Chapter 4
Chapter Four
ERIKA
Even though I’d ditched the coveralls in the work truck before I returned it to the clinic, I still reeked of cow manure when I marched into Vision Elementary. The accusatory glare of the receptionist confirmed I fully polluted her lobby with my stench.
I read the name placard in front of her. “Madison, I’m here to pick up Vinny Chomping from afterschool care.”
“Who are you?” The receptionist couldn’t have been much older than me. She tucked a strand of platinum-blonde hair behind her ear like she was bracing for nonsense.
“His sister.”
The school still smelled the way all schools do—moldy sadness mixed with aggressive mint cleaner. The doors were heavy and prison-like, designed to lock kids in and keep adults out, which felt backwards and unsettling.
Madison’s eyebrows climbed straight into her bangs. “I don’t think you’re on his approved pickup list. I’ll need to see some I.D.”
I slid over my license, plus the temporary custody paperwork the lawyer’s receptionist had printed on what felt like the world’s thinnest paper.
She read it. “Erika Chomping.” Then she looked up, eyes softening.
“Oh. I’m so sorry about Vinny’s parents.
Well, your parents.” Her gaze flicked over me.
“Wait, are you the Erika who did that awful thing to Dr. Hurst at the baseball championship?” Her eyes brightened with the tease of new gossip to share with her officemates.
Her voice lowered. “What did you do to him to make him show up naked?”
I lowered my own voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “Technically, he had on some clothes, if underwear counts.”
“Don’t worry, hon, he’s been in good hands since you were so mean to him.” Her grin implied she’d been heating up his sheets.
Mean to him?
A few pranks in payback for shattering me right before senior prom hardly seemed enough to qualify as “mean.” I pushed the ignored guardianship document closer to her across the counter. “Do you need to see the legal documents?”
She snapped the paper to her side of the desk. “We might need a copy on file.” She lifted a phone and said, “Vinny to the front please.”
While we waited, Madison said, “You’ll need to set up appointments with his teachers.” She started scribbling. “Here’s his third-grade teacher, his counselor, and his learning therapist.”
A chill slid down my shoulders. The words learning therapist cracked open a trapdoor in my brain. Weekly sessions. Flashcards. Me, sweating through spelling tests while everyone else breezed past. Nothing like being pulled out of class in front of your peers to make you feel broken.
Minutes later, a short, skinny kid with dark hair and a spray of freckles across his nose appeared in the lobby. He stopped short when he saw me, his expression hardening like I’d personally ruined his entire day.
“Hey.” That sounded under-qualified for motherhood, guardianship, or whatever this arrangement qualified as. “I’m Erika.”
“I know who you are,” he snapped, brushing past me toward the door.
Okay. Not personal. Probably.
Once we were in the car, I pointed toward the front seat. “That’s Tracker,” I said. “He’s harmless.”
The kid didn’t even glance at the dog. He buckled his seatbelt with sharp, efficient movements, then wrinkled his nose. “Why do you stink?”
I decided honesty was safer than dignity. “I helped deliver a calf right before I picked you up.”
He considered that. “Bet that sucked.”
“It really did.” I couldn’t help smiling a little.
He stared out the window. “I’ve got baseball tonight.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding, filing it away as something important to him. The light turned red, and I eased to a stop. “What time?”
He sighed, dramatic and put-upon. “Practice starts at five. I can’t miss.”
I glanced at the clock, which showed we had less than an hour. “How long is practice?”
He looked at me like I’d just asked something obvious, but this time I didn’t bristle. I tightened my hands on the steering wheel, already doing the math—and realizing this wasn’t about my evening anymore.
“Until 6:30. Sometimes we go until seven if we’re doing a drill.”
“What about the rain? Won’t the fields be muddy?”
“It’s grass.” His tone was flat, unimpressed. “There won’t be puddles. It’ll be fine.”
More time outdoors. Oh, joy. “What do you usually do for dinner?”
“Mom has it ready when I get home from school.” The way he said Mom cut deep—like she was the gold standard, and I wasn’t even bronze.
“Is there food at your house?” I asked carefully.
“Not really. Maybe mac-n-cheese.” He paused, then added like a punch to the ribs with a hefy dose of sarcasm, “You can cook like mom, right?”
“I can probably handle mac-n-cheese.” I swallowed hard. Anything more complicated than that? Probably not like his mom. “Can you skip baseball tonight so we can sort through our… Well, everything?”
