Once my hand was my own again, I put it on my hip and went for the third weird smile in the last ten minutes. “Well, it was nice meeting you, Dallas. Officially. You’re welcome for everything. Let me know if you ever need anything.”
He blinked and I suddenly felt like I’d done something wrong. But all he said was, “Sure. See you around.”
I didn’t look at his butt as I closed the door behind him. He was married, after all. I’d seen enough. There wasn’t a whole lot in this world I took seriously, but a relationship, especially a marriage, was one of those things, even if he had women coming over to his house looking for him. Staring at a man’s butt was a lot different than checking out the front half of him when he’d been the one to come out half naked.
I wasn’t going to be sitting on my deck with a glass of lemonade on days he did the yard after all, damn it.
I flipped the lock just as my cell phone started ringing from where I’d left it in my bedroom. I ran down the hall and picked it up, not surprised when ALICE LARSEN showed up on the screen. “Hello?” I answered, knowing exactly who was really calling.
“Tia,” Louie’s voice came through the line. “I’m going to bed.”
Plopping my butt down on the edge of the bed, I couldn’t help but smile. “Did you brush your teeth?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Positive?”
“Yes!”
I snickered. “Did Josh?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he?”
“Playing video games in the living room.”
“Do you love me?” I asked him like I did every night just to hear him say it.
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“A lot!” his little boy voice giggled in amusement, reminding me why I still asked.
“Are you having fun?”
“Yes.”
“You’re ready?” I asked.
“Yes,” the five-year-old answered quickly. I could already picture him in my head, lying back against his pillows with his covers up to his neck. He liked sleeping like a mummy, wrapped up completely. “Can you tell me the one about daddy saving the old lady’s cat again?” he asked with a tired, nearly dreamy sigh.
God, I really needed to quit saying “old lady” around them. I couldn’t count the number of times I had told Josh and Louie the same story, but I always let him choose what he wanted to hear. So, for what was more than likely the twentieth time, I told him about the time Rodrigo climbed up a tree to save our elderly neighbor’s cat back when we had lived together along with my best friend. “The tree was so big, Goo, I thought he was going to fall and break his leg…,” I started.
Chapter Three
I was this fucking close to banging my head on the steering wheel. Oh my God. It was too early for this. And if I was going to be totally honest with myself, noon would have been too early for this. Six in the evening would have been too early for this.
“I don’t have any friends.” Josh continued the same rant he’d been going on for the last small eternity about how unfair starting fifth grade at a new school was.
He’d been going at it for twenty minutes exactly. I’d been eyeing the clock.
They were twenty minutes I would never, ever get back.
Twenty minutes that seemed like they were going to span the next six months between this moment and my thirtieth birthday.
Twenty minutes that had me silently begging for patience. Or for the end. For anything to make him stop. Oh my God. I was crying invisible tears and sobbing silently.
I’d been dropping Josh and Lou off at school and daycare for a long time, and in that period, waking up before seven hadn’t gotten any easier. I doubted it ever would. My soul cried every morning when the alarm went off; then it cried even more when I had to keep after Josh to wake up, get out of bed, and get dressed. So listening to him complain for the hundredth time about the unfairness of starting all over again was too much to handle before lunchtime.
To be fair, a huge part of me could understand that having to make new friends sucked. But it was a better school than the one he’d been at before, and Josh—not counting this moment—was the kind of kid I was proud to be mine, who made friends easily. He got that from our side of the family. I’d give him a week before he had a new best friend, two weeks before someone invited him for a sleepover, and three weeks before he completely forgot he had ever complained in the first place. He adapted well. Both boys did.
But this, this was making it seem like I was ruining his life. At least that was what he was pretty much hinting at. Me destroying a ten-year-old’s life. I could cross that off my bucket list.
When his grandparents had dropped him off the night before after being gone for a week, and he’d already been in a terrible mood, I should have known what I’d be getting myself into.
“Who am I going to sit with at lunch? Who is going to let me borrow a pencil if I need one?” he pleaded out the question like a total drama queen. I wasn’t sure where the hell he’d picked that up from.
My real question was: why wouldn’t he have a pencil to begin with? I’d bought him a value pack and mechanical pencils.
I didn’t bother answering or asking about the pencil situation, because at this point, I thought he just wanted to hear himself talk, and anything I said wasn’t going to be helpful. Commentary was pointless, and frankly, I didn’t trust myself not to make a sarcastic comment that he would take the worst way possible because he was in a mood.
“Who am I going to talk to?” he kept going, undaunted by the silence. “Who am I going to invite to my birthday?”
Oh dear God, he was worrying about imaginary birthday parties already. How rude would it be if I turned on the radio loud enough to zone him out?
“Are you listening to me?” Josh asked in that whiney voice he usually spared me from.
I gritted my teeth and kept my face forward so that he wouldn’t see me glaring at him through the rearview mirror. “Yes, I’m listening to you.”
“No, you’re not.”
