Chapter One Remi
Chapter One
Remi
One month later
If a single mom on a tight budget were hired to rule the world, we’d all be in a better situation. Shit would get done, and everyone would be taken care of. The side effect, of course, was that wasting money was the scariest thing you could possibly talk to her about.
Case in point, my normally fearless ten-year-old wavering in the hallway just outside my bedroom door, breathing loudly. He never did anything quietly, which I was grateful for most days.
“Gavin, I can hear you. What is it?”
He sighed. Did that loudly too.
Instead of waiting for him to pluck up the courage to come into the room, I merely glanced up, and when there was no sight of him, I went back to pulling the needle through the hole in his school uniform pants.
Another sigh. This one even louder.
“Did you get in trouble at school?” I asked, wincing when I almost stabbed myself in the tip of my pointer finger.
“No.”
“Good start. Is someone bullying you?”
“No.”
“Even better. Now, how about you stop sighing in the hallway and tell me what’s on your mind.”
Gavin shuffled through the open door, leaning his shoulder against the frame and staring down at the floor. No eye contact was never a good thing.
“Do you remember that really expensive present I asked for, for my birthday last year? And you said it was something I needed to take care of and respect and not, like, roll around in the dirt when I was wearing it?”
My brain was locked on my never-ending to-do list and not on past birthday presents, and I had to blink for a second while my thoughts came into focus.
“Yeah, the football thing.”
Gavin rolled his eyes, a chunk of his strawberry-blond hair sticking up from his forehead like he’d been shoving his hands in it. “It’s a jersey, Mom, not a ‘football thing.’”
I did not need him reminding me what it was, because the cost of that jersey had tied my stomach into a ruthless knot for a solid week. It was a few chunks of material, for crying out loud. I could’ve made one for less than half the price.
But the look on his face when he’d opened his tenth-birthday present was worth it.
Wide-eyed awe, the kind that couldn’t be faked and appeared less and less as he got older.
I’d bought it a little big because at the rate he was growing, he’d be out of that thing in six months, and that was not the most economical use of a ridiculously expensive gift.
For the first three months, he wore it to bed every single night, desperately waiting until he’d grown a little to wear it in public and the pride on his face when he wore his Archer Evans jersey to school was one of those mom moments that shouldn’t make you cry but totally does.
He didn’t want toys anymore for birthdays and Christmas.
It was getting harder and harder for him to make a list that didn’t consist of video games or jerseys or .
. . video games. And the day he was able to wear it in front of his friends reminded me why it was important for me to try my best to understand this shift in the tides as he grew older.
My kid was on top of the world—absolutely nothing could take him down when he was wearing that thing.
I tied a knot in the stitch, then another, and snipped off the end of the thread. “What about it?” I asked.
Gavin chewed on his bottom lip, then walked the rest of the way into my room, his hands behind his back and a sheepish look on his face.
There wasn’t really anywhere for him to sit.
The bed was covered with laundry, which I usually shoved to the empty half before I face-planted on my hand-me-down mattress that sagged in the middle.
He sucked in a deep breath and thrust his hand out, the jersey balled up in his grip. “I don’t want it anymore.”
When you’ve lived your life in a near-constant state of chaos, something fascinating happens.
Nothing—and I mean nothing—shocked me. Not even when a stranger shoved his hand down my pants in a weaker moment.
I’d rolled with that little bombshell very quickly, banishing the entire evening to the dark, cobwebby parts of my brain.
Honest to God, it was my best personality trait (compartmentalization was right up there too), allowing me to show up whenever and wherever someone needed me, and somehow, I hadn’t lost my mind yet.
A litter of eight puppies from out of state needs emergency foster placement because they still have to be bottle-fed? On it.
My kid comes in the door at seven p.m. and informs me that we need a scale model of the planets for school tomorrow? No problem. Happened way more frequently than I cared to admit.
The school secretary calls right in the middle of a big donor meeting and tells me that Gavin puked in math class and I need to run over to pick him up?
On my way. I had a strong suspicion he was faking half the time, but honestly, I’d puke, too, if I needed to do that pointless shit on a daily basis.
(I’d gone twenty-seven-and-a-half years and not once had I done algebra outside of school, but please, I’d love to have them tell me again how useful it is.)
