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?”
Chapter Seven
“Isoldall your stuff while you were with your grandparents,” I told Josh on Sunday after his grandparents had dropped them off following their weekend together. Both boys looked tanner than they had before leaving for the weekend.
I didn’t know what I would do without their involvement in our lives. That saying “It takes a village to raise a kid” was no joke. Louie and Josh had five people who cared for them full time, and sometimes it still didn’t seem like enough. I seriously had no idea how single parents with no close family to help made it work.
Not even Louie fell for my joke; they both just ignored me before heading into their rooms to drop off their bags with Mac trailing behind them, ignoring me too.
Grumpy much?
“We have to do the lawn. Don’t take forever,” I yelled after them.
It was Josh who let out a drawn-out grumble, pausing at his doorway. “Do we have to?”
“Yes.”
“We can’t do it tomorrow?”
“No. I get off work too late and the mosquitoes will be bad.”
“I have homework,” the little ass lied.
“You’re full of crap,” I stated. He always got his homework done on Friday; I’d bet my life on it. I had my brother to thank for getting him on that path early on in school. He hadn’t let him go out and play until he got his stuff done.
There was another drawn-out sigh and the sound of a door—a closet door probably—slamming shut. Good grief, I hoped he was going to get over this crap soon. Wasn’t it only girls who went through the horrible hormonal phase? Even then, wasn’t that when they were in their teens?
Luckily, neither one of them gave me any more verbal grief as we all trudged out the back door to fish the lawn mower out of the shed in the back. Mac was terrified of the noise it made, so he was left inside the house. There were three huge spider webs on the door, and I only screamed once as something scuttled across the floor as I pulled out the mower and the two rakes I’d taken from my dad’s house on my last visit.
I handed the boys each a rake. “You rake the leaves. I’ll pull out weeds.”
Josh frowned fiercely but took the garden tool from me. Louie… well, Louie wasn’t really going to get much done, but I didn’t want to raise a lazy butt. He could do his best. With gardening gloves on—I double-checked for roaches living in the fingers—we spent the next hour doing the first half of the yard, only taking a break for water and Gatorade and to put sunblock on the boys when I noticed the back of Lou’s neck getting pink. How could I have forgotten about putting sunblock on him?
Once the weeds had been yanked out and bagged, and half of the leaves were lumped into multiple small piles throughout the yard, the boys stood off to the side, wiping sweat off their faces and looking so done I almost laughed.
“Is that it?” Josh asked.
I slid him a look. “No. We still have to pick this all up and mow the lawn.”
He dropped his head back and let out a groan that had me blinking, unimpressed.
“J, you’re basically a grown man—” I started to tell him.
“I’m ten.”
“In some countries in the world, you could be married right now. You’re pretty much the man of the house. You’re almost as big as I am. I’m going to let you mow the lawn—”
“I’m a little boy,” he argued.
“You’re not that little. What do you want to do? The front or the back?”
Despite everything, Josh knew what and how much he could get away with, and he had to be aware that he wasn’t going to get himself out of the mow job. It was happening no matter what he said. So I wasn’t surprised when he sighed. “The back, I guess.”
