Dax
Okay, so it wasn’t how I’d planned to spend my Friday night, but seeing the smile on Jagger’s face made it all worthwhile. After this afternoon’s unplanned trip to the pond, I really did need to get busy on the outside of the house before it got cold. While I hadn’t said anything to the realtor yet, I was pretty sure I’d wind up putting in an offer at the end of the lease because Marshall wasn’t as bad of a town as I’d prepared myself for it to be.
“All right, little man,” I said as I went into the kitchen to grab some snacks out of the cupboard. I should probably give up on trying to get anything done so I could make him dinner, but this would be enough for now. We still had about two hours of daylight I didn’t want to waste. I paused momentarily when I realized there was no hunting around for the right cabinet. I’d spent enough time here over the past week that I felt almost as much at home in his place as I did mine.
“Are we going on another picnic?” Jagger asked enthusiastically as he bounded into the kitchen.
“No, we have work to do,” I informed him. “You want to go back to my house and help me paint the front porch?”
“You’re going to let me paint?” It didn’t seem possible for Jagger’s smile to grow any wider, but it did. He stood straighter and squared his little shoulders back, pleased as could be that I wasn’t treating him like an imposition.
“Absolutely! As long as you promise me you’re going to follow directions and not run off on me, I’ll keep you busy.”
“I promise, Dax. Papa says I’m a good helper. Daddy doesn’t let me help much, but I want to,” he rambled as we walked, hand in hand, through the neighborhood.
A few of the little old ladies shot us curious glances, but no one said anything. The thought crept into the back of my mind that they were probably used to seeing Jagger run around the neighborhood unsupervised and were simply grateful to see him with a responsible adult. Not that I still thought Michael was irresponsible—he was simply overwhelmed. But that didn’t change the fact that I’d noticed the way the ladies with nothing better to do than sit on their front porches shook their heads when the three of us walked around together.
I hated how easily I thought of us as this cohesive unit. That line of thinking was dangerous, because the more I got to know Michael, the more I liked him, and not in the best buddies way. If I had to choose a type, he was close to perfect. Tall, dark hair, slightly haunted eyes, and funny as hell when he wasn’t dwelling on whatever caused that blank stare from time to time.
A gentle tapping on my arm pulled me out of my random mental ramblings. Somehow, I’d managed to space out for half of the walk between our houses, and Jagger looked at me suspiciously.
“You okay, Dax?” he asked as he pulled me toward the front porch. Mrs. Batterman waved to us from across the street. I knew she’d have questions for me later, but I didn’t mind. Unlike some of our other neighbors, she was genuinely friendly. Her biggest problem was that she was bored and in desperate need of a hobby.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I assured him. I made quick work of opening cans of paint and pouring some into the pan. I glanced over to the stack of scrap lumber and quickly pulled a few pieces over, explaining to Jagger how to paint them while I worked on the tedious intricacies of the spindles. There was no way I was going to try power washing again with him around. The stupid machine had bested me once already, and I wasn’t about to give Jagger a vocabulary lesson that’d get him sent to the principal’s office once school started.
We worked together in comfortable silence for about five minutes, which was more than I’d have thought him capable of being quiet. Nothing against Jagger at all, but he was an exuberant kid and loved to ask questions. All the time. Surprisingly, I was the one who cracked first, which I chalked up to trying to keep him from pulling into his shell the way he had the first two times I’d seen him.
“Are you ready for school to start?” I asked as I continued painting the intricate details of the rail.
Jagger shrugged. “I guess.”
That wasn’t the reaction I was expecting. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to deal with kids who didn’t want to be in school, but I liked to imagine they’d all be excited about the start of a new school year. In Jagger’s case, his first year. And then it clicked.
“Are you nervous?” He nodded. I set down my paintbrush and moved over next to him. “There’s really nothing to be scared of.”
“What if I don’t know anyone?” he asked, chewing on his bottom lip. “Meemaw told Daddy that he should have let me go to preschool last year. All the other kids will know people, but I won’t know anyone.”
Without thinking about what I was doing, I scooped him onto my lap and gently rubbed his back. “Hey, that’s not true,” I told him. His gaze shot up to my face and I could tell he didn’t believe me. “I’ll be there, so you’ll know at least one person.”
“Really?” He still seemed skeptical. “But you’re too big to go to school.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah, I am,” I agreed. “I’m not a student, I’m one of the teachers at the school.”
“So if kids are mean to me, I can come to you and you’ll yell at them?” He looked so damn excited about the prospect of seeing me chewing out anyone who upset him that I almost told him I would. But that couldn’t happen and I wasn’t going to make promises I had no intention of keeping.
“Well, not necessarily, but if you tell me, I’ll definitely talk to them and tell them it’s not nice to pick on other kids,” I offered as a compromise.
That seemed to calm him down for the moment. He picked up the paintbrush and went back to work on his scrap of wood. I sat and watched him for a moment, wondering if there was more to his trepidation than being nervous about starting school for the first time. I had my assumptions, but I wasn’t about to bring them up in case he hadn’t thought about some of the worries that crossed my mind.
We continued working until I heard Jagger’s stomach rumble. The sun was sinking lower in the sky, so I decided it was time to quit for the night. I told him it was time to clean up and he protested, telling me that he wanted to keep going. It was only after I assured him we’d try to do some more the next day that he started to pick up. On the way back to his house, Jagger told me about going school supply shopping with Michael’s mom. He was the most excited about his Avengersbackpack and new clothes.
The rest of the night was relatively quiet. We had a deep discussion about how Skylanders were superior to Power Rangers over chicken strips and tater tots, followed by the promise of a movie if Jagger took his bath without a fight. It worked and the two of us curled up on the couch to watchMinions. He was out like a light in less than thirty minutes, but I let the movie play so I didn’t wake him. Once he was settled into his room with the door left cracked open and the hall light turned on as I’d seen Michael do previously, I started flipping through channels on the television, trying to find something to distract me from how unprepared I felt for the beginning of the school year.
I’d been assured several times that I’d be getting everything I needed to set up my room and be ready for twenty-five and six-year-olds, but I was beginning to feel as if I’d walk in on the first day of the school with zero clue what I was supposed to be doing. I had my room assignment and the bare essentials, but I still didn’t have a class list. That annoyed the crap out of me because I’d wanted to send a quick note to my students to introduce myself so we wouldn’t be total strangers when school started.
Not only was I new to the district, but my place on the staff felt like an afterthought. I’d been hired following a study by some consultant, who advised the school that they needed to hire another kindergarten teacher rather than continue adding more students to the existing classrooms as the town grew. They’d listened, and here I was still waiting on a class list the week before school started. Not the way I hoped to start my time in Marshall.
Eventually, I gave up on finding anything decent on TV and turned on one of my mellower playlists on my phone. Without the hum of occasional traffic driving past the house, it felt eerily quiet. I tossed and turned, unable to get comfortable, worrying about Jagger, worrying about his dad, worrying about all sorts of shit I couldn’t change.
