6
"This is stupid," Casey muttered.
The words were loud enough for Jilly to hear where she was sitting on a picnic blanket with Lindsey. They'd caught a late fall warm front, and balmy sunshine spilled over her shoulders. She had Lindsey's first grade homework binder open in her lap, and they were working on simple subtraction problems. It was slow going for Lindsey.
And Casey was sorely trying Jilly's patience.
The boys were supposed to be scraping old paint off of Noah's house. But PJ was the only one putting any effort into it. Casey was barely dragging the paint scraper against the old wood siding.
Painting the front of Noah's house was going to take forever at this pace.
She didn't know why he'd changed his mind. She'd been on pins and needles all day yesterday as she'd plowed the eastern field. She'd heard nothing from the sheriff's office.
And then, out of the blue, she'd fielded a text from Aiden that had said she and the boys could remove the graffiti.
She'd been so relieved that Noah wasn't reporting them that she'd shed a quick tear. And then she'd girded her loins and called the social worker herself to report it. The woman had made a note in the kids' file and scared Jilly a little with a reminder that they were keeping a close watch, since this was her first placement.
Her first and maybe her last, if Jilly had anything to say about it.
She'd gotten off the phone with hope singing in her veins.
They'd spent two hours attempting to remove the paint yesterday.
It turned out, spray paint was impossible to remove.
Rubbing alcohol had done nothing. She'd bought a product at the hardware store that claimed to remove anything. And it had done the trick for the black spray paint. Only it had also removed the original paint from the house.
The paint was old anyway, peeling in spots.
So she'd given up on removing the paint and texted Aiden, asking if they could repaint the house. Noah—via Aiden—had agreed to them completing the front only.
She'd decided to take what she could get.
Noah hadn't spoken to them or even peeked his head out the door since yesterday. He'd completely ignored their presence since they'd arrived right after school let out. She hadn't expected any different.
She’d pretty much figured out that Casey was the instigator just by his hateful attitude. She'd spoken to both the boys at the same time, and neither one would tattle on the other. So she'd told them she would have to punish them both. They were grounded from TV for a month, and they would fix the problem they'd created at Noah's house. PJ had been quiet. Casey had been angry.
She'd had this grand plan that the two of them would work together, see the error of their ways, and she'd magically be a good mom.
Yeah, it wasn't working out like that.
PJ was doing a decent job. He'd scraped the bottom three feet of the house from the corner to the window that looking into Noah's office. She’d peeked inside earlier as she’d helped the boys set up.
Casey was basically doing nothing.
And she didn't know how to make him pick up the slack. She didn't want to do corporal punishment. By the way he'd flinched away from her once when she'd been reaching for an upper cabinet in the kitchen, she guessed that someone, at some point, had hit him.
That made her see red.
No kid deserved to be hit.
But she also didn't know how to get through to him. Maybe a spanking would help. Maybe it wouldn’t. At least it would besomething.There had to be another way.
"I'm hungry," PJ said under his breath.
It wasn't an outright complaint.
She felt for the kid. It'd been a long ninety minutes since she'd picked the three of them up from school.
