Page 29 of Housesitter

From him. The smoke pulled the unsaid part of that statement from where it lived behind Ruby’s face. It slipped it discreetly into Kel’s ear. He appreciated the assist, but it didn’t need to have bothered.

That one he could pick up on his own.

“I’m not my dad,” he said. This time the mouthful of whiskey tasted flat and gingery on his tongue. Medicinal. He meant to stop there, but the words slipped out of him like smoke. “I’m not my grandad either.”

Ruby flinched. She pulled her glasses off her face and pointed them at him.

“You can leave him out of whatever this is,” she said. “Your grandfather might not have been a good man, but he was a smart one.”

Kel stretched his legs out under the kitchen table. The heels of his boots scraped over the lino. Despite his best efforts, Ruby’s mood had soured his, popping the heady feeling that had stuck to him since he left Milligan’s farm.

“Yeah, well, like I said…I’m not him. Or Dad,” he said. He turned the whiskey glass in his hand and watched the light flicker in the honey-gold liquid. “They got the hell out of Marble Falls.”

Ruby set her glasses down on top of the Milligan lien and got up from the table. She started to clear away the dishes with sharp, irritated movements.

“Your grandad, Ezekiel, was run out of town on a rail by the Maddens, so they wouldn’t have to pay their debts,” she said as she brushed crumbs onto the floor with a swipe of a weather-beaten hand. “And your dad…well, he ran away from you and your mom, but maybe that’s because he never had a father of his own. Never had an example. So you can’t blame them. If you want to blame anyone, blame the Maddens.”

With that, she snatched the whiskey off Kel and stalked away over the kitchen to shove it back into a cupboard. She tried to slam the door on it, too, but the frame was warped, and it stuck. The best Ruby could manage was giving it an irritated shove with the heel of her hand until it wedged into place.

Kel tilted his glass. He watched the reflection of the overhead light sparkle in the liquor.

“I did,” he said.

That was why he’d made Dio Madden’s life a misery after all. The various petty cons and ‘it can stop if you pay me to stop it’ harassment hadn’t just been for a payday; it had been payback. The retaliation for the generational insults the Maddens had doled out to his family over the years.

Because what they’d done to Ezekiel was bad enough, but then Dio Madden had come back to Marble Falls. Like he just had to rub in the fact that he got a choice about it.

His moment of introspection was interrupted by Ruby’s annoyed sniff.

“Oh, you did, did you,” she said. “What changed?”

Kel lifted the glass to his mouth. He tasted the whiskey, cheap and sharp, as the rim touched his lower lip.

“Me,” he said, as he drained the glass. This time he felt the bite of it in the back of his throat. He stood up and set the glass down neatly on the table, the base clicking against the use-scarred Formica. “I am a Madden now, remember?”

Then he left. He was outside getting into his truck when he heard the door slam open behind him.

“You’re a Laker,” Ruby yelled after him. Fuck the neighbors, apparently. To be fair, they’d never cared who they woke up with their fights. “Any chance you had to be anything—anyone—else left town with Ezekiel. Get used to it.”

No.

Kel started the truck, gripped the wheel tightly, and peeled out of the yard in search of something (someone) to repair his mood.

Warwick was out of uniform.

She propped up the bar at The Quarry in jeans and a low-cut top, freckles on display, as she waited for the barman to get her beer. The look she gave Kel was unfriendly.

“You know what, Kel,” she said. “You’re not as smart as you think you are. Never have been.”

Smoke eddied around her mouth as she spoke. The murmur of it inside Kel’s head was clearer than Warwick’s voice was, unmuddled by the noise of the jukebox or the other patrons.

No one’s as smart as you think you are, still too smart for your own good.

Kel leaned his elbow on the bar. “No one’s as smart as I think I am.”

He ignored Warwick’s suspicious look at hearing her own thoughts in his mouth. Why not? What was she going to do, accuse him of reading her mind? That was ridiculous.

Even Kel, riding high on a good run of luck, knew that.