“Fortunately, Mom’s friends tend to be benevolent. I also learned a lot of skills most people don’t have.”

“Like.”

“Well…I read Latin, a little Greek. I can put up drywall, plant one hell of an organic garden, use power tools, and I’m a kickass cook. I’ll bet you can’t match that.”

He spoke damn good Spanish and liked using power tools himself, but he didn’t want to spoil her fun. “I threw four touchdown passes against Ohio State in the Rose Bowl.”

“And set those Rose Princesses’ hearts a-fluttering.”

The Beav loved taking shots at him, but she did it with such open relish that she never came across as bitchy. Odd. He drained his coffee. “With so much moving around, school must have been a challenge.”

“When you’re constantly the new kid, you develop fairly sophisticated people skills.”

“I’ll bet.” He was beginning to see where her confrontational attitude came from. “Any college?”

“A small liberal arts school. I had a full scholarship, but I quit at the beginning of my junior year. Still, it’s the longest I spent in one place.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“Wanderlust. I was born to roam, babe.”

He doubted that. The Beav wasn’t a natural hard-ass. Raised differently, she would have been married by now, probably teaching kindergarten with a couple kids of her own.

He tossed a twenty on the table, and when he didn’t wait for change, she reacted with predictable outrage. “Two cups of coffee, a doughnut, and one uneaten muffin!”

“Get over it.”

She snatched up his muffin. As they headed across the parking lot, he studied the drawings she’d done of him and realized he’d gotten the best end of their deal. For the price of a couple of meals and a night’s lodging, he’d received some food for thought, and how often did that happen?

As the day advanced, Dean noticed the Beav growing more fidgety. When he stopped for gas, she took off for the restroom and left her grungy black canvas purse behind. He capped off the tank, thought about it for half a second, then went on an exploratory mission. Ignoring her cell phone and a couple of sketch pads, he pulled out her wallet. It contained an Arizona driver’s license—she really was thirty—library cards from Seattle and San Francisco, an ATM card, eighteen dollars in cash, and a photograph of a delicate-looking middle-aged woman standing with some street kids in front of a burned-out building. Although the woman’s hair was pale, she had the Beav’s same small, sharp features. This had to be Virginia Bailey. He dug deeper in her purse and unearthed both a checkbook and a savings account passbook issued by a Dallas bank. Fourteen hundred dollars in the first and a lot more in the second. He frowned. The Beav had a nice nest egg, so why was she acting as though she was broke?

She returned to the car. He put everything back in her purse, closed it, and handed it over. “I was looking for breath mints.”