell our folks.”

“Why wouldn’t she want them to know?”

“Our parents were…” Flakes? Crunchy hippies? Parents in name only? “Our mother would’ve flipped out, tried to calm everyone with lavender oil and magnets. Our father would’ve wanted to start a campaign to bring Robby to justice, rather than let a lawyer and the cops handle things quietly.”

“So you and your brother agreed not to say anything. To anyone.”

“We didn’t really discuss it. Things just went down that way. I looked at Dakota, basically telling him it was up to him. He nodded, didn’t say a word. Just dug his keys from his pocket and left the house.”

“To hunt Robby down.”

Ten nodded. “He found him at a local arcade. Went after him with the baseball bat he kept in his car. Then because he was eighteen and a legal adult and refused to tell the cops why he’d beaten Robby to a pulp, Dakota went to prison for aggravated assault.”

Kaylie’s throat worked as she swallowed. “I can see why Robby wouldn’t admit what he’d done and risk charges, but why didn’t Dakota say something?”

He pushed off the doorframe then, crossed his arms, and looked back at the paintings. “He was protecting Indy. He’d promised her. She didn’t want anyone to know. He took the fall so she wouldn’t have to finish school being
that
girl. The one Robby Hunt tried to rape.”

“Oh, Ten.” Her voice was soft, her hand at her mouth hiding most of it.

“He did his time. We stayed in touch. When he was paroled, I tried to get him to come work for me. I wanted to pick up where we’d left off. Keller Brothers Construction. He wasn’t having it. Once he was free of Manny and had his life back, or most of it anyway, he left. I don’t have a clue where he is. Haven’t heard from him in years. Wouldn’t know where to look for him.”

“But you’re still in contact with Manny, right? Would he know?”

“Dolly tell you that, too? About Manny?”

“She said the two of you had become friends.”

“We did. We still are.” No reason to hedge. “When Dakota wouldn’t come work with me, I felt like I needed to do something. I don’t know. It sounds dumb, but I thought if I couldn’t help him, maybe I could help others. So Manny would send me parolees who had construction backgrounds, or had done similar manual labor. I’d take them on, give them a leg up with the jump back into the real world.”

He saw the gears in her head grinding, wasn’t surprised when she asked, “Do you have any ex-cons working for you now?”

He nodded.

“Will? Is that why he’s been out of pocket for a while? Because he’s been in prison?”

He nodded again.

“What did he do?”

This time he shook his head. “That’s his story to share. Or not.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me any of this.” She came for him then, pushed at his shoulder to turn him toward her. “Don’t you think that you should have? Before you brought him into my house?”

Fear was in her face, and anger, disbelief. And the knife and the blood and her mother. “I don’t hire violent criminals, Kaylie. And I don’t hire junkies or dealers. I hire guys who found themselves on the wrong side of the law for doing the right thing.”

“You think Dakota taking a baseball bat to another kid was the right thing? Because that sounds pretty violent to me.”

“Indy was a minor. Robby was not. Dakota did what he thought he had to do. What I should’ve done.”

“What if he’d killed him?” she asked, her voice rising.

“Then he’d still be in prison.”
Where I should’ve been.

“What if
you’d
killed him?”

“I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you.”

She buried her face in her hands, shook it off, her whole body shuddering. “I’m having trouble getting my head around any of this. I don’t understand why you didn’t call the cops.”

“Calling the cops would’ve turned Indy’s life upside down.”

“And losing her brothers didn’t? One going to prison, one just…going away?”

This time he spun on her, advancing, the actions of his past rising like a tsunami behind him. “You don’t think I haven’t thought about that a million times since? Wondering what we were thinking, taking matters into our own hands? We were kids who’d pretty much raised ourselves. We didn’t have much of a bar to use to measure our behavior.”

“But your parents—”

“Our parents weren’t exactly candidates for any parenting awards.” Funny how he and Kaylie had that in common, and yet nothing about their situations growing up was similar at all. “We loved them, they loved us, but they had trouble keeping even one foot in reality.”

“They put a roof over our head, then spent most of their time out of the country, or at least out of town. They fed us and clothed us, then did the same for kids living in poverty all over the world. We had the material things we needed to thrive, but we didn’t have the emotional guidance that
probably would’ve kept Dakota out of prison, and helped Indy deal with what had happened…”

“And kept you at home,” she finished for him because she knew him that well. “Do your parents still not know what happened?”

He shook his head. “Why tell them now? They’re happy. Their oldest is out of prison. All three of their kids are now responsible adults. They can continue to pretend everything in their life is fine.”

“Do they know where Dakota is?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because you don’t talk to them. Or to your sister.”

“I called Indy about your garden. Left her a message.”

“Like I said.” She gave him a knowing look. “I realize my aversion to anything that smacks of wrongdoing comes from a very personal place. I’m probably way too sensitive—”

“With good reason.”

“Maybe. And I probably need to work on that. But in the meantime, please don’t keep things from me. Not things like…this.”

“Kaylie, listen to me. I’m never on a job long, and the parolees I hire aren’t at any one location more than a few days. Will may be the exception, but that’s the usual rule. I do what I can to help them fit in. I don’t take them on jobs with kids, no matter what their crime, but that’s my decision. And I clear everything through Manny first. They’re good men who made bad choices. Hard for me to write them off for that when I would’ve done worse if my brother hadn’t.”

“Would you have? Really?”

