Wait for It

Fuck.

Ginny pulled the words right out of my mouth. “Why is it so bright out today?”

I squinted against the shaft of sunlight beaming through the glass doors and windows of the shop. Despite suffering through the worst of my hangover yesterday, I still wasn’t back at 100 percent after our drinking fest. My head ached and my mouth still tasted faintly like a dead animal.

God, I was getting old. Five years ago, I wouldn’t still be feeling like shit almost forty-eight hours after going out.

“I’m never drinking again,” I muttered to the redhead who had woken up on my couch the day before.

“Me neither,” she moaned, practically hissing as the door to Shear Dialogue swung open and even brighter sunshine poured into the salon at eleven in the morning as Sean, the other stylist, stepped inside with his phone to his ear. He gave us a chin dip in greeting, but we were both too busy acting like we were Dracula’s children to care.

God.

Why did I do this to myself? I knew better. Hell, of course I knew better than to drink so much in one night, but after we’d left the biker bar, aptly named Mayhem, in a cab together—because there was no way either one of us had any business behind the wheel of a car—we’d gone on to drink a bottle of wine each.

When I’d woken up the day before on my stomach and felt that first stir of nausea and flu-like symptoms hit my body, I’d promised God that, if he made my nausea and headache go away, I would never drink again. Apparently, I had to accept that he knew I was a damn liar and wasn’t going to do a single thing to ease my suffering. My mom had always said you could lie to yourself, but you couldn’t fool God.

“Why did you make me drink that entire bottle of wine?” Ginny had the nerve to ask.

Slumping deeper into my work chair, I slanted a look in her direction. I didn’t trust my neck to do what I requested. “I didn’t make you do anything. You were the one who said you wanted your own, remember? ‘I don’t want white. I want red.’”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Of course you don’t remember it.”

She let out a snicker that made me smile until my head hurt worse.

“I don’t know how we’re going to make it through the rest of the day.”

“I don’t have that many appointments left. You?” Mondays and Wednesdays were my slowest days of the week usually; those were the two afternoons I picked the boys up from school.

She groaned. “I’ve got two hours until I’m busy. I might go take a nap in the break room.” She paused. “I’m thinking about going to buy one of those travel-sized bottles of wine from the gas station and drink it. I think it might make me feel better.”

Ginny had a point. I had eyed the last bottle I had in the fridge that morning and talked myself out of a few sips to ease my hangover. My next client was in an hour, and then I had a fifteen-minute break between customers after that until I got off. Actually, having clients when you were hungover was a curse disguised as a blessing. “Go. I can wake you up if you want.”

We both let out a moan of suffering at the same time Sean slammed the break room door closed.

Slumping in my seat, I folded my arms over my chest and tried not to taste my saliva. “Your cousin is pretty cute.”

“Which one?”

How had I forgotten my neighbor was her cousin? I didn’t have the energy to ponder Dallas and his brother, whose name I didn’t know, being related to her. It didn’t make sense. “Trip.”

That had Ginny making a noise that sounded like a pathetic attempt of a scoff. “Don’t even go there, Di.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“How can I say this? He’s a great friend and family member, but a partner in a relationship…? No. He has two baby mamas.”

“Oh.” Oh. One baby mama? All right. Two baby mamas? Nope.

“Yeah. He’s great. Don’t get me wrong. He’s a great dad, and other than my dad, there’s nobody else I love more in my family, but he’s a player, and I doubt he’ll change any time soon,” she explained in a way that gave me the feeling she’d gone through this spiel in the past. So… Trip was her favorite, not the cousin who sat on the other side of the bar from us and not once came up to her to say hi. Shocking. “His oldest son plays competitive baseball like Josh.”

Huh. I slid her a look, intending to just mess with her. “So, you’re saying we have things in common?”

“I’m doing you a favor, Di. No. Don’t go there with him.”

“There goes my dream of us being family.” I laughed until my brain told me to quit doing stuff like that.

She let out a snort that lasted all of three seconds before she moaned. “I have other family, you know.” After a pause, she asked, “So you live across from Dallas?”

“Uh-huh.” I thought about it for a second. “He’s really your cousin?” The coincidence was almost too much for me to believe it was true.

