Sneezing from the fumes of cleaning solution, I check the time on my phone. Two hours until I need to be back on campus and ready to hop on the bus. We’ve got an away gametonight, which means I won’t be back until late. Sighing, I leverage myself up off the couch. Jack perks up.
“More cleaning?” he asks, sounding as though the prospect excites him. Parker makes a fake crying noise.
“No, just going to make this hooligan some dinner so he doesn’t eat Miss Sue out of house and home.” I nudge Parker’s leg with my toes, and he makes the appropriate gagging noises required when someone’s foot comes near you.
“I’ll help,” Jack offers, hopping up and trailing me into the kitchen. A few moments later, the TV turns on.
“Something appropriate, Parks!” I yell, pausing to listen. I hear the telltale signs of his favorite gaming YouTube channel, and relax. Looking at Jack, I pause when I see the look on his face—soft and a little bit sad. “You right, Jacko?”
“It’s just nice,” he says shyly, gesturing toward the family room. “That you care what he’s watching.”
I don’t make the comment I want to make, which is that every parent or guardian should care what their kids consume these days. I know enough about Jack’s family to know that his parents probably didn’t give a rat’s ass what he did, or watched; didn’t care enough to try and let him be a kid—happy, and unconcerned with the shit adults have to deal with.
“I could probably loosen up a little bit on the movies and stuff,” I admit, grabbing a few things from the fridge, pausing to admire Jack’s organization work. “But the poor kid is already too aware of how bad things can happen, does he really need to watch that shit on TV, too? I want him to be ten, not ten going on thirty. Luckily, he seems to prefer watching streamers play video games more than anything.”
“My friend Nate…well, you know him”—Jack laughs, shaking his head at himself—“never watched TV as a kid. He grew up on a ranch, you know? So he was always outside doing horse things. He has the most limited understanding of pop culture. I love it.”
“Horse things?” I ask, grinning at him and handing off a crinkly bag of small peppers.
“I havenoidea what happens on a ranch,” he replies seriously, making me snort. “What are we making, anyway?”
“Well, Bluey, that’s the question, isn’t it?” Hands on my hips, I stare down at the random assortment of ingredients I pulled from the fridge. “My go to is to make rice or noodles as a base, throw in some chicken for protein, and then add something colorful for nutrients.”
“That’s smart,” he agrees, looking impressed. I almost laugh, but it’s obvious he’s being serious.
“The little guy has to have a well-rounded diet. Honestly, though, before I moved here I pretty much lived off of takeout and sandwiches.”
A hint of rose curls over Jack’s cheeks as he starts filling the saucepan with water for the rice. I get started on the chicken, content to work in silence with him, arms brushing and the dryer slowly whirring in the background.
“I didn’t really eat good as a kid,” he says suddenly, face ducked as he stirs the empty pot of water, as if hoping it’ll help it to boil. “Mostly lived off of sugary breakfast cereal and bread.”
He chuckles. I don’t. Leaning a hip on the oven as I wait for it to preheat, I look at him. I’d done the requisite internet search when I was hired, and then immediately felt sickened with it. His parents died of an overdose while he was at school, and even though Jack’s name was left out of the articles, his parents’ weren’t. It wasn’t hard to connect the deaths with the man beside me. Jack was nothing more than afootnote in the pieces, a handful of lines about a kid forgotten at school until a teacher noticed him sitting out front well after the time he should have been picked up. One enterprising reporter had added a plea asking for any family members to come forward, entreating some long-lost cousin to care about a child that nobody had cared about in a long, long time.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him now, because hearing he lived off of cereal isn’t surprising, given what I know about his childhood.
“Nate always teases me for having a sweet tooth,” he adds, trying for a joke as discomfort floods his face in the form of a blush. “I don’t think I ever had a vegetable until I was Parker’s age.”
“I bet that was a disgusting experience,” I comment, and watch his shoulders visibly relax as he smiles at me, continuing to stir the still-not-boiling pot of water.
“One of the foster homes I was in—the last one—was a vegan couple, and they were awesome. Craig used to say that if veganism was good enough for the strongest land mammal, then it was good enough for us.”
This time I do chuckle, and his smile grows as the flush recedes. “What animal is that?”
“Gorilla. I lived with them for my last two years before I left the system, and now look at me.”
“Size of a gorilla,” I agree, looking at the breadth of his shoulders and wide waist. He’s got the sort of body that lives between fit and comfy, strong from his time playing hockey, but soft around the edges. He looks like the sort of man who’d give incredible hugs. If he ever starts handing them out, I’ll be the first in line.
“Craig is the one who got me into hockey,” he continues. I’ve never heard him so talkative, or had him be so willing toshare anything from his past. “He’s ahugeSouth Carolina fan, and when I was seventeen they did this charity thing where they gave away VIP tickets to low-income families and stuff. Well, we won—or, Craig and Linda did—but I’m the one who got to go to the game with Craig.”
He sounds so proud it breaks my heart a little bit. Swallowing around a scratchy throat, I gently nudge him back far enough for me to put the pan of chicken in the oven. The water is finally boiling, and I don’t have the heart to tell him it’s too soon to make the rice. I hand him the box and wait for him to continue his story, watching as he measures out enough for all of us.
“First game you went to?” I prompt, and his face lights up as he remembers.
“Yeah. It was so cool. We got to walk around the locker room, and they gave us a bunch of stuff. But the best part was after the game. We got to stand in the tunnel, and all the players walked by and”—he mimes the way hockey players tap their gloved hands—“high-fived us. Troy Nichols was the last person off the ice, and he stopped to talk to us. Like…he’d just played an entire game and was probably exhausted, but he stopped to talk to us anyway.”
His voice is so excited, caught up in the memory of a stranger being kind to him. I remember hearing about a lucky Troy Nichols jersey, and wonder if I’m learning the origin of that right now.
“To be fair, Craig did most of the talking, because I was shy as hell,” Jack adds. “But then Troy pulled off his game jersey…like, the oneoff his back, and someone handed him a Sharpie and he signed it for me. He seriously just gave it to me, can you believe that? And it was the old jerseys too,because they re-did them the next season, so it’s pretty much a collector’s item now.”
