Page 3 of Stirring Up Trouble
A lumpof dread roughly the size of a hippopotamus parked itself directly over Gavin Carmichael’s sternum and refused to budge. He pressed the phone firmly to his ear, willing his composure to hold fast.
“I see. And how many times has my sister missed English class, exactly?” His dread morphed quickly into anger, but it didn’t lose any intensity with the transformation. He took a deep breath, determined to bolster his resolve and deal with this calmly.
“Her attendance record says six,” clipped the vice principal. “I assume she hasn’t been ill, then.”
“No.” He raked a hand through his hair, counting to three before continuing so his irritation wouldn’t show. “Thank you for being concerned enough to call. The absences are all unexcused, so please feel free to administer whatever punishment Bree has earned according to school policy. She’ll also receive punishment here at home, of course.”
Not that it would matter. Gavin could no more control Bree than he could coax table grapes into becoming Dom Pérignon. Christ, what a mess their tenuous relationship was turning out to be.
The vice principal cleared her throat. “Mr. Carmichael, I don’t mean to pry, but…well, we have excellent counseling services here at Pine Mountain Middle School. Perhaps Bree might benefit from talking with one of our staff members.” Her voice softened considerably. “Thirteen is a difficult age for nearly all of our students. To lose her mother and move to a small town on top of that is…”
“I’m grateful for your concern, Mrs. Wilkerson,” Gavin interrupted, hoping he sounded like it. The woman probably meant well, but having a touchy-feely chat with a middle school vice principal he barely knew wasn’t on his agenda. Talking with Bree herself was hard enough.
“I’ll make sure she knows it’s an option. In the meantime, can you let me know if she misses any more classes? I’ll be sure she makes up all of her incomplete assignments.”
He wasn’t about to tell Mrs. Wilkerson how many times he’d asked Bree if she wanted to go to counseling in the last ten months. In hindsight, Gavin realized she automatically shot down anything he suggested, from where they lived to what they should eat for dinner. All this arguing couldn’t possibly be what their mother had had in mind when she’d named him Bree’s sole guardian.
Then again, she hadn’t planned on breast cancer stealing her life at fifty-three and leaving both of her children orphans, either.
Gavin thanked Mrs. Wilkerson again and replaced the receiver with a deliberatesnick. He was due at La Dolce Vita in less than an hour to get the waitstaff and the front of the house ready for tonight’s dinner service, and prep for the upcoming weekend would entail all the usual insanity. Still, no matter how seriously he took his job, Bree took precedence over work. If he left now, he’d get to the school just in time to pick her up, saving her from the bus ride she always grumbled about.
Plus, even though he hated to admit it, if they were in the car together, she’d be a captive audience, and he wanted to deal with her latest defiance before Mrs. Teasdale arrived. While Gavin wasn’t crazy about having the elderly sitter keep an eye on her while he worked, Bree’s track record for troublemaking left him no choice. Plus, the babysitting service had yet to come up with a single decent candidate for a full-time nanny, and Mrs. Teasdale had agreed to stay until that happened. Even in sleepy Pine Mountain, he felt safer knowing not just that Bree was on the straight and narrow, but that she wasn’t alone. Just in case she needed anything.
Not that she’d let on if she did. Why did she have to make it so hard just totalkto her?
The metallic scrape of a key in the lock cut his thoughts in half, and the jolt back to reality mingled with his shock as Bree bumped the front door open with a jeans-clad hip.
“I was just coming to pick you up,” Gavin said, voice flattening over the words before she could fully cross the threshold. The instant their eyes locked, her fluid movements screeched to a halt, and she reached up to pluck her AirPods from their twin perches beneath her honey brown hair.
“I was just coming to pick you up,” he repeated over the tinny screech of music still blasting from the AirPods. Bree made a face like she’d just gotten a whiff of something terribly rotten, but didn’t move from the doorframe.
“You do realize that only the geeky kids get picked up by their parents. It’s totally embarrassing.” She squared her shoulders, defiant and too-thin, to fix him with a stare. God, when had she gotten so tall?
“I thought the bus was embarrassing,” Gavin replied, a frown bracketing his mouth. “And anyway, I’m your brother, not your parent.”
“Half-brother,” Bree corrected forcefully. “Who’s supposed to be at work.”
Gavin buckled down and blanked his expression. He should’ve known they were going to do this the hard way.
“And you’re supposed to be in school. You don’t get out until two-forty. It’s barely ten after,” he said.
Bree’s arms shot around her rib cage, the knot of gangly limbs creasing the front of her Army jacket as she held herself with snug resolve. “My last class is study hall. It’s kind of optional, you know?”
Gavin’s level voice met her hormone-fueled bravado head-on. “How about English class? Is that optional, too?”
Her chocolate-brown eyes widened for an instant before she rolled them. “English is lame. The schools are so much better in Philadelphia. I don’t see why we can’t just go back.”
Guess they were headed down memory lane.
Stellar.
“We can’t go back because I have a stable job here that doesn’t require me to travel.” Had it really been only a year and a half ago that he’d gone from one glittering city to another, fixing up failing restaurants until their management staff could handle things on their own? San Francisco, Santa Fe, Chicago…the memories were already blurry around the edges, replaced by words likestage 4, aggressive chemotherapy,anddouble mastectomy. Gavin shoved them away.
“All my friends are in Philly,” Bree said, unwrapping one arm to place a petulant hand on her hip.
He arched a brow, unable to help himself. “The same friends who tried to talk you into shoplifting?”
Bree’s mouth settled into a hard scowl that contradicted the youthful prettiness of her face. “That was a misunderstanding. I didn’t do anything wrong. The police even said so!”