Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
B oon
After driving up the long familiar driveway, I shoved the truck in park and exhaled loudly at the same time Kinsley sighed.
That was the only thing we’d agreed on in the last week.
I darted a glance at her out of the side of my eyes to see she had her arms folded across her chest. She was gorgeous with her honey-colored long hair, curved lashes, and heart-shaped face, a fact that unnerved me now that I was the parent responsible for her.
I’d heard the phrase “beating off the boys with a bat,” but I wasn’t sure if that was a real thing.
I mean, I had plenty of bats and a hell of a swing, if need be.
The front door of the house I grew up in flew open and Mom appeared, hands clasped in some overdramatic silent prayer.
Then it wasn’t silent anymore and she came squawking down the porch steps, louder than the damn chickens.
Kinsley let out what sounded like a choked laugh and opened the passenger door.
“Kinsley! My sweet, sweet grandbaby! Look at you! All grown up and so beautiful!” Mom moved fast for her age, already fussing over my daughter like she hadn’t seen her in a few years.
Oh yeah. She hadn’t.
I got out of the truck and stretched my arms over my head.
My fucking back was killing me almost as much as my shoulder.
The season had been a long one, ending in the playoffs in a tough 4–3 loss.
I didn’t have another World Series title under my belt, but I’d retired respectably, the fans and management throwing a wild party after our loss that felt like a sendoff.
Cassie, Kinsley’s mom, hadn’t waited a second dropping Kinsley off, showing up on my doorstep the morning after our loss. I’d been hungover and exhausted—and thankfully didn’t have a woman in bed with me—but that didn’t seem to factor.
Taking my mother’s advice, I didn’t end up in court with Cassie.
We settled things without our lawyers. I’d take Kinsley this last year of her childhood so Cassie could get married and go back to school to become a nurse.
As she put it, “I’ve given seventeen years to raising our daughter so you could have a career, and now it’s my turn to have a career. ”
She made a good point.
“Let’s get you inside and feed you. Did your father even stop for lunch?
” Mom had her arm around Kinsley, steering her into the house and leaving me in the dust. And with all the suitcases.
Apparently, all my child support checks over the years had produced a lot of clothing.
Kinsley moved into my Dallas condo with five suitcases.
Who the fuck has five suitcases’ worth of shit?
I grabbed two out of the back of the truck and rolled them loudly over the gravel to the house. My neck turned of its own accord and I saw a glimpse of the Fletcher place, our next-door neighbors. I wondered if they still lived there. I wondered if Shae still lived in Blueball.
“Are you coming?” Mom hollered, cutting through my thoughts.
I grunted as I lifted the suitcases up the steps, my shoulder screaming. “Could use a little help,” I grumbled under my breath.
I was glad I kept the snark to myself when Mom set a plate of grilled cheese sandwiches on the kitchen table, right next to a plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.
Kinsley had already dived in, making my mother fuss some more about whether I fed her over the last week she’d officially been in my custody.
I’d fed her plenty. Apparently teen girls eat almost as much as professional athletes.
After I’d gotten all five suitcases upstairs into the room Mom had set up for Kinsley, I sat at the table and grabbed a cooled grilled cheese. Kinsley was already done eating and moaning over the cookies by then.
“I think you’ll like the high school,” Mom was saying. “It’s gotten quite the upgrade since your father went there. They use iPads and everything!”
Kinsley lifted her eyebrows but didn’t say anything. I wondered for the hundredth time when she quit babbling all day long when she was with me and now showed up sullen and uninterested. I wished for the toddler age back when buying an ice cream cone had cured everything that bothered her.
I wiped my hands and mouth with a napkin after the last bite. “Principal Joseph said I could give you a tour this weekend so you know where all your classrooms are before Monday.”
Kinsley swung her hazel-eyed gaze over to me. “I’m good.”
Fucking teenagers. Like, what did that even mean? I’m good, as in, no, thanks? Or I’m good, as in, sure, Dad, I’d love a tour?
“So, we’ll go tomorrow morning, Tink?” I asked, trying to pin down our plans.
