So it was like that.
“Good,” the light of my life answered easily, his eyes shooting to my direction quickly as if searching for a clue for what he should do or say. Just because he’d been kind of cool and distant with me didn’t mean I had to lead by a bad example. I winked at Lou.
“Hi, Diana,” my neighbor finally greeted me next, all subdued and shit.
“Hey,” I returned, glancing back and forth between Trip, Dallas, and Louie.
What were they doing coming over? I wasn’t going to believe it was a coincidence that Trip was over at my neighbor’s house two days after we’d met and he’d found out where I lived, but… well, I wasn’t going to think about it too much. Ginny had told me what he was like. As cute as he was, that was it. Plus, he hadn’t acted that interested in me. He had just been doing what a man like him did best: flirt.
“These your boys?” Trip asked.
I would never deny them to anyone, especially not in front of their faces. So I nodded. “The little devil is Louie and that’s Josh.” Josh was frowning at the strange men while still holding his bat in a weird way and looking them up and down judgmentally. Ginny’s family members or not, he wasn’t impressed. I wasn’t sure where he’d gotten that habit from.
“You’ve got a great swing,” Dallas said to my older boy.
Just like that, with one single compliment, Josh’s who-the-hell-is-this look melted into a pleased one. God, he was easy. He also threw me under the bus. “She’s pitching slow.”
I kind of choked, and Josh threw me a playful grin.
“Nah. There’s a good arc to it,” my neighbor kept going like nothing had happened. “Your posture, feet, and hand position are good. You play on a team?”
My gaze met Trip’s and he flashed me that easy, flirting grin of his. If he remembered Ginny’s comment from two nights ago, he knew Josh had played on a team.
What was happening?
“Not anymore,” Josh answered, not needing me around from the sound of it.
Dallas’s eyes narrowed just slightly as he looked at my nephew. “What are you? Eleven?”
“Ten.”
“When’s your birthday?”
Josh rattled off the date coming up in less than two months.
Under normal circumstances, the exchange might have been creepy, but in the last two years, I’d sat through so many Select parents talking about ages and sizes, that I knew this was baseball related. It all suddenly came together for me. Ginny had mentioned a handful of times in the past about her cousin coaching the baseball team his son was on. A son that was around Josh’s age. I also faintly recalled seeing a baseball trophy at Dallas’s house when I’d gone in there. For whatever reason Trip had come over, both he and Dallas had scouted Josh from our playing on the front lawn.
Huh.
Wait. Did that mean Dallas was a coach too?
“We have an 11U team this year,” Trip explained, answering my question without even meaning to. “Tryouts are next week and we need a couple new players.” Those blue eyes that were exactly like my boss’s shot back in my direction for a split second before moving back to Josh damn near instantly. “If you’re interested and your mom lets you—”
Bless Josh’s soul, he didn’t correct him.
“—you should come by.”
The overly excited “Yeah?” that came out of Josh’s mouth made me feel terrible for not making more of an effort to find him a team sooner.
“Yeah,” my neighbor replied, already patting around on his back pocket. He pulled out a worn, brown leather wallet and fished through it for a moment before taking out a business card. To give him credit, he handed me one first and then Josh another. “We can’t make any promises you’ll get on the team, but—”
“I’ll get on the team,” Josh confirmed evenly, making me smile. What a cocky little turd. I could have cried. He was a Casillas through and through.
Dallas must have gotten a kick out of his confidence too because he smiled that genuine, straight, white-tooth smile he’d used on Lou earlier. “I’ll hold you to it then, man. What’s your name again?”
“Josh.”
Our big, rough-looking neighbor with a shitty brother, who hung out at a motorcycle club’s bar, but somehow also coached little kid baseball with a biker, thrust a hand out at Josh. “I’m Dallas, and this is Trip. Nice to meet you.”
Chapter Six
“Joshua!”
“I’m coming!” the voice down the hall yelled in reply.
I tipped my chin into the air, eyeing the clock on the wall with a grimace. “You said that five minutes ago! Let’s go or you’re going to be late!” And we all knew how much I hated being late. It was one of my biggest pet peeves.
“Thirty seconds!”
Louie’s snort had me glancing down at him. He had his backpack on, and I knew without looking that it was filled with either the tablet he and Josh shared or his handheld game console, snacks, and a Capri Sun. I didn’t think Louie knew what it was like to not be prepared; he got that from his Larsen side because God knew he hadn’t gotten it from his dad. He had his shit together better than I did, as long as I didn’t take into consideration the number of things he lost after they left the house.
“He’s lying, isn’t he?” I asked him.
Sure enough, Lou nodded.
I sighed again, gripping the strap of my bag tighter. I’d stuffed it with three bottles of water and a banana. Where Lou was the prepared one, Josh was not.
“Josh, I swear to God—”
“I’m coming!” he hollered, the sound of what I was sure was his bag hitting the wall confirming his words.
“You got everything?” I asked as soon as he stopped in front of us, his bag thrown over his shoulder, bulky and heavy. I stopped asking him if he needed help a year ago. Big boys wanted to be big boys and carry their own stuff around. So be it.
