What the hell was I supposed to do with Josh and Louie? Was I supposed to discipline them differently? Talk to them differently? Was there a leeway with them that wasn’t possible with girls?
I didn’t think so. I could remember my parents being a lot more relaxed—and that was saying something because they were strict—with Rodrigo than with me. It used to piss me off. They would use the excuse that he was a boy and I was some sort of innocent flower that had to be protected at all costs as their reasoning behind why I would get grounded for weeks if I got home past curfew while he would get a sigh and an eye roll. There had been plenty of other things that my parents had expected of me that they hadn’t of Drigo.
So, as I sat in my Honda with Josh and Louie in the backseat, both strangely silent, I still couldn’t decide how to handle the situation. After I had picked up Josh from school, neither one of us had said a word as I drove back to work and proceeded to go back and forth between color jobs for my last two clients of the day until it was time to pick up Louie. And as if sensing the tension in the car, Lou had been suspiciously quiet, too.
The fact was Josh had punched a little boy in the face.
Now I had been pissed off about it for all of ten minutes until I’d shown up at their school to talk to the principal and Josh himself, to find out that yeah, he had hit someone in his class. But he had punched him because the little shit had been beating up on a different kid in their class in the bathroom. The fact that they were in fifth grade doing this kind of crap didn’t escape me at all. Josh had supposedly intervened, and the little shit had then turned his attention and aggression on my nephew. The slight amount of irritation I’d felt having to go pick him up had disappeared in an instant. But the principal had something up his butt and was talking about how severe the offense was and blah, blah, blah, the school doesn’t condone violence, blah, blah blah.
The asshole then proceeded to try and suspend Josh for a week, but I argued until I got it down to two days with a promise to have a long talk and consider disciplining him.
That was where my problem came in.
Diana, the aunt, wanted to give Josh a high five for standing up for another kid. I wanted to take him for ice cream and congratulate him on doing the right thing. Maybe even buy him a new game for his Xbox with my tip money.
Diana, the person who was supposed to be a parent figure, knew that if it had been me who got in trouble at school, my parents would have beat my ass and grounded me for the next six months. My mom had slapped me once when I was fourteen for yelling at her and then slamming the door in her face. I could remember it like it was yesterday, her throwing my bedroom door open and whack. Getting suspended from school? Forget about it. I’d be six feet in the ground.
So what the hell was I supposed to do? What was the right path to go down?
Sure, my parents had an iron grip on my life back then and I had turned out okay, but there had been problems along the way. I couldn’t count the number of times I had thought that my mom and dad didn’t understand anything, that they didn’t know me. It hadn’t been easy feeling like I couldn’t tell them things because I knew they wouldn’t get it.
I didn’t want Josh or Louie to feel that way toward me. Maybe that was the problem between being an aunt and being a parent figure. I was one, but had to be the other.
So where the hell did that leave me?
“Am I in trouble?” Louie randomly asked from his spot in the backseat on his booster chair.
I frowned and glanced at him through the rearview mirror, taking in that small, slim body angled toward the door. “No. Did you do something I don’t know about?”
His attention was focused on the outside of the window. “’Cuz you’re not talking, and you got Josh outta school early and not me.”
Josh let out an exasperated sigh. “You’re not in trouble. Don’t be stu—” He caught the “stupid” before it came out. “—dumb. I got in trouble.”
“Why?” the five-year-old asked with so much enthusiasm it almost made me laugh.
Those brown eyes, so much like Rodrigo’s, flicked over toward the rearview mirror, meeting mine briefly. “Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because,” he repeated, shrugging a shoulder, “I hit somebody. I’m suspended.”
“What’s suspended?” Lou asked.
“I can’t go to school for a day.”
“What!” he shouted. “How can I get suspended?”
Josh and I both groaned at the same time. “It’s not a good thing, Lou. If you get suspended to miss school, I’ll kill you.”
“But… but… how come Josh isn’t going to get killed?”
Those blue eyes met mine through the mirror again, curiosity dripping from the corners of those long lashes. “Because I’m not going to get mad at you guys for getting in trouble when you’re doing the right thing—”
“But why would you get in trouble for doing the right thing?” Lou blurted out.
What the hell was I supposed to say? I had to pause to think about it. “Because sometimes, Lou, doing the right thing isn’t always considered the best thing for everyone. Does that make sense?”
“No.”
I sighed. “Okay, like Josh, do you have bullies in your class? Someone who picks on other kids and tells them ugly, mean things?” I asked.
“Umm… there’s a boy who tells everyone they’re gay. I don’t know what that is, but our teacher said it wasn’t a bad thing and called his mom.”
Jesus. “I’ll tell you what gay is later, okay? But it isn’t a bad thing. Anyway, so that kid tells other kids things to try and make them sad and mad, right? Well, that’s a bully. It’s someone who picks on other people to try and hurt their feelings. That isn’t nice, right?”
“Right.”