I sighed and gave the steering wheel a squeeze. “Yes, I am. I’m just not going to say anything because I know you’re not going to believe me when I tell you that you’re going to make friends, that everything is going to be fine, and when your birthday rolls around, you’ll have more than enough people to invite, J.” I kept my mouth shut about his non-pencil problem for both of our sakes. When he didn’t respond, I asked, “Am I right?”
He grumbled.
Just like my damn brother. “Look, I get it. I’ve hated starting at a new job where I didn’t know anyone, but you’re a Casillas. You’re cute, you’re smart, you’re nice, and you’re good at anything you want to be good at. You’ll be fine. You’ll both be fine. You’re amazing.”
More grumbling.
“Right, Louie?” I glanced into the rearview mirror to see the upcoming kindergartner in his booster seat, grinning and nodding.
“Yeah,” he replied, totally cheery.
Seriously, everything about that kid made me smile. Not that Josh didn’t, but not in the same way as Lou. “Are you worried about starting school?” I asked the little one. We’d talked about him starting kinder plenty of times in the past, and every single time, he had seemed stoked about it. There was no reason for me to think otherwise. My biggest worry had been that he might bawl his eyes out when I dropped him off, but Louie wasn’t really that type of kid. He’d loved daycare.
Ginny had warned me that I’d cry taking him to his first day, but there was no way I could or would break down in front of him. If I cried, he’d cry even if he had no idea why. And I’d be damned if that happened. When I’d taken his picture in front of the house a little while earlier, I may have had one little tear in my eye, but that was all I was willing to give up.
“Nope,” he replied in that happy five-year-old voice that made me want to snuggle him until the end of time.
>
“See, J? Lou’s not worried. You shouldn’t be either.” In the rearview mirror, Josh’s head drooped before falling to the side to rest against the glass window. But it was the huge sigh that came out of such a young body that really got me. “What is it?” I asked.
He shook his head a little.
“Tell me what’s really wrong.”
“Nothing.”
“You know I’m not going to drop it until you tell me. What’s up?”
“Nothing,” he insisted.
I sighed. “J, you can tell me anything.”
With his forehead to the glass, he pressed his mouth to it, steam fogging up the area around his lips. “I was thinking about Dad, okay? He always took me to school the first day.”
Fuck. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Last year, he’d gotten pretty grumpy about starting the school year then too. Only it hadn’t been this bad. Of course, I missed Drigo, too. But I didn’t tell Josh, no matter how much I needed to sometimes. “You know he would tell you—”
“There’s no crying in baseball,” he finished off for me with a sigh.
Rodrigo had been firm and tough, but he’d loved his kids, and there wasn’t a single thing he didn’t think they could do. But he’d been that way with everyone he loved, including me. A knot formed in my throat and had me trying to clear it as discreetly as possible.
Was I doing the right thing with Josh? Or was I being too tough on him? I didn’t know, and the indecision burrowed a notch straight into my heart. It was moments like these that reminded me I had no idea what the hell I was doing, much less what the end result would be when they grew up, and that was terrifying.
“Your new school is going to be great. Trust me, J.” When he didn’t say anything, I turned to look at him over my shoulder. “You trust me, don’t you?”
And just like that, he was back to being a pain in the ass. He rolled his eyes. “Duh.”
“Duh my ass—butt. I’m going to drop you off at the pound on the way home.”
“Oooh,” Louie cooed, forever an instigator.
“Shut up, Lou,” Josh snapped.
“No, thank you.”
“Oh my God, both of you be quiet,” I joked. “Let’s play the quiet game.”
“Let’s not,” Josh replied. “Have you found me a new Select team?”
Damn it. I slid a look to the side window, suddenly feeling guilty that I still hadn’t even started looking for a new baseball team for him. Once upon a time, I would have lied to him and said that I had but that wasn’t the kind of relationship I wanted to have with the boys. So I told him the truth. “No, but I will.”
I didn’t have to turn around to sense the accusation in his gaze, but he didn’t make me feel bad over it. “Okay.”
None of us said anything else as I pulled up to the curb at the school and put the car into park. Both boys sat there, looking at me expectantly, making me feel like a shepherd to my sheep.
A shepherd who didn’t always know the right direction to go.
I could only try my best and hope it was good enough. Then again, wasn’t that the story to everyone’s lives? “Everything is going to be okay. I promise.”
* * *
“Miss Lopez!”
I shut the car door with my hip later that day, with what felt like fifty pounds of grocery bags hanging off my wrists. Louie was already at the front door of our house, the two smallest bags from our shopping trip in each of his hands. While I usually tried to avoid taking them to the grocery store, the trip had been inevitable. The salon wasn’t scheduled to open until the next day, and I was partially thankful that I’d been able to pick them up their first day of school. Considering that even Louie hadn’t looked like school had been everything he might have hoped it would be, grocery shopping had gone well; I’d only had to threaten the boys twice. Josh paused halfway to his brother with full hands too, a frown growing on his face as he looked around.
“Miss Lopez!” the frail voice called out again, barely heard, from somewhere close but not that close. I didn’t think anything of it as I stepped toward them, watching as Josh’s gaze narrowed in on something behind me.
