Make friends.
Be nice.
When a few parents came up to me to shake my hand and introduce themselves, it relaxed me. The parents were all ages. Some older—maybe they were grandparents—and there were a few who looked younger than me, too, but most of them seemed like they were over my nearly thirty. I spotted the two moms that I’d been eavesdropping on at the tryout but didn’t get a chance to officially meet them.
Somehow, by the end of the practice, I’d ended up with two dads sitting on the same bench I was on. It was only my big canvas bag between us that I felt kept them from scooting closer. The one sitting the closest to me had mentioned no less than four times how he was divorced. The guy sitting beside him, who had blatantly ogled my boobs every single time he talked to me, wore a wedding band. My best guess was that his wife had missed practice and he hadn’t wanted to get busted sitting on my other side. Schmuck. I knew the difference between flirting with someone I wanted to flirt with and accidentally flirting, and I made sure to keep the conversation easygoing and about the kids.
But when Josh made his way toward me after practice, his eyes narrowed on the dads who were still sitting where I’d left them on the bleacher. He gave me this look that said he wasn’t amused by the two strangers sitting so close. He usually didn’t like men talking to me, and in this case, nothing had changed.
“What do they want?” he asked immediately.
“Oh, hey, J. I’m glad practice went well. I’m doing fine, thank you,” I replied in a mocking voice.
Josh didn’t even blink as he jumped into our imaginary conversation. “That’s good.”
I stuck my tongue out at him and waved him to the side. “Ready to go?” I changed the subject. There wasn’t a point in explaining anything about the dads.
“Ready,” he answered, shooting the two men a wary look before walking next to me down the pathway that led from the team’s practice field to the parking lot. The complex had four other fields and one of them was being used for a girls’ softball team practice. “Are we gonna pick up Lou now?”
Setting my hand on his shoulder, we kept walking. “Yeah. I’ll make dinner when we get home.” Earlier in the day, Louie had called from the school’s phone saying he wasn’t feeling well. With a day full of appointments, I had checked with my mom to see if she could go pick him up and she had. She’d said he hadn’t been running a fever but that he’d been complaining of a headache and sore throat. She’d offered to keep Louie overnight, but he’d said he would rather come home. He didn’t like sleeping away from Josh if he didn’t have to, and I didn’t have the heart to force him to sleep somewhere else.
“What are you making?”
“Tacos.”
“Gross.”
I stopped walking. “What did you just say?”
He grinned. “I’m playing.”
“I thought I was about to have to drop you off on the side of the road and make you find your own way home, kiddo.”
That made my serious Josh laugh. “You—uh-oh.” He stopped in place and immediately dropped his bag on the ground, his hands going to the rim of it to spread the material wide.
I knew that movement. “What did you forget?”
Josh rummaged through it for a couple of seconds longer. “My glove.”
He knew the same thing I did. I had just bought him that glove a couple of months ago. I’d made him swear on his life he wouldn’t lose it; it was that expensive.
“I’ll be right back!” he shouted, already taking a step away as he gestured toward the bag that was beginning to topple over. “Watch it for me!”
I was going to kill him if he lost it. Slowly. Twice.
Feeling my eyelid start to twitch, I snagged his bag before it fell over and hefted it over my shoulder. What did I do? I just stood there, looking around at the people on the team who hadn’t left yet. In one of the bigger groups of parents and kids, I could see Trip’s blond head. I hadn’t gotten a chance to tell him hi, but I figured it was all right since it was the first day of practice and everyone probably wanted to talk to him. It wasn’t like I had anything to ask yet or be annoying for.
As I continued glancing around, waiting for Josh, I spotted Dallas, his brother, the bitchy mom named Christy, and her son walking almost side by side toward the parking lot, which was where I was standing. It seemed like the woman was the one talking while Dallas just nodded along, and the other two seemed off in their own world. For a brief moment, I thought about tying my shoelace that didn’t need a retie or pretending I was on a phone call. Then I realized how cowardly that made me feel. All because Dallas hadn’t been Mr. Friendly at the bar? I had to face it. I was going to be around these people for a while. I wasn’t scared of them, and I wasn’t going to be shy and shit.
If he didn’t like me for whatever reason in the world he might have made up for not being my fan, then too damn bad. My grandma had told me once you couldn’t make someone love you or even like you, but you could sure as hell make someone put up with you.
So, the second they were close enough to me, deep in a conversation that didn’t require a whole bunch of mouth movement, I let out a breath, reminded myself that two of these people were Ginny’s family, one was a child and the other… well, I wasn’t worried about her, and I said, “Hi, guys.”
The greeting I got in return didn’t amuse me.
One glare from the mom for a reason I couldn’t even begin to figure out.
One weak smile from the little boy on Josh’s team.
And two grumbles. Literally. One that sounded like “Mmm,” and the other didn’t really sound like anything at all.
Had Mac mysteriously broken out of the house, taken a shit on Dallas and Jackson’s front step, and lit it on fire without me knowing? Had I done something wrong or rude to the mom? I didn’t know. I really didn’t know, but suddenly I felt a little betrayed. A part of growing up was accepting that you could be nice to others but shouldn’t expect that kindness to be returned. Being nice shouldn’t require a payment.
