Page 22 of A Bear's Secret

Chapter Seven

Trevor

“It’s just so boring,”Lizzy said. She stabbed at her blueberry pancakes, dramatically leaning her face against her hand, staring down at her plate like it was the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

Was I this dramatic when I was thirteen?Trevor wondered, cutting a piece of his own pancakes, dipping it in syrup, and eating it.

“Well, why is it boring?” he said, trying to maintain a reasonable tone. “Maybe you can write your report about that.”

Lizzy rolled her eyes.

“Two people had a baby. Who cares? People have babies all the time,” she said.

Trevor struggled to remember his own ninth grade education. Had he even had to read The Scarlet Letter? Somehow, he was vaguely aware that it was an A for adultery, pinned to a woman’s dress, but beyond that, he couldn’t recall a lot.

“But they weren’t supposed to have a baby together,” he said to his niece, putting more pancake in his mouth, hoping that he was right. “Maybe you could write about how morality has changed since the book was written.”

He was really struggling for ideas. Frankly, school hadn’t been his forte, and he’d mostly chugged along as a B and C student, really only getting A’s in the things he enjoyed, like woodshop and math.

It had driven his teachers crazy, and they’d sent endless letters home about his wasted potential. Not that his parents paid much attention to him. After all, they already had their golden boy in his older brother, David, and Trevor was more or less a backup.

Besides, Papa had already been dead for a few years by then, leaving only Mom and Dad, and they were both starting to spin off into their own orbits by the time Trevor was a teenager.

Lizzy looked at Trevor like he was the world’s biggest idiot. He pretended not to notice.

Somewhere else in the house, a door opened, and Trevor’s mom came in, wearing a bathrobe and slippers even though it was ten in the morning already. By ranch standards, she’d practically slept until early afternoon.

She was also obviously hungover.

“Morning,” she said. Her hair was mussed, and she had bags underneath her eyes.

“Want some blueberry pancakes?” Trevor asked, standing from his own breakfast.

“Sit down, I got it,” she said. The pancakes were being kept warm in the oven, and she slipped two onto her plate, standing behind Lizzy’s head.

Then, as if she thought she was being sneaky, she took a small bottle of tequila from a cabinet next to the stove and poured a shot into her orange juice. When she turned around, she held Trevor’s gaze as if to challenge him to say something.

He dropped his eyes back to his own plate, knowing that nothing he could say was going to work.

“You hear about that boy found unconscious?” she asked, swallowing half the glass of orange juice in a single gulp. “He was off the trail to the Double Moon.”

“I was at the hospital for three hours yesterday, mom,” he said. “He was on our land.”

“But he was headed to the Double Moon,” his mom said. “I never did trust Barb and Bill. Who hires a grizzly to do a wolf’s job?”

Being the manager of a ranch was a big, important job, and Trevor’s parents were traditionalists: they thought it was a job that could only be done properly by a wolf. Any non-wolf working in management on a ranch was taking a job from a good, solid, hard-working wolf, and that was that.

Trevor didn’t respond. His mom’s orange juice was half-gone already, and he knew from years of experience that it was useless to argue.

“He had an empty syringe in his neck,” she went on. Lizzy made a face, but didn’t say anything. “Who does a thing like that?”

His mom took a bite of pancake, then spoke with her mouth full.

“It’ll be a nightmare for us if he dies, I tell you what,” she said.

Trevor stood from the table, snatching his plate up.

“It’ll be worse for him and his family,” he said.

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