“Yeah,” he replied quickly.
I blinked. “You got your helmet?”
“Yeah.”
I blinked again. “So what’s that on the coffee table?”
His face turned pink before he lunged for the helmet he’d left there the night before. Last year, I’d made him a laminated checklist he needed to go through before going to practice. If I’d had to drive back home to pick up a glove or socks again, I would have screamed. Looking back on my childhood now, I wasn’t sure how my mom hadn’t dropped me off at the fire station. I used to forget everything.
“Uh-huh,” I muttered before waving him forward to go through the door first, followed by Lou and then Mac.
Josh was huffing and puffing as we drove to the facility where the 11U Texas Tornado played. In the two weeks since Trip and our neighbor had invited him to try out for his team, he’d been making either my dad, Mr. Larsen, or me go out and play with him nearly daily. I could tell the fire in the furnace of his little heart was stoked and more than ready to go for a sport he’d been playing since he was three years old, running to the wrong base.
We’d both looked up the team one night to make sure they were legit. They were; they’d won a good number of tournaments, too. The last two years, they won State, and they’d done well at Worlds. Sure enough, both Trip and Dallas were shown in several of the pictures posted on their page, tall and obviously tattooed and not looking at all like the kind of men who would coach boys a fourth of their sizes. I’d also learned my boss’s cousins’ full names: Trip Turner and Dallas Walker.
I’d met a lot of parents who ended up coaching their children’s teams because they had been unhappy with who had been teaching their kids in the past, but it was still weird. Trip was a member of a motorcycle club, for God’s sakes. I had no idea if Dallas was or not, but I figured that was a negative because I’d yet to see a motorcycle come down the street. Weren’t bikers supposed to be doing biker stuff instead of spending entire weekends at tournaments and teaching kids values? And what was biker stuff anyway?
The important lesson I seemed to
keep forgetting was that you couldn’t always judge a book by its cover.
So, if Josh wanted to try out, I wasn’t going to stop him. All I could do was hope he kicked ass and kept it together. None of us liked to lose. Him especially.
The facility where the team practiced at was about a twenty-minute drive away, located near the edge of town. They shared the space with a softball branch. With only ten minutes to spare before the tryouts were set to start, I rushed Josh and Lou out of the car.
The facility was almost as nice as the one where Josh used to practice. His last team’s practice spot was too far from where we lived now, and even if it wasn’t, we still wouldn’t be going back there. Josh rushed ahead, waving at me as I stopped to fill out the paperwork to register him for the tryout. We’d gone to get a check-up for him at the doctor just a couple of days ago in preparation for this, and I’d brought a copy of his birth certificate. The form wasn’t too long, but it still took me a few minutes to get through it. Louie stood by me, already messing with his game console. Out of the corner of my eye, I found Josh standing by a group of boys about his size. He was such a freaking trip thinking he wouldn’t make friends, but he always did almost instantly. The kid was magnetic.
I finished, and Louie and I made our way outside to the field the team used, taking seats at the bleachers where there were already about fifty other people sitting around, watching the kids. A few adults were clustered together by the entrance to the field, and soon enough they all started filing out, each one with a clipboard. Dallas was one of them… and when I squinted at the sight of the head of blond hair, I was pretty sure that was Trip right by him. And standing a few feet away from both of them was the rude guy who had gotten jumped. What had Ginny called him? Jack? Jackson? Someone Who Didn’t Know How To Say Thank You?
More than twenty boys age ten and eleven lined up along the field and started tossing the ball back and forth as the adults moved around, jotting things down on their clipboards, watching. Then, the batting part of the tryout began with Dallas pitching to the boys. They ran through a few other drills and split the kids up into two teams to play a game that seemed to last forever.
I was pretty smug when Josh whooped some ass at every drill they made him run. He was a great catcher, an excellent batter, and he was fast. He got that from my side of the family obviously.
But…
It was impossible not to listen to the two women sitting in front of me talking about some of the kids who had been previously on the team and other parents. Nothing they said, from gossiping over crazy-ass moms who made their kids practice too much, to couples who had split up, was anything I hadn’t heard or experienced with Josh’s previous team. That was the one thing I’d come to realize: there was always the same kind of people everywhere you went, regardless of location, skin color, or income.
And then they started up with the coaches. One in particular at least: “the hottie with the body.” I tried. I really tried not to pay attention, but I couldn’t help myself.
“God, what I wouldn’t give for him to pitch me some balls,” one of them muttered a little too loudly, making Louie glance up from his game and give me a funny look. If I had wondered which of the men they’d been talking about, I now knew for sure it was Dallas. He was the only one pitching.
“Mind your own business,” I mouthed to him, earning me a disappointed frown.
“I’ve tried offering him money to coach Derek in private, but he never agrees,” the other woman said.
“He says he’s too busy.”
“With what?” the first lady asked.
“Working. What do I look like? His secretary?”
I snickered and had to throw a hand over my mouth to hide my reaction from them when one of the ladies turned around to see what I was making noises over.