“Yeah.” There was another pause. “His mom is my dad’s sister. Trip’s dad’s sister.”

There was something about the hesitation as Ginny talked about this specific side of her family that gave me the clue there was something about them that she wasn’t fond of for some reason or another. In the time we had worked together, she wasn’t stingy talking about her family. She’d mentioned Trip enough times, but she had never once brought up Dallas. I wondered why; I just didn’t want to ask.

Ginny knew me well enough to recognize when I was curious about something but didn’t want to be the first to bring it up.

“We’re not close. He didn’t grow up around here like me and Trip did, and he’s younger than we are by a little.” Ginny was forty-three; “younger than” her didn’t really explain much. “He retired from the marines… or one of those branches. I don’t remember which exactly. From what I heard, he moved back a year ago. I haven’t seen him but once.”

“Oh,” was the only thing that came to mind for me to respond with. But I’d fucking known it! He had been in the military, long enough to retire. How old was he? Before I could stop my big mouth, I asked, “Is he married?”

She didn’t look at me as she answered, “I remember someone saying he’s separated from his wife, but that’s all I know. I’ve hardly seen him in the last twenty years. I’ve definitely never seen her around.”

Separated. I knew it. That explained everything. The ring. The woman in the car he’d gotten into a screaming match with. Maybe that explained him being weird. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to think we were flirting with each other? One of my clients that I’d had for years had gone through a rough divorce. After she’d told me all the shit she and her husband were fighting over, she had pretty much convinced me that everyone should get a prenup.

“I met his brother.” I’d more than “met” his brother, but that wasn’t my business to share. “He’s kind of a jerk. No offense.”

Ginny turned her entire body to look at me. “Jackson is here?”

Why the hell did she say his name like she was saying Candy Man? It was my phone ringing that had me snapping straight up with a jolt, immediately forgetting her question. Too lazy to get up, I reached forward as far as I could to grab my purse. I strained and then strained a little more, snatching the edge of it and pulling it toward me with a huff. Sure enough, my phone was in the pocket I always left it in, and I only had to take a quick glance at the screen before I hit the ignore button at the “restricted call.”

I had just set my phone back into my bag without a word when it started ringing once more. With a sigh, I glanced at the screen and groaned, torn between being relieved I’d decided to look again and dreading the caller. “Fuck.”

“Who is it?” Ginny asked that time, all nosey.

I let my finger float over the screen for a second, knowing I needed to answer it but not really wanting to. “The boys’ school.”

The look on her face said enough. She had two sons. Getting a phone call from the school was never a good thing. Ever.

“Shit,” I cursed one more time before making myself tap the screen. “Hello?” I answered, praying for a miracle I knew wasn’t going to happen. I already had one hand in my purse, searching for the keys.

“Mrs. Casillas?”

I frowned a little at the title but didn’t correct the woman on the other line who knew she was about to ruin my day. “Yes?”

“This is Irene at Taft Elementary. There’s been an incident—”

* * *

Nothing before the age of twenty-six could have prepared me for raising two boys. Really. There wasn’t a single thing.

None of the four boyfriends I’d had over the course of my life had prepped me for how to deal with two small people who would eventually grow into men. Men who would eventually have responsibilities and maybe even families—decades and decades from now. The thought was terrifying. I’d dated boys and I’d dated idiots who were still boys no matter how much facial hair they had. And I was responsible for raising a pair to not become like them. I was about as far away from being an expert as you could get. Looking back on them now, my exes were like pieces of gum you’d find beneath a table at a restaurant.

While Rodrigo and I had always been close, at five years older than me, I had been too young to pay attention to those careful years between five and fifteen, to see how he’d survived them. All I could remember was this bigger-than-life personality who had been popular, athletic, and likable. If there had been growing pains, I couldn’t remember. And I definitely couldn’t ask my parents about it. I also couldn’t call the Larsens for advice; they’d raised two girls, not two boys, and in the span of no time, I’d figured out that for a lot of things, boys were a lot different than girls. Josh and Lou had done some shit that I couldn’t begin to wrap my head around, and I had no doubt five-year-old me would have thought the same thing.

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?”

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.”