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enough alike to be sisters, blond and freckled, though one had a bad perm. And from the way they acted, they could have been twins. Unlike the pair back home, they were loudmouthed and silly, shrieking, “Oh, Kristen!” “Oh, Kelsey!” at each other, and in ten minutes they were driving him nuts. He thought they might be driving the older lady nuts, too, because she got her horse saddled and out of there, fast.
    Travis watched Jennifer brush and fly-spray her small brown horse. He liked the part when she cleaned its feet with a pick, because it called for a lot of bending over.
    Kristen and Kelsey were ready first and the barn was much more peaceful. They’d been gone about ten minutes by the time Jennifer had her saddle and bridle on, and Travis was surprised to see her near tears.
    â€œIf my lesson runs late Mom’ll kill me. I’ve got to go straight to piano from here. Oh, damn.”
    She led the horse out of the barn at a trot, and almost ran down the red dirt road toward the ring.
    The little girls from the first class were riding into the pasture behind the ring. He decided he’d get the stalls watered and be back in the house before they got back. Little girls didn’t interest him.
    The work didn’t take long.
    He stopped halfway in the kitchen door. There was a blond woman in the kitchen. She looked too well dressed to be a burglar, but Travis froze a minute anyway…
    She paused, too, then relaxed. But she was staring at him as if she were seeing a ghost.
    â€œYou must be Travis,” she said finally. “God, you look more like Ken than Christopher does. I’m Teresa,” she added.
    Teresa, Ken’s wife, or soon-to-be ex-wife. Boy, she was good-looking—but he always had been a sucker for brown-eyed blondes. What was Ken divorcing her for? Then he remembered: she was divorcing him. Immediately he was on Ken’s side.
    â€œI guess I mean you look like Tim. I never did meet him, but in their pictures they look quite a bit alike.”
    â€œYeah.” Travis could remember only one picture of his dad, in his Air Force uniform; he remembered the eyebrows, especially, being like his, almost joined in the middle. Stan had made Mom put it away. But frankly, he didn’t see this big resemblance to Ken everyone else did. “But he’s premature gray.”
    â€œHe’s premature thirty-seven,” Teresa said dryly.
    Travis gave her a look that let her know whose side he was on, and she changed the subject. “I brought Christopher out. I’m going out of town tonight on business and I knew Ken wouldn’t mind getting him a little early. I tried calling him at the office but he was out.”
    Christopher. The little kid. He seemed to remember Ken saying something about the little kid coming out this weekend, but he hadn’t been paying attention. He thought of something: He’d been planning to nag Ken into doing
something
this weekend, even if it was just going to a movie. Now they wouldn’t be going anywhere more exciting than a Dairy Queen.
    â€œI will say this,” Teresa went on, “—Ken gets an A-plus in the daddy department. That’s so important for a boy—” She broke off suddenly and, in a voice trying too hard to be pleasant, asked, “Now, what was it you got in trouble for? It wasn’t drugs, was it?”
    Travis had it on the tip of his tongue to answer, “No, it was attempted murder.”
    But something made him change it to “Oh, my stepdad and I don’t get along too good, Mom wanted us to chill out for a while.”
    â€œYeah, broken families are the pits, aren’t they?” She stopped to examine a nail. Poor lady was having a hard time finding a polite subject. “You want to meet Christopher? He’s up in his room making sure all his toys are still there.”
    â€œUh, I got a lot of homework, I thought I’d get started on it.”
    He