But as the group of four walked by, honest to God making me grateful that no one had seen that encounter, it aggravated me. More than a little.
A lot.
If I had done something, I could understand and accept responsibility for my actions. At least I wanted to believe that. But I hadn’t. I really hadn’t done anything to either one of them.
And most importantly, Josh had been picked to be on the team. So….
“Don’t worry, I found it,” came Josh’s voice from my left, tearing my thoughts away from the men who lived across the street from us.
I slanted one of the few people in this world who wouldn’t dishonor me a look. “Worried? You should have been the one worried you weren’t going to make it to turn eleven if you hadn’t found it.”
* * *
About an hour and a half later, the three of us were driving down our street when Josh piped up, “The old lady is waving.”
“What old lady?” I asked before I could stop myself from calling her that. Damn it.
“The really old one. With the cotton hair.”
There were two things wrong with his sentence, but I only focused on one: I couldn’t tell him to stop calling her old when I’d just done it, but hopefully I would remember next time. “Is she still waving?”
Pulling the car into the driveway and parking it, he unbuckled his seat belt and turned to look over the backseat of the SUV. “Yeah. Maybe she wants something.”
There was no way in hell her hair needed cutting so soon, and it was almost ten o’clock at night. What the hell was she doing awake? The boys shouldn’t even be up at this point either, but that was just part of the beast called Select Baseball. The three of us all got out of the car, tired and ready to go to sleep after we’d eaten at my parents’ house, and a huge part of me hoped that, as I got out of the car, Miss Pearl didn’t actually need anything. I’d barely slammed the door shut when I heard, just barely, a near whisper thi
s far away, “Miss Lopez!”
We were back to Miss Lopez.
I just managed to hold in my sigh as I turned to face her house. I waved.
“She’s waving at you,” Louie’s helpful ass explained.
Damn.
“I’m sleepy,” he added immediately afterward.
I didn’t need to look at Josh to know he had to be exhausted too. They were both usually in bed by nine on nights that didn’t fall on baseball days. “Okay. You two can go inside while I go see what she wants, but lock the door behind you, and if someone tries to break in”—this was highly unlikely, but stranger shit had happened—“Lou, call the cops and blow that train horn under your bed I know your Aunt Missy bought you for your birthday while Josh tries to break a skull in with his bat. Got it?”
They both seemed to deflate with relief that I wasn’t forcing them to go over to Miss Pearl’s.
“I’ll only be fifteen minutes tops, okay? Lock the door! Don’t turn on the stove!” I said, watching them nod as I started off across the street. I turned around once I was on the other side to make sure the door looked securely closed and not left half open. By the time I made it up to Miss Pearl’s driveway, she was at her doorway, wearing a snow-white robe over a dark purple nightgown with her cat in her arms. “Hi, Miss Pearl,” I greeted the older woman.
“Miss Garcia,” she said, smiling at me a little. “I’m sorry for botherin’ ya in the middle of the night—”
I chose to ignore the “Miss Garcia” and smiled at her calling ten the middle of the night.
“—but the pilot light on my water heater went out. If I get on the floor, I might not be able to get up, and my boy isn’t answerin’. Would ya mind helpin’ me out?”
Pilot light? On a water heater? I could faintly remember my dad working on ours as a kid.
“Sure,” I said, not knowing what other option I had. I could look it up on my phone, I hoped. “Where is it?”
Maybe that was the wrong question to ask because she gave me a funny look. “In the garage.”
I smiled at her and immediately reached for my phone in my back pocket. As she walked me through her house and into the garage, I quickly looked up how to turn a pilot light on a water heater and managed to glance at the basics behind it. So when we stopped, I asked, “Do you have a lighter or a match?”
That must have been the right thing because she nodded and walked over to a work table pressed up against one of the walls, pulling a box of matches out of one of the drawers. I shot her a tight smile when she handed them over, hoping like hell she wouldn’t be one of those people who stood there watching and judging.
She was.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket again and, in front of her, looked up the model of her water heater on the Internet and read the instructions twice to be on the safe side. When I set my phone down, I made sure to meet her gaze; I smiled and then did exactly what I was supposed to. It took a couple of tries, but it worked. Thank you, Google.
“All done,” I let Miss Pearl know as I got to my feet and dusted off my knees before handing over her matches.
The older woman raised one of those spiderweb thin eyebrows as she accepted the matches. “Thank you,” was her surprisingly easy answer without any comments about what I’d done.
“You’re welcome. I should get going back home. The boys are waiting for me. Do you need anything else?”
She shook her head. “That’s all. Now I can get my bath in.”
Beaming at her, I walked toward her front door and waited until she caught up. “It was nice seeing you, Miss Pearl. Let me know if there’s anything else you need later on.”
“Oh, I will,” she agreed without any hesitation. “Thank you.”
“No problem. Have a good night,” I said to her, already three steps down her deck.
I had made it to the intersection of her walkway with the sidewalk when she yelled, “Tell your older boy good luck with his baseball practice!”
“I will,” I told her, not thinking anything of her comment. She’d probably seen him lugging his equipment around. It wasn’t some big secret.
