Wait for It

“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 neighbor 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.

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 this 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?”