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Maybe some people would chalk a moment like that up to the wine or to temporary insanity, but he couldn’t bullshit himself. He’d only had one glass, and there was nothing temporary about this insanity. His attraction to Ellen wasn’t going away.
Neither was he.
But their nonrelationship was about to get a lot more complicated. If her reaction to the locks was a fair barometer, by mid-afternoon Ellen probably wouldn’t even be speaking to him anymore. Which dramatically reduced the odds he’d need to repeat last night’s painful exercise in self-control.
Caleb drilled out the cylinder hole. It dropped to the deck with a puff of sawdust. As he swapped the big hole saw for a smaller one, Henry peeked at him from the kitchen.
“That man is?” Henry asked. Ellen came up behind him and laid one protective hand on his shoulder.
“That’s Caleb, honey. I already told you that.”
“Doin’?”
“He’s installing a new lock on the door.”
“Cabe has a drill!”
“Yep, he has a drill.”
“Use it for?”
“He’s making a hole for the lock to go in.”
“Henry do it. Henry use a drill.”
“No, sweetie, you need to stay over here with Mama.”
But Henry was a toddler—his mother’s denial was all the provocation he needed to wiggle out of her grip for a closer look. When the bit punched through for the bolt hole, Caleb backed it out and offered up the warm plug of wood to Henry, who took possession of the treasure with a huge, dimpled smile. Apparently all it t
ook to get on Henry’s list of people worth cozying up to was the right tools.
Caleb wished Ellen were that easy.
“You want to help out, buddy?”
“You don’t have to do that,” she protested. “He’ll just get in the way.”
“Nah, it’s fine. I have nephews. They always want to help when I’m fixing things.” And it always makes Amber like me better when I take her kids off her hands for a while.
Fishing around in his tool chest, he found the small pair of safety glasses. “If you want to stand close, you have to wear these to keep your eyes safe. Can I put them on you?”
A solemn nod from Henry. Caleb slid the glasses over his ears. “There you go. Now have a seat. I need somebody to look at these directions and tell me what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Henry plopped down on the threshold and began paging through the instruction book with a serious expression, stopping every now and then to ask “This is?” or “That is?” He soaked up Caleb’s explanations with an impressive attentiveness for such a little guy.
“How old did you say he is?”
Ellen lingered near the kitchen, clearly unable to decide what to do with herself. She was still angry, but he guessed she didn’t want to spoil Henry’s fun without a good reason. “He turned two in May.”
“Good vocabulary for a kid his age.”
“Yeah, talking is pretty much his primary function.”
“Want your steamroller,” Henry said.
“It’s in your room, Peanut.”
Henry left and came back a minute later with an assortment of plastic construction trucks, which he put to work in the sawdust.