Two minutes later, I was inside the house after banging on the front door for a solid minute and then having Josh ask, “What’s the password?”
To which I responded, “If you don’t open the door, I’m going to kick your butt.”
Which got me: “Somebody’s in a bad mood.”
I had barely closed the door when I got bum-rushed from behind. Two arms went around my thighs and what felt like a face smashed into the small of my back. “I know what you can tell me tonight.”
“You feel good enough for a story?”
He nodded. He looked like he wasn’t feeling well, but he wasn’t dying yet. My heart ached just a little as I turned around in Louie’s arms to look down at him. “What are you in the mood for, Goo?”
Those blue eyes blinked up at me. “How did Daddy know he wanted to be a policeman?”
Chapter Seven
“I sold all your stuff while you were with your grandparents,” I told Josh on Sunday after his grandparents had dropped them off following their weekend together. Both boys looked tanner than they had before leaving for the weekend.
I didn’t know what I would do without their involvement in our lives. That saying “It takes a village to raise a kid” was no joke. Louie and Josh had five people who cared for them full time, and sometimes it still didn’t seem like enough. I seriously had no idea how single parents with no close family to help made it work.
Not even Louie fell for my joke; they both just ignored me before heading into their rooms to drop off their bags with Mac trailing behind them, ignoring me too.
Grumpy much?
“We have to do the lawn. Don’t take forever,” I yelled after them.
It was Josh who let out a drawn-out grumble, pausing at his doorway. “Do we have to?”
“Yes.”
“We can’t do it tomorrow?”
“No. I get off work too late and the mosquitoes will be bad.”
“I have homework,” the little ass lied.
“You’re full of crap,” I stated. He always got his homework done on Friday; I’d bet my life on it. I had my brother to thank for getting him on that path early on in school. He hadn’t let him go out and play until he got his stuff done.
There was another drawn-out sigh and the sound of a door—a closet door probably—slamming shut. Good grief, I hoped he was going to get over this crap soon. Wasn’t it only girls who went through the horrible hormonal phase? Even then, wasn’t that when they were in their teens?
Luckily, neither one of them gave me any more verbal grief as we all trudged out the back door to fish the lawn mower out of the shed in the back. Mac was terrified of the noise it made, so he was left inside the house. There were three huge spider webs on the door, and I only screamed once as something scuttled across the floor as I pulled out the mower and the two rakes I’d taken from my dad’s house on my last visit.
I handed the boys each a rake. “You rake the leaves. I’ll pull out weeds.”
Josh frowned fiercely but took the garden tool from me. Louie… well, Louie wasn’t really going to get much done, but I didn’t want to raise a lazy butt. He could do his best. With gardening gloves on—I double-checked for roaches living in the fingers—we spent the next hour doing the first half of the yard, only taking a break for water and Gatorade and to put sunblock on the boys when I noticed the back of Lou’s neck getting pink. How could I have forgotten about putting sunblock on him?
Once the weeds had been yanked out and bagged, and half of the leaves were lumped into multiple small piles throughout the yard, the boys stood off to the side, wiping sweat off their faces and looking so done I almost laughed.
“Is that it?” Josh asked.
I slid him a look. “No. We still have to pick this all up and mow the lawn.”
He dropped his head back and let out a groan that had me blinking,
unimpressed.
“J, you’re basically a grown man—” I started to tell him.
“I’m ten.”
“In some countries in the world, you could be married right now. You’re pretty much the man of the house. You’re almost as big as I am. I’m going to let you mow the lawn—”
“I’m a little boy,” he argued.
“You’re not that little. What do you want to do? The front or the back?”
Despite everything, Josh knew what and how much he could get away with, and he had to be aware that he wasn’t going to get himself out of the mow job. It was happening no matter what he said. So I wasn’t surprised when he sighed. “The back, I guess.”
“You want to go first or second?”
“First,” he grumbled.
“I can do the other part,” Lou interjected.
“Goo, the handle is taller than you are. You’ll end up running your brother and me over, hitting a car, mowing down a cat or two, and catching something on fire. No thanks. Maybe when you’re sixteen.”
He took it as a compliment, his expression practically beaming. “Okay.” Like he was really proud of the mayhem I thought he was capable of.
“Let me show you how to turn it on, J,” I said and went on to instruct him how to use the machine even though I knew for a fact he’d done it with my dad a few times.
By the time Josh was done, I’d shoved and tripped Louie into three different piles of leaves, and then we had to clean them up afterward. The backyard wasn’t perfect, but I wasn’t going to bust Josh’s balls over it, and I settled for sticking my pinky in his ear. “Good job, hambone. Now you have to bag the leaves in the front with Goo.”
The expression on his face made it seem like I was trying to poison him or something. His shoulders slumped and he lumbered toward the front yard with Mac barking from inside the house; I’d closed the dog door on him so he wouldn’t sneak out while we’d been busy. I finally let him out, shutting the gate in his face to leave him in the backyard. Josh was still bumbling around when we got to the front, and I didn’t think twice about putting my index finger to my lips while his back was turned and telling Lou not to say anything.
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