Don’t even get me started on Pops and his absolute refusal to do anything to keep himself healthy because life tastes better when your food is deep-fried. I’d fielded no fewer than five calls that month from his nurse, reminding me that he needed better eating habits.
Yeah, no shit, he did. But the man was as stubborn as a mule, and I’d learned years ago that I couldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to do.
Seriously . . . before Gavin had walked into my bedroom way too late on a school night—both of us still awake past ten because his soccer practice went long and he had homework to finish—I would’ve sworn on a giant stack of Bibles that nothing he said could genuinely surprise me.
But this had me sitting up straighter.
“Why don’t you want it anymore?”
The rest of my question stayed locked in my throat, but it was something along the lines of Do you have any idea how much that thing cost? You’re going to wear it until it falls apart.
It took everything in me to leave it unsaid, because four months of use was not what I’d had in mind when I dropped a hundred and forty freaking dollars on that thing.
Was I sweating? I was sweating.
But then Gavin’s chin trembled, and his eyes immediately filled with tears.
“Oh, bud,” I whispered, gently taking the jersey from his hands. “Talk to me.”
He dashed a hand under his eyes when a few stray tears escaped. “You know that quote Pops always tell us?”
I pushed some laundry aside, making room for him. “Which one? Pops loves his inspirational quotes, doesn’t he?”
More tears slipped down his cheeks, and seeing him so genuinely upset made it feel like I had concrete blocks stuck in my gut. “A-about respect. That the right to be respected is won by respecting others.”
I couldn’t remember exactly where it came from, but he did repeat it often, and my tenderhearted kid, who didn’t have a father to teach him lessons, absorbed everything his great-grandfather said like a dried-up little sponge.
“Yeah, I remember that one.” I ran my hand through his hair. “What about it?”
Gavin stared down at the jersey in my hands, looking unbearably sad.
“Remember last year, when Coach King benched Archer at the end of the season because he wasn’t playing as well as he could and he wasn’t . . . he wasn’t being, um, a good leader in the locker room?”
Nope, not even a little. At any given time, my brain had 172 open tabs, and the local sports drama had not earned one of those spots.
But my child’s room was covered in posters and flags and pennants from the Buffalo teams. The Buffalo Storm was his absolute favorite.
He idolized the entire roster, but the quarterback most of all.
So no doubt he’d told me. Multiple times, probably.
“Sort of,” I hedged. “It’s been a while. He didn’t play last season either, did he?”
Gavin shook his head, his eyes locked on the jersey. The way it was lying in my lap, the number 9 was visible, as was the last name. I smoothed my hand over the letters, folding it just a little bit more neatly.
“He was supposed to have, um, an epic comeback, they said. But he tore his ACL during preseason. Carson did good as the backup, though. We went to the playoffs, and they hadn’t done that in years. They still lost, though. I think they would’ve won if Archer was playing.”
“That’s too bad,” I murmured, watching the flush on his cheeks fade as the tears did.
He’d done that since he was a baby, his cheeks reddening instantly when he cried.
Something he got from his father, no doubt, because it wasn’t a trait of mine.
In fact, Gavin didn’t share many of his physical traits with me.
Not the nose or the smile. Not his height, or his love of science, or his dimpled smile.
He didn’t have the light dusting of freckles across his nose like me.
But I saw myself in the strawberry-blond locks and the color of his eyes.
Sometimes blue. Sometimes gray. Even green, depending on what we were wearing. Chameleon eyes, Pops called them. Those came straight from me.
“He threw for over thirty-seven hundred yards in the last season he played,” Gavin continued. “Thirty touchdowns, and five of them were rushing touchdowns.” He blinked up at me, his eyes dry and earnest now. “He’s really strong. Stronger than most quarterbacks. Taller too.”
I’d heard this before, of course. Much of it against my will, and I usually forgot it shortly after he told me.
This, though, I remembered. Archer Evans stood six feet, four-and-a-half inches tall, which was taller than the average quarterback.
Which, according to my stat-obsessed child, was six foot three.
“But we don’t want his jersey anymore?” I asked gently.
“No.” Gavin wrinkled his nose, face scrunched in deep thought. “Because DUIs are, like, bad, right?”
My eyebrows popped up. “Um, yeah. Was anyone hurt?”