“You’re not teaching him respect by giving him presents after he’s sassed you.”

“All you taught me was respect, and look where that got us.”

“Please.” Mary all but wrung her hands. “This isn’t the place.”

“Don’t you tell me where I can speak my mind,” Bob snapped. “My mistake was in not slapping you back harder and more often. You always did run your own way, as you pleased. Nothing but trouble, causing it and finding it and giving your mother heartache. Run off to the city before you’re dry behind the ears, and pissing your life away.”

“I didn’t run off to the city. I ran away from you.”

Bob’s head jerked back at that, as if he’d been slapped. He went pale. “Now you’re back, aren’t you? Scrambling to make do, shuffling the boy off to neighbors so you can make a living. Stirring up gossip ’cause you’re fooling around with women down the hall from where that boy sleeps, and teaching him to run wild as you did, and end up the same way.”

“Just one minute.” If her own temper hadn’t hazed her vision, Kate would have realized she was stepping between two men very near to coming to blows. “It so happens Brody isn’t fooling around with women, he’s fooling around with me. And though that is none of your business, the fooling around has never gone on when Jack’s asleep down the hall.

“And if you don’t know that Brody would cut his own arm off rather than do anything, anything to hurt that child, then you’re blind as well as stupid. You should be ashamed to speak to him as you did, to not have the guts to tell him you’re proud of what he’s making out of his life, and of the life he’s making for his son.”

“You’re wasting your breath,” Brody began, and she rounded on him.

“You shut up. You’ve plenty to answer for, too. You have no right to speak to your father as you did. No right whatsoever to show him disrespect. And in front of your own child. Don’t you see that it frightens and hurts Jack to watch the two of you claw at each other this way?”

She spun back, searing both of them with one hot look. “The pair of you haven’t got enough sense put together to equal the brains of a monkey. I’m going outside with Jack. As far as I’m concerned the two of you can pound each other into mush and be done with it.”

She wrenched open the door and sailed outside.

She was still simmering when Brody joined her a few minutes later. Saying nothing he watched Jack wrestle with the puppy and try to get Mike to chase a small red ball.

“I want to apologize for bringing that into your house.”

“My house has heard family arguments before, and I expect it will hear them again.”

“You were right about it being wrong for us to start on each other in front of Jack.” When she said nothing, he jammed his hands into his pockets. “Kate, that’s just the way it is between me and my father. The way it’s always been.”