“I think she’s talking to you,” he suggested, his eyes staying locked on whatever it was he was looking at.
Me? Miss Lopez? It was my turn to frown. I glanced over my shoulder to find why he would assume that. The instant I spotted the faded pink housedress at the edge of the porch of the pretty yellow house across the street, I forced myself to suppress a groan.
Was the old woman calling me Miss Lopez?
She waved a frail hand, confirming my worst guess.
She was. She really, really was.
“Who’s Miss Lopez?” Louie asked.
I blew a raspberry, torn between being irritated at being called just about the most Latino last name possible and wanting to be a good neighbor, even though I had no clue what she could possibly wanted. “I guess I am, buddy,” I said, lifting up the hand that had the least amount of groceries on it and waving at the old woman.
She gestured with that bone-thin hand to come over.
The problem with trying to teach two small humans how to be a good person was that you had to set a good example for them. All. The. Time. They ate everything up. Learned every word and body language that you taught them. I’d learned the hard way over the years just how sponge-like their minds were. When Josh was a baby, he’d picked up on “shit” like a duck to water; he’d used it all the time for any reason. He’d knock over a toy: “Shit.” He’d trip: “Shit.” Rodrigo and I had thought it was hilarious. Everyone else? Not so much.
So, trying to teach them good manners required me to rise above the instincts to want to groan when something frustrated or annoyed me. Instead, I winked at the boys before looking back at our new neighbor and yelling, “One minute!”
She waved her hand in response.
“Come on, guys, lets put up the groceries and go see what the”—I almost said old lady and just barely caught the words before they came out—“neighbor needs.”
Louie shrugged with that signature bright smile on his face and Josh groaned. “Do I have to?”
I nudged him with my elbow as I walked by him. “Yes.”
Out of the corner of my eye, his head lolled back. “I can’t wait? I won’t open the door for anybody.”
He was already starting with not wanting to go places with me. It made my heart hurt. But I told him over my shoulder, even as I unlock the door, “Nope.” Once I got him started on staying home alone, there would be no going back. I knew it, and I was going to cling to him being a little boy as long as possible, damn it.
He groaned, loud, and I caught Louie’s gaze. I winked at him and he winked back… with both eyes.
“I need my bodyguards, Joshy Poo,” I said, pushing the door open and waving my youngest one inside the house.
Said “Joshy Poo” blew out his own raspberry as he passed by me into the house, only slightly stomping his feet. He didn’t say anything else as we unpacked the things that needed to go into the refrigerator and left everything else on the counter for later. We crossed the street, with Josh dragging his feet behind him and Louie holding my hand, and found the door to the yellow house closed.
I tipped my head toward it. “Goo, knock.”
Louie didn’t need to be told twice. He did it and then took two steps over to stand by me. Josh was almost directly behind us. It took a minute, but the door swung slowly open, a poof of white hair appearing in the crack for a moment before it went wide. “You came,” the woman said, her milky blue eyes going from the boys to me and back again.
I smiled at her, my hand going to pet the dark blond head at my hip almost distractedly. “What can we help you with, ma’am?”
The woman took a step into the house, letting me get a good look at the pale pink dress she had on with snap buttons going down the middle. Those thin, very white hands seemed to shake at her sides, a tale of her age. Her lined mouth pulled u
p at the corners just a little. “You cut hair?”
I forgot I had given her my business card. “I do.”
“Would ya mind givin’ me a little snip? I was supposed to have an appointment, but my grandson has been too busy to take me,” she explained, swallowing, bringing attention to the wrinkled, loose skin at her throat. “I’m startin’ to look like a hippy.”
I usually got pretty annoyed with people when they first found out I was a hair stylist and wanted preferential treatment: a free haircut, some kind of at-home service, a discount—or worse, when they expected me to drop everything to take care of them. You didn’t ask a doctor to give you a free check-up. Why would someone think that my time wasn’t as valuable as anyone else’s?
But…
I didn’t need to look at the trembling, heavily veined hands at Miss Pearl’s sides or her cloud of thin white hair to know there was no way I could possibly tell this woman I wouldn’t do what she was asking of me, much less charge her. Not just because she was my neighbor, but because she was old and her grandkid was supposed to take her to get a haircut and hadn’t. I had loved the hell out of my grandparents when I was a kid, especially my grandmother. I had a soft spot for all of my older clients; I charged them less than I did everyone else.
Ginny had long ago stopped asking why I gave them discounts, but I’m sure she understood. Sure, it was unfair to give some people a discount, but the way I looked at it, life wasn’t fair sometimes, and if you were going to cry about an elderly person paying less than you, you needed to get a life.
And this elderly, judgmental lady… I gave Louie’s shoulder a squeeze. “Okay. I have time right now if you’d like me to do it.”
Josh muttered something behind me.
The old woman’s smile was so bright that I felt bad for groaning when I had realized she wanted me to cross the street to go talk to her. “I wouldn’t be putting you out?”
“No. It’s no problem. I have shears at home. Let me go grab them and come back,” I said.
* * *
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