“I know he works a lot. He’s been redoing the floors at Luther’s place,” she paused and let out a sigh that sounded totally charged. “You’d figure he could spend some of that money he’s getting from his retirement on some new clothes. Look at those shorts. Are there holes on the pockets? Those are holes in the pockets.”
“But then the new ones wouldn’t mold to that ass, would they?” the woman cackled.
“Good point,” the other one agreed.
What a bunch of horny bitches.
I think I already kind of liked them. They were funny.
I’d barely thought that when a sour-faced woman, maybe a few years older than me, leaned over—she was sitting on the same bench as the other two women talking—and hissed, “Have a little respect, would you?”
One of the two women groaned loudly. “Mind your own business, Christy.”
“I would, but I can’t hear myself think over you two gossiping,” the woman to the side grumbled.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” one of the ladies muttered.
The woman named Christy shot the pair a glare before sitting up straight and focusing on the game again. But the two moms started mumbling just loud enough for me to hear something about “a stick up her ass” and “delusional if she thinks he’d give her ass the time of day.” After that, I couldn’t hear much else.
By the time the tryout had been wrapped up, followed by a long talk that I couldn’t listen in on that consisted of Dallas standing in a circle of kneeling boys, I was ready to get home. With Louie holding my hand, we hopped down the bleachers and walked around the front to wait for Josh, who had his bag over his shoulder. The kid was sweaty and flushed, but he was smiling.
“Somebody kicked ass,” I whispered to him as he approached us.
Josh grinned, shrugging his shoulder. “I know.”
I bumped him with my hip. “That’s my boy.”
Louie even held up a hand, earning a high five from his big brother.
“Is there anything else you need to do or are you done-done?”
“We’re done-done,” he answered. “He said they’ll post the list online next Friday.” He let out a visible shiver of excitement. “I’ll make it.”
It had taken me years to build up the kind of self-confidence that Josh had. Hell, even now, I still struggled with it more than I would like to admit. I had never been really good at anything growing up, much less so good that I had a reason not to ever doubt myself. Then there were people like my cousin who was slightly older than me, who, even when we were kids, walked around with this kind of internal swagger and confidence that was hard to ignore. She’d always been an amazing athlete, like Josh. But that awesomeness had skipped Rodrigo and me.
I had an eye and a hand for cutting hair, and it paid the bills. Plus, I really liked what I did. I accepted that I was never going to win a gold medal or be on the cover of a Wheaties box. But I knew Josh could do whatever the hell he wanted to do with his life. He could be anything.
Seeing the joy on his face made me happy, happier than happy. I loved knowing that was my boy on the field who was so good he made other parents jealous. But I knew that, even if he wasn’t the best, I would still root for him and think he was the shit anyway. That kind of stuff was important to a kid. I wanted him to know I would always love him anyway.
With a hand to his shoulder, I hugged him to my side and felt him hug me back with a hand on my waist.
“Ready then?”
“Yeah,” he replied easily. “Can I call Grandpa on the way home and tell him how it went?”
Mr. Larsen had called that morning before school, stating he had come down with a bug and wouldn’t be able to make it to tryouts. Under normal circumstances, he would have had a front row seat to it. “Yeah, just grab my phone when we’re in the car.”
We had just gotten on the sidewalk to cross the parking lot when Josh lifted a hand, his head tilted to the right past me and Louie, who was still holding my hand, and waved. “Bye, Mr. Dallas!” he yelled.
Sure enough, standing on the sidewalk surrounded by two kids and four adults, one of whom was wearing a vest just like the ones I had seen at the bar, our neighb
or nodded and waved briefly, his eyes flashing to me for a brief second before returning back to the people he was talking to.
Okay. If that didn’t make it obvious we weren’t going to be besties, I don’t know what other clue I would have needed. All right.
* * *
None of us were surprised when a week later, we checked the roster online and found Josh’s name near the top of the list for the baseball team. It had been in alphabetical order; otherwise, I didn’t have a doubt his name would have been first. Of course he’d made the team. I had probably been more excited than he was.
It was another new beginning for us.
Going to the first day of baseball practice with a new team was a lot like starting a new school year. There were e-mails and schedules, and expensive uniforms to be bought and eventually lost. Fun stuff like that. For the boys already on the team, the season never ended. Select baseball players for the most part did it year round; they didn’t have seasons. They always had games, only some months were slower than others because of the holidays and weather. So, for an established team to pick up a few new players, it seemed like making a kid start school halfway into the year. The people who were old news were sitting around inspecting the new blood. Measuring, judging, watching.
Parents and kids alike considered every new person competition, which was fair enough. They were. One new kid could take another boy’s position. I couldn’t blame them for being paranoid.
So on the first day of baseball practice with the Tornado—as Josh’s new team was called—I put an extra watchful eye out on the parents and the kids. Josh could handle himself, but he was still my little guy at the end of the day, regardless of whether he was only inches away from being as tall as me. And as my little guy—as my guy, my Josh—there wasn’t an ass I wouldn’t whoop if I had to. For my kids, I would do anything.
When we got to the new facility and Josh left me to go with the rest of the kids on the field behind the building, I took a spot on the bottom row of the bleachers and prepared myself mentally.
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