15. Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fourteen
T he text was flat, monotone somehow, even in type.
leave me alone
Joe really wanted to be angry. Anger would be simple. Tess had a kid, so she didn’t get to just check out. She didn’t get to expect Joe to step in and keep everything running just because she didn’t feel like it. If that was true, when did Joe get to take his turn?
The problem was that being angry didn’t actually help.
It didn’t sound true, but it was. Joe had tried being angry as a solution to a lot of things after Alan died, and the only actionable result was that he’d still had to deal with everything while he had a migraine.
“Is that Mom?” Benjy asked.
Joe swiped the message off the screen with automatic guilt as he looked up.
“What makes you think that?” he hedged as he tried to work out his approach.
Benjy stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged. One of the AirPods his Dad had given was stuck, stark white against dark curls, in his ear. It usually was lately, and he listened to a lot of his dad’s old playlists. Joe wasn’t sure if that was about his dad, his mom, or both.
“You kinda looked like you’d stubbed your toe,” he said. “It’s either Mom or my grandma.”
Joe’s poker face was apparently not as good as he’d thought. He forced a smile as he put his phone in his pocket.
“I suppose it’s better than RBF,” he said. Then pointed at Benjy’s nose. “Not that you should know what that stands for.”
It wasn’t the best joke, but Benjy gave it a snort…maybe out of pity. He didn’t let it distract him, though.
“Was it Mom?” he asked again.
Joe inhaled and then nodded without saying anything.
He put his hand on Benjy’s shoulder and started to walk with him across the oil-stained tarmac of the airfield toward the pick-up that Dean had insisted they come by and pick up before they went to the storage unit.
Joe wasn’t entirely sure if it had been Quentin who let him know what was going on or the Maine Coon Whisper Network between Jessie and Kathryn.
Either way, Joe supposed he couldn’t complain. The van would be useful, and Dean had turned up with a Ford old enough and battered enough that Joe didn’t have to feel guilty about the offer.
“Your mom loves you,” he said. “You know that, right?”
“ Grandma says that you show up for people you love,” Benjy muttered.
Joe knew how he wanted to respond to that. He bit the inside of his cheek to stop himself.
“They do,” he said. “Or, at least, they try. But that doesn’t always look how we want it to. Right now, your mom is showing up for you by letting you stay here with me while she…gets things back on track.”
Benjy kicked at a pebble, scraping the sole of his sneaker over the ground. “You mean while she stops drinking.”
“Y…yeah,” Joe said. He thought briefly of the letter from the rehab, with the details of how Tess had failed a drug test and skipped out before she’d been asked to leave, and of the agreement he’d made with her when she first went in.
That it wasn’t shameful to need help, that they would be honest about what was going on.
Maybe honest and detailed didn’t have to be the same thing.
“She’s trying. It just makes her feel bad that it’s not easy. ”
“That’s stupid,” Benjy said as he glared at his feet.
“Still don’t like that word,” Joe said. “But she’s been smarter, yeah.”
Benjy scuffed his feet over the ground a couple more times. He glanced up before they got to the car, and then looked at Joe.
“Is…is it OK?” he said. “Me staying? You can afford it?”
The question hit Joe’s stomach like a cold brick.
“Hey!” he said. “Don’t think about that, you’re a kid.”
Benjy hunched his shoulders. “That means no,” he said.
“It does not,” Joe said.
“Kinda does.”
“It means that’s adult stuff to worry about,” Joe said. He stopped and grabbed Benjy’s sleeve to pull him back when Benjy tried to keep walking. “It–”
He hesitated as he tried to work out the right way to say it. There had to be some child-development-approved way to cover this that wouldn’t do any damage. Joe was a teacher. He should know.
Benjy stared at him. “Are you gonna lie?” he asked.
“No, I just want to do it right,” Joe said.
He reached out and gently rapped his knuckles against Benjy’s head.
“I don’t want to mess this up. When people die, it’s expensive.
Not just paying for stuff, but fixing your life around the gap they left.
So, I didn’t do that as well as I could have, and yeah, money is going to be a bit tight while I sort that out.
But first? That’s not your fault; it’s not your problem either.
And two, it’s a ‘we aren’t going on holiday this year’ problem, not a ‘darn your underwear’ problem. OK?”
The ‘underwear’ line made Benjy snigger in surprise. The flash of humor didn’t last long before he looked serious again, but he didn’t look as worried.
“I could—”
“Be nice to me and do well at school,” Joe said. He pulled Benjy into an affectionate headlock as they started walking ahead, the dark curly head pressed against his shoulder. “That’s your job. OK?”