Had he learned to hide that side of himself so well that she didn’t think he had it in him? Or was she asking something
else, wanting to know if he was someone she needed to fear, someone dangerous, someone unbalanced, like the woman who’d slit her wrists in front of her five-year-old daughter?

“Yeah. I would have. Dakota just got there first.”

B
y the time lunch rolled around on Friday, Kaylie had already interviewed four applicants for the cook’s position. Each had potential, but none clicked with the same compatibility Dolly had. And none came close to measuring up to Mitch and his ideas. Talking to Dolly was as comfortable as talking to May. Talking to Mitch, well, he was a lot like Ten, though she would never tell either man that because of those very similar natures.

She was still digesting what Ten had told her about his brother, and she had yet to figure out why she was letting Dakota’s history bother her. She didn’t know him, and from what she’d learned, his incarceration had been a punishment he’d chosen to accept even before he’d delivered a retaliation he and Ten agreed was deserved.

Ten was right. His brother standing up for his sister’s honor had nothing to do with his work as her contractor. And yet prison and an ex-con’s time served always brought her back to her mother and her inability to settle her feelings about the past. She’d been in Hope Springs two weeks now, and she had yet to do anything that wasn’t related to the conversion of the house into a café. Next week, she swore. No matter if the chasing down records meant a whole day spent away.

Hearing a car door slam, Kaylie looked out the kitchen window to see the fifth woman of the morning walking up her driveway. Except she didn’t have the day’s fifth appointment scheduled until later this afternoon. The woman, big sunglasses hiding much of her face, appeared to be close to Kaylie’s age, and similarly sized, sharing the same taste in boots, T-shirts, and jeans, though where Kaylie drove a Jeep, this woman drove a low-slung sports car splattered with mud, and that careless contradiction had Kaylie smiling.

She put aside her paperwork, told Magoo to stay where he was stretched out on the kitchen floor, and met her visitor at the back door before she could knock. “Hi. Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Kaylie Flynn,” she said, and when she pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head, Kaylie knew who she was. “I’m Indiana Keller.”

She had Ten’s eyes, and the same caramel-brown hair, though hers was twisted into an unruly rooster tail against the back of her head. Kaylie wondered if Indiana knew her brother was here, if she would care. Wondered, too, what she’d thought about him getting in touch on behalf of someone else, not because they were family and close.

Though little about the reasons why made sense, he’d made it clear they weren’t. Close, anyway. He couldn’t do much about their being family. “I’m Kaylie. I’m so glad to meet you. But full disclosure in case you’d like to go somewhere else to talk, Tennessee’s here, working upstairs on some wiring issues.”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing I need you to show me around outside, isn’t it?” she asked, before a joyless smirk caught at her mouth. “I’m kidding. Ten’s a man alone by
choice. A ridiculous choice, if you ask me, but what do I know? I’m just the sister who managed to screw up both of her brothers’ lives.”

Wow. Kaylie wasn’t sure what to say to that. She certainly hadn’t expected such a forthright confession from a woman she didn’t even know. But then she’d been doing a lot of confessing herself lately, hadn’t she, sharing pieces of her life with strangers she now called friends. This house. Something about it was magic…

She took in Indy’s expression, saw a flicker of anxiousness beneath the bravado. “Ten’s told me a lot of what happened with the three of you. I hate that such a sorry person had this impact on all of your lives.”

Indy’s head bobbed, and this time her smile was true. “I like that he told you. I like it a lot. Almost as much as his finally,
finally
, calling me. When I heard his voice on my machine…” She let the sentence trail, reached up with a shaking hand to rub at her eyes. “I can’t wait to grab him for an appropriately embarrassing public hug. Stupid, hardheaded man.” She stopped and blew out a long breath. “But now I should shut up and pretend I’m a professional instead of dying to see my brother. Show me what I’ve come here to see.”

Indy’s honesty, her frankness…Kaylie liked the other woman already. Stepping outside, she led the way through the breezeway to the back side of the garage. “I need to get a landscaper out here to do something with the flower beds. Right now the whole place looks abandoned. Which I guess makes sense. It’s been a while since anyone has lived here.”

“Are you living here now?”

“I’m camping out. I didn’t want to move all my things until the renovations were done. Easier to clean up the
postconstruction mess when it’s on the floor and not in the creases of my clothes.”

“Good call. I had my living room painted recently, and even with drop cloths covering everything, I keep finding bits of the old stuff that was sanded off the door and window facings.”

Kaylie feared even with her precautions, she’d be finding the same. “I appreciate you making the drive. Dolly Breeze told me you live in Buda?”

“I rent a small place in town,” Indy said, pushing her sunglasses back in place. “But I spend most of my time at the greenhouse several miles away. I’m thinking now I need something like what you have here. A home and a business all in the same spot.”

Kaylie laughed. “It may turn out to be a disaster, but since I always take my work home with me anyway…”

“This way you don’t have to panic in the middle of the night if you’ve forgotten something in the office.”

“Oh, I’ll still panic, but I’ll be able to run downstairs and hopefully find it,” Kaylie said, stepping over a fallen limb. Yeah, she really needed to get in touch with a landscaper. She wondered if Ten knew someone…“Do you provide landscaping services, too? Or do you just supply produce? Ten didn’t explain all of what you do, just that he’d talk to you about the garden.”

“Nope. I’m strictly fruit and veggies. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t have time to take on something new. But I can give you a half dozen names of businesses who’ll do right by you.”

“Thanks. Ten’s been great to recommend local services, but I hate to go to him for everything.”