“Exactly. You should be nice to other people. Treat them with respect, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, bullies don’t do that, and sometimes they’re mean to people who don’t know how to defend themselves. Some people can ignore those mean comments, but other people can’t handle it. You get what I’m saying? They might cry or feel bad about themselves, and they shouldn’t. There’s nothing wrong with someone not liking you, right?”
“Right?”
The question in his voice almost made me snort. I had to let it go. “So, this kid in Josh’s class was picking on another kid…. Josh, tell him what happened.”
Josh sighed. “He was telling him he was a fa—” He stopped and shot me a look through the rearview mirror. What the fuck? Kids used the “F” word when they were ten? What decade was I living in? When I was his age, getting called “fart face” was about the biggest insult getting thrown around. “He was calling the other kid ugly names like Shrimp because he’s short, and making fun of his shoes because they weren’t Nikes—”
Oh hell. I hadn’t heard that part in the office.
“I told him to stop saying that stuff, but he wouldn’t. He started telling me… stuff.”
What kind of shit had he been telling Josh? And why did I suddenly have the urge to go kick some ten-year-old’s ass?
“He kept pushing and pushing me, and I told him to stop. But he started saying stuff about me and the other boy—”
I wasn’t just going to kick the kid’s ass, I was going to kick his mom’s ass too. And after I was done kicking his mom’s ass, I was going to kick his grandma’s ass to teach the whole family a lesson.
“He kept flicking me on the ear and my neck, stepped on my shoes, kicked me a bunch of times, so I punched him,” he ended simply while I was still thinking about maybe even hunting down an aunt or two of the little shit’s.
“Oh,” was Louie’s serious, thoughtful response.
I put off my plan for later, reminding myself I needed to be an adult for now. “So, the principal got mad at Josh for hitting him, even though he hadn’t been the one to start anything. I think it’s stupid he got in trouble even though the other kid
was the one being an asshole—”
That had Lou giggling.
“Don’t tell your abuelita I said that. I’m not going to get mad at Josh for what he did, even though the principal doesn’t think it’s right. If you aren’t purposely trying to hurt other people—and you can hurt them with your words and your actions—and you’re trying to help someone or defend yourself against somebody who is trying to do something wrong to you, I’m not going to get mad. Just tell me. I’ll try to understand, but if I don’t, we can talk about it and you can tell me what happened. You should never pick a fight with someone for no reason though. Sometimes we all make bad choices, but we can try and learn from them, okay?”
“I don’t make bad choices,” Lou argued.
The fact that Josh and I both laughed at the same time didn’t go unnoticed by the youngest person in the car.
“What?” the five-year-old argued.
“You don’t make bad choices.” I laughed and reached back with my palm up; Josh smacked it. “I told you not to stick foil in the microwave like a dozen times and you still did it and broke it!”
Josh slapped his palm into mine again. “Ding-dong, remember that time you said you really had to poop and we told you to go use the bathroom—”
“Be quiet!” Lou shouted. I didn’t need to look to know his face was turning red.
“—but you didn’t, and you pooped in your underwear?” Josh continued, laughing his ass off.
“It was an accident!”
My shoulders were shaking, and it was only because I was driving that I didn’t fall apart on the steering wheel while remembering Louie’s sharting accident last month. “It was an accident, and you learned to quit prairie dogging it, didn’t you? So see? You learned your lesson about making bad choices when it comes to poop.”
“Yeah,” he muttered, sounding so defeated it only made me laugh more.
“And that’s what matters.” I snorted just as I pulled the car into the driveway to our house. “You just had to shit your shorts to learn your lesson.”
“Tia!”
There were tears in my eyes as I got out of the car, holding my stomach from how hard I was laughing. Once the boys were out too and we were walking toward the front door, I pulled on a strand of Louie’s hair so he would know we were only messing with him. “It isn’t that hot today. You want to play some catch?” That principal could suck a big ding-dong if he thought I was going to punish Josh for what he’d done. In the back of my head, I realized that my parents and the Larsens probably wouldn’t agree with my glorifying his choices, but they could make all the faces and comments they wanted. I was proud of my kid.
“Can we play tag too?” Lou asked.
An Alka-Seltzer, Gatorade, a Coke, and a lot of water had dulled the sharpest edge of my hangover the day before, but if I was being completely honest with myself, not playing something my five-year-old wanted all because I’d had too much to drink made me feel awfully guilty. I could throw up in the bushes later if it came down to it, I guessed. “Sure.”
“And can I ride my skateboard after?”
“Yeah you can.”
“Have you found me a new team?” Josh asked with hopeful hesitation in his voice.
Fuck. I kept forgetting. “Not yet, J, but I will. Cross my heart. I really will find you one.” We had already talked about how it would more than likely take a couple of months to find Josh a new Select baseball team to play for, and to give him credit, he hadn’t been hounding me about it even though we were coming up to the two-month mark since we had talked about it. But I knew how important baseball was to him. Luckily, in the meantime, Mr. Larsen had been taking him to practice with his catching coach and batting coach.
