Chapter 6 #3
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.”
* * *
A bout 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?”