The look he shot me in the rearview mirror could have scorched earth. Pure betrayal. As if I’d asked him to set his prized baseball glove on fire. “Baseball,” he said sharply, the word final and unmovable.
“Baseball it is. I need a shower—”
“I need food.”
“I’ll shower. You eat. I’ll—”
“What?” he interrupted again. “What will I eat?” He crossed his arms.
“Burger Times.” It was the only fast-food restaurant in town.
Vision was one of those main street towns that if you blinked while riding the train through the center of town at top speed you missed it.
However, Vision had two primary business streets that T-boned into the courthouse.
Terrible city planning. The town had gotten a pizza place since I left.
If anyone wanted other options, they had to drive fifteen to twenty minutes up the road.
“You’d go there? To Burger Times?” Curiosity lit his face. “Mom never let me get that. She called it overpriced fat food.”
“I enjoy overpriced fat foods.”
Twenty minutes later, I dodged potholes down the gravel driveway to a white farmhouse perched on a hill, complete with a wraparound porch.
Very on-brand for Dad, the porch didn’t have charming rocking chairs.
Instead, it featured one rickety wooden chair and a sagging canvas chair, both wearing a fashionable coat of moldy leaves.
The house was missing a few shutters and probably should’ve been repainted sometime during the Obama administration.
But the porch mat looked brand new. So did the boot brush beside the door.
Clearly, chaos was allowed everywhere except where shoes were involved.
Maybe this was Hope’s way of drawing a line in the dirt—literally.
I parted the pile of unopened mail on the kitchen table to slide the paper bag of burgers toward Vinny. “Eat. I’m going to shower.”
He had one-fourth of a burger eaten before I even left the kitchen. His mouth full, he said, “We need to head to baseball in ten minutes.”
I made it only a few steps into the master bedroom before I faltered.
The bed was unmade and clothes draped over chairs and spilled across the carpet.
My dad’s belongings cluttered the dresser like he’d just stepped out for a minute.
But he hadn’t. Neither of them had. The ache hit hard, sharp.
I forced myself to move, because staying meant feeling everything I wasn’t ready to face.
The bathroom was barely larger than a linen closet with a shower-tub.
It reeked of plug-in deodorizer and mildew.
Rust stains around the shower, toilet, and free-standing sink made me shaky with the need to scrub.
No excuse for that kind of muck in a bathroom.
I missed my condo bathroom that was half the size of this house’s master bedroom. I kept it pristine.
I couldn’t figure out how to close the sticky bathroom door or how to turn on the bathroom fan. Maybe it just didn’t work.
After a lukewarm shower, I pulled my wet hair into a ponytail and grabbed one of Dad’s old baseball caps off his dresser. Tracker stared at me from where he’d been waiting outside the bathroom. “I forgot your dinner, didn’t I? I’m sorry. Can it wait until after baseball?”
The dog looked sad. Or maybe it was my imagination.
“We’re going to be late,” Vinny announced from the hallway. “If I’m late I have to run laps.”
“You’re eight. They don’t make you run laps.”
“I’m almost nine. My coach does.” He sat on the lowest step of the stairwell to the second floor and tied his shoes.
“He can get over himself and go…” I caught Vinny staring at me as if waiting for bad words to tumble out of my mouth. “Never mind,” I muttered as I pawed through my mini-backpack that served as my purse. “Where’s my phone?”
“He’s a great coach, but he’s serious about being on time and working hard.”
“Can’t find my phone,” I said distractedly. I ran through the kitchen. No phone.
I searched the bathroom. Nothing. Where is it?
“Hurry up!” He slung a heavy backpack onto his shoulder, the baseball bat Velcro-strapped to the outer pocket.
When I hurried back through the hallway, he caught my arm and steered me toward the door.
“Ah ha!” I found my phone in the cupholder of the center console in my car. Tracker jumped into the backseat with Vinny. “Where’s practice?”
“It’s at the elementary school field. We’re already late. Takes thirteen minutes to get there and it’s already five.” He crossed his arms and slumped in the back seat. “This sucks.”
I turned around before backing out. “I’ll tell your coach it’s my fault we’re late. Do you think that will help?”
He grunted and stared out the window. His sweatshirt was about two sizes too tight and his baseball pants, which should’ve hit his shoes, rode up to mid-calf. “Your car smells weird.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the Pathfinder other than the six hundred miles it took to get here.” I rocked my head. “Tracker might’ve had bad gas after snarfing up discarded fries at a rest stop. I told him not to but let’s just say the last one hundred miles were miserable for both of us.”