Five years ago, I had no idea there was even a thing called a catching coach or someone who just worked on batting skills. Literally, he was a coach that worked with Josh to perfect his skills as a catcher and another to correct and improve his batting. I’m not sure what I had thought about baseball before that, but I sure as hell didn’t realize how much work went into it, much less how competitive and cutthroat it could be before boys even hit puberty. There was none of that fun, fair, positive crap going on with the kinds of teams Josh played on. They played to win. If it didn’t make Josh so happy, I would have been fine with him doing something else with his free time.
A few minutes after getting home, we had all changed into nonschool and work clothes and had made our way to the backyard with Mac, who was beyond stoked to have us all home. I eyed Louie’s outfit for a second and kept my comment to myself. The red Spiderman pajama pants and purple collared shirt my mom had bought him at some point didn’t match. At all. But I didn’t say a word. He could wear whatever he wanted to wear. I caught Josh side-eyeing him, but he didn’t tell him anything either. We both just let that boy live his life in mismatched clothing.
Somehow we started off playing tag in the backyard, even though I was pretty sure we had intended to play catch first. The three of us chased each other around with Mac running after us, trying to play too. Over the chain-link fence, I heard the rumble of cars passing by, but when Louie slapped his hand on my back to “get me,” I completely forgot what I was thinking about as I ran after him.
We didn’t stop until we were all panting and sweating, and then Josh and Lou picked up their gloves to start playing catch.
The sun was hot, but none of us let it get to us as we took turns tossing the ball at each other; it was a pointless game for Josh’s skills, but I liked that he still did little-kid stuff to hang out with Louie.
“Can I bat some?” Josh finally asked after we’d been tossing the ball for a while.
I scrunched up my nose and looked around at the nonstop fence lines in our neighbors’ backyards, imagining the worst.
“You don’t throw that fast, and I won’t hit it as hard as I can,” he said like I wouldn’t take it offensively.
“‘You don’t throw that fast,’” I mocked to mess with him. “Yeah, sure. Just be careful. We don’t need to be breaking any windows.”
He rolled his eyes like what I was asking for wasn’t a big deal, and maybe for him it wasn’t. He wouldn’t be the one paying for a new window or going to apologize if it happened.
“Let’s go to the front at least so we don’t have to jump any fences to get into people’s backyards.” I eyed Louie. “I’m talking to you, you little criminal.”
“I don’t do anything!” He laughed, putting both of his hands to his chest like he couldn’t understand why I would pick on him.
I loved it.
“Uh-huh. I know you’re always up to nothing good.”
He chuffed.
“I’ll get the bat,” Josh said, already moving toward the house.
It didn’t take him long to get his bat, and we moved toward the front yard, leaving Mac in the back barking and whining, but that was what he got since he’d run across the street last time. Soon enough, I was tossing underhand pitches at Josh, watching him hit one after the other, proving that his batting lessons were coming in handy. Sure, I didn’t throw the balls with any real power behind them, they were slow, but something was something. He was hitting them, rocketing them into our neighbors’ lawns and making Louie run after the balls at our urging… and a promise I’d pay him five bucks.
It was probably about fifteen bats in that I spotted the two male figures across the street in front of Dallas’s house, talking. One of them had to be him; I didn’t know anyone else with that buzz-cut hair and brawny build that would be standing there of all places. And it was about two seconds later that I realized it was Trip, Ginny’s cousin—other cousin—next to him. The longer I looked at them, at how one was leaning forward and the other wasn’t, the more I realized they might have been arguing. But in the time it took me to glance at the boys and back across the street again, both men were making their way over. It was the blond who had me smiling in their direction, remembering his teasing from two nights ago. The love and
friendship he had with my boss had been obvious. I’d liked him more and more the longer we stayed at the bar talking, especially when he had offered to walk us outside to catch our taxi.
And just as suddenly, I thought about the brush-off the man beside him had given me. Right after that memory, I made myself remember how he had come by my house to thank me for helping his brother. I could give him some credit for that.
And he was married and having marriage problems. I could respect that. After every time I’d split up with someone, I’d sworn off the entire male gender—except for those related to me—for a lifetime, which in reality usually only lasted a few months.
Josh didn’t notice our visitors until they both stopped on the sidewalk a few feet away as Trip’s hands came up flat in a pacifying gesture. “Not trying to scare y’all,” he apologized when the ten-year-old shot him a wary who-the-hell-are-you look, which I was pretty sure he’d picked up from me. I was also pretty sure I noticed him getting a better grip on his bat.
“Hi, Trip,” I greeted my newest acquaintance before acknowledging my neighbor. “Hi, Dallas.” I eyed both boys. “Josh, Lou, this is Ginny’s cousin Trip, and our neighbor Dallas.” Should I mention that I knew he was related to my boss? The boys liked Gin. Saying her name would be like a seal of approval, and I wasn’t sure if this man deserved the honor or not, but I made a spur of the moment decision. “He’s Ginny’s cousin, too.”
Neither one of the boys reacted until I gave Louie a wide-eyed stare, and he shouted out a “Hi” at our visitors.
Dallas had his gaze settled on Louie the instant he’d opened his mouth. He smiled so easily at him it totally caught me off guard. “How’s it going, buddy?”
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