Benjy squirmed out of Joe’s grip, all offended cat dignity, and smoothed his hair down.
“Whatever,” he said with an aggressively ‘whatever’ sort of shrug. He kept pace with Joe instead of scowling off in advance, though. That was a good sign.
As they reached the truck, Dean hopped down from the back. He pulled a dirty cloth out of his pocket and wiped the grease and dust off his hands.
“I’ve got some ratchet straps hooked up for you,” he said as he gestured over his shoulder. “And Jessie is in the office stocking up a cooler with snacks.”
The protest was autopilot. “Dean, that’s not–”
Dean pffed Joe’s response. “It’s for energy,” he said. “You have to feed your workers!”
The news brightened Benjy’s still-a-bit-dour expression. He glanced at Joe for permission and, once he got the nod, jogged off toward the office to pitch in on selection.
“Everything OK?” Dean asked.
He was nice.
The whole family was nice. More than nice. If it wouldn’t have sent Joe into a panic that he could feel would end with him burning his life down, maybe he could see them being his in-laws one day.
And even that ‘maybe’ flew too close to the sun. Joe felt the tightness of panic in his throat. He quickly dragged his mind back to today’s actual problem, which was…
Nice or not, he’d discussed his financial situation with enough people today.
“He just worries about things,” Joe said. “Sometimes I have to remind him it’s OK to just be a kid.”
Dean chuckled. “Sounds like Que,” he said. “He always had an old head on his shoulders, too.”
Maybe. Joe supposed that could be why Quentin and Benjy got on. With the other two, it was mostly the cat.
“Just let me get Cody from the car,” Joe said. “Then I’ll get Jessie and Benjy out of your hair.”
He headed back over to his car. Cody was engrossed with Bluey on his tablet and the sweet potato he was eating like an apple. It was a new thing, but it kept him happy. Joe unclipped him from the car seat, grabbed the lion-dog, and headed back over to the truck.
“You know,” Dean said as he winked and waved at Cody, and got rewarded with a huge, gappy grin. “You can leave the little one with Kathryn and me to mind if you want?”
Joe opened his mouth to object. Before he could, Kathryn pulled up next to the pick-up in a dull red SUV. She gestured an apology through the window as she said something on her Bluetooth, laughed, and then disconnected as she got out of the car.
“Have you brought the kids to visit?” she said happily as she reached out a tanned, ringed finger to Cody for him to grab.
“He was just telling us they would be too much trouble,” Dean said. He ignored Joe’s betrayed look. “We’re getting on, after all.”
“Joe!” Kathryn said.
“I did not say that,” Joe said. “I’ve more sense.”
Kathryn snorted at him. “Please,” she said. “And we’re always happy to have them. I love having children around the place again, and it’ll take my mind off Quentin.”
Joe was just about to try one more polite refusal before admitting it would be easier to go through a storage unit without the babies when he registered the last bit.
“Quentin?” he repeated, but Dean talked over the top of him.
“How is he?”
Kathryn shook her head. “You know what he’s like,” she said. “He just wanted to go back to his apartment and nurse his wounds.”
“Sounds like him,” Dean said with wry agreement. “Boy’s always been like a cat when he’s hurt, just wants to hole up somewhere and be left alone.”
“Wait,” Joe interrupted. “Hold on. What’s going on? What wounds? I talked to him last night; he was fine. He said he was going to swing by and help when he had a chance.”
He’d said ‘ I love you’ and Joe had been too scared to acknowledge it, never mind say it back. Now he had wounds?
The sudden thought that something could have happened to the plane occurred to Joe. It didn’t seem likely—Dean was the CEO of Corvus, surely he’d have been too busy to help Joe with ratchet straps if he’d lost a plane—but Joe’s legs still went weak under him at the idea.
Kathryn traded a quick look with Dean. Then she disentangled her hand from Cody and patted Joe’s arm. Her fingers left greasy, sweet potato stains on his jersey.
“It’s something and nothing,” she said. “Quentin’s fine.”
“Why wouldn’t he be fine?” Joe demanded.
Dean took over. “Apparently, there was a bit of an incident on the plane,” he said. “One of the passengers got aggressive while they were disembarking. Quentin intervened, and it turned into a bit of a scuffle. Nothing life-threatening. Just bumps and bruises.”
Joe stared at them. He fished his phone out of his pocket and checked his messages.
Might not make it this afternoon. Rain check?
He resisted the urge to throw his phone at anything. Instead, it went back in his pocket.
“And he just went home?” he said.