The kid didn’t even crack a smile. Tough audience.
“You should go home,” Vinny muttered. “Then things would be better.”
Now wasn’t the moment to have this argument. In the rearview I saw Tracker move to sit close to Vinny, who didn’t seem to mind.
“I guess you remember how to get to the school.” He reached out to pet Tracker’s head.
“Sure do.” Picked you up there. The rest of the drive was silent.
Vinny was out and dashing toward the field before the car came to a complete stop in a parking space.
Neither the playground nor the various fields used for sports had changed over the past decade.
The oversized rock in front of the school that got painted on a rotational schedule every week to advertise a birthday or event still existed.
Wind shot a bitter chill through my shirt on the walk to the solitary, rickety metal four-tiered bleachers. I pulled my jacket closed and crossed my arms. The jacket zipper broke yesterday on the trip down like a screaming metaphor for the road trip.
Parents clustered in their canvas folding chairs around the chain-link fence behind home plate like they were defending a sacred ritual.
Not a single soul sat on the lonely tier of bleachers, which must be reserved for social outcasts and anyone who committed the unforgivable sin of arriving after practice started without a personal chair.
I felt eight pairs of laser-beam mom eyes—and two equally judgy dads—tracking me like I was a raccoon raiding their campsite.
One of the dads grunted, “You’re late.”
I blinked and pointed at my chest. “Were you talking to me?”
“Practice starts at five.” The guy’s tone was snarky, not informative.
Not one hint of compassion came from any of the adults.
None would make eye contact with me. Maybe they’d been here early and had frozen in misery.
Maybe they didn’t know Vinny’s parents died a few days ago or that I knew jack shit about his life.
“If they’re late, the coach makes ’em run laps,” said a mom wearing a fake fur hat. She was buried beneath three blankets, two of which sported UNC logos. “Then we’re here an extra ten to fifteen minutes.”
“Sucks,” muttered Mom Number Two, rearranging her scarf like she was auditioning for Frozen: The Community Theater Edition. “It’s cold enough without the extra fifteen minutes.”
I stomped up in front of their tidy little firing squad of canvas chairs and gave a big wave.
“Hi! I’m Erika, Vinny’s older sister. Lovely to meet ya’ll.
Sorry we’re late. Turns out someone only informed me we had practice forty-five minutes ago, but hey, we made it.
” I forced a grin so wide my face trembled.
Mom Number Two didn’t miss a beat. “Do you want a medal?”
I did want a bit of credit. I officially mom-ed the kid to baseball practice. I had zero experience with kids, not even babysitting. I thought I rocked it to be here, considering I’d only heard from Vinny about his practice when I picked him up at four.
“Don’t mind her,” Fake Fur Hat Mom said, giving me a sympathetic smile as she burrowed deeper under her mountain of blankets.
“You’ll freeze in that. Those bleachers suck the heat right out of your butt.
Seriously, it’s like sitting on an ice vacuum.
” She patted her stash. “If you need a blanket, I’ve got three.
I’m Cindy, by the way. You were a year or two behind me in school.
My kid’s Colton. Big dude at first base. ”
Behind me on the field a man I assumed to be the coach yelled, “Thanks to Vinny we’re running laps, people. Give me two.”
One of the dads groaned dramatically and flung a hand toward the field like he was cursing the heavens. “Great. That’s at least an extra ten minutes. We’ll freeze to death out here. Only God knows how the coach doesn’t feel the cold.”
“He can’t punish them.” I marched around the chain link fence.
Behind me, the parents gasped and muttered like I’d just violated a sacred baseball law that we couldn’t cross the fence line.
I stormed up behind the coach, only to have my brain short-circuit. The man was six-foot-something with a truly magnificent ass and long, sculpted legs poured into gray baseball pants. Like, illegally good. I’m not made of stone.
Focus. Get a grip. He’s probably married. With four kids. And a mortgage. And definitely not here to flirt with the chaotic woman who showed up late and disrupted practice.
He blew his whistle and yelled, “You’re dragging Colton. Don’t let Vinny beat you.”
I called out, “It’s my fault Vinny is late. Don’t punish them because of me.”
The coach turned. Familiar hazel eyes narrowed on me in a stare filled with what-the-hell-are-you-doing?
“You.” My stomach dropped.