“No. Jeez . Stop with the stupid nickname too. I’m not a baby anymore.
” Kinsley rolled her eyes and shoved back from the table.
Mom and I watched her stomp out of the room with a flip of her hair.
Fifteen seconds later her bedroom door slammed shut, the classic teenage fuck you echoing down the stairs.
Mom stared at me, her gaze turning hard. I held up my hands but she whacked me on the shoulder with her napkin. “Way to go, dummy.”
“What?” She couldn’t seriously think this was my fault.
I’d merely asked a question, wanting to get Kinsley into the school so she’d feel comfortable for her first day on Monday.
And what was wrong with the nickname? I’d been calling her my little Tinkerbell since she was born.
She’d never expressed an issue with it before. How did any of that make me a dummy?
“You can’t interrogate her like that!” Mom went on, stunning me. “She’s a teen girl, dumped on her father, living in a new state. She’s sensitive, Boon. Put yourself in her shoes.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
I’d never been a teenage girl. Never moved as a kid.
I had no idea how to put myself in her shoes.
Hell, I wasn’t good at this parenting thing!
I’d been trying to tell people, but no one was listening.
Mom huffed like she was disappointed in me and stood up from the table.
“Why don’t you make yourself useful and go fix the fence?”
She marched off, the second female of the day to be pissed at me. If I thought my family might be happy to see me back home in Blueball, I was wrong. I glared at her retreating back, snatched three cookies off the plate, and escaped outside.
Today was warmer than I thought it would be for early October.
This certainly wasn’t the razzle-dazzle of Dallas, but being outside peeled my shoulders away from my ears and let my lungs fully inflate.
All the stress of parenting a teenager who hated me, moving back to my hometown, and figuring out the second half of my life had left me a ball of stress.
It would be one thing to navigate retirement and a move from a big city to a small town, but add in a teenager that might as well be as foreign as a green little alien?
I was officially a fish out of water in all senses.
A goat walked by me as I surveyed the fence that was down between our driveway and the Fletchers’ property. He stopped and stared at the fence post with me, then turned his beady little eyes on me. His horns looked deadly.
“You fuckin’ did this, didn’t you?”
That fucker stared me down until I had to blink because my eyes were watering so badly. Wait. Did goats even blink? Were they one of those weird animals that didn’t need to lubricate their eyes? Had I just gotten suckered into a staredown with a non-blinking animal?
Keeping an eye on the trickster, I got up close to the fence, pulled down the weathered horizontal slats that were barely hanging on, and looked over the fence post. All the pieces of wood looked pretty good.
Salvageable, at least. I pointed at the goat and told him to stay put.
He didn’t look like he had an inclination to listen to instruction.
I headed to the shed around the back of the house and got out a shovel, nails, hammer, and gloves.
Back at the fence line, I pulled my T-shirt over my head and threw it over the fence a few yards away.
Might as well work on my farmer’s tan while I got a workout in.
I had to do a few arm swings to get my right shoulder to loosen up.
I’d had the best physiotherapists in the world working on it for years, and I still had pain.
Guess I’d use the ridiculous pile of money I’d earned to buy medicinal weed for the rest of my life.
The goat had wandered off and I hoped it wasn’t getting into trouble or Mom would send me out to wrangle him back.
I got busy digging a new hole for the post and dropped it in.
I backfilled the hole and adjusted the horizontal slats.
I had a mouthful of nails held between my lips and one black-and-blue thumb from the stupid hammer by the time I noticed a commotion going on next door at the Fletchers’ front window.
I shaded the fading sun from my eyes and squinted.
Four women clustered around the window, their noses plastered to the glass as they watched me.
A grin replaced the irritation at having to fix a fence.
Now this was familiar. Not one practice went by when there wasn’t a small horde of women crowding the fence at our practice field, wanting a glimpse of the players.
Every now and again, if a guy was feeling lonely, he’d go over and have a little chat with them.
Most of us didn’t engage with them, having dealt with cleat chasers our whole lives, but that didn’t mean we didn’t put on a little show.