Huh. I slid her a look, intending to just mess with her. “So, you’re saying we have things in common?”
“I’m doing you a favor, Di. No. Don’t go there with him.”
“There goes my dream of us being family.” I laughed until my brain told me to quit doing stuff like that.
She let out a snort that lasted all of three seconds before she moaned. “I have other family, you know.” After a pause, she asked, “So you live across from Dallas?”
“Uh-huh.” I thought about it for a second. “He’s really your cousin?” The coincidence was almost too much for me to believe it was true.
“Yeah.” There was another pause. “His mom is my dad’s sister. Trip’s dad’s sister.”
There was something about the hesitation as Ginny talked about this specific side of her family that gave me the clue there was something about them that she wasn’t fond of for some reason or another. In the time we had worked together, she wasn’t stingy talking about her family. She’d mentioned Trip enough times, but she had never once brought up Dallas. I wondered why; I just didn’t want to ask.
Ginny knew me well enough to recognize when I was curious about something but didn’t want to be the first to bring it up.
“We’re not close. He didn’t grow up around here like me and Trip did, and he’s younger than we are by a little.” Ginny was forty-three; “younger than” her didn’t really explain much. “He retired from the marines… or one of those branches. I don’t remember which exactly. From what I heard, he moved back a year ago. I haven’t seen him but once.”
“Oh,” was the only thing that came to mind for me to respond with. But I’d fucking known it! He had been in the military, long enough to retire. How old was he? Before I could stop my big mouth, I asked, “Is he married?”
She didn’t look at me as she answered, “I remember someone saying he’s separated from his wife, but that’s all I know. I’ve hardly seen him in the last twenty years. I’ve definitely never seen her around.”
Separated. I knew it. That explained everything. The ring. The woman in the car he’d gotten into a screaming match with. Maybe that explained him being weird. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to think we were flirting with each other? One of my clients that I’d had for years had gone through a rough divorce. After she’d told me all the shit she and her husband were fighting over, she had pretty much convinced me that everyone should get a prenup.
“I met his brother.” I’d more than “met” his brother, but that wasn’t my business to share. “He’s kind of a jerk. No offense.”
Ginny turned her entire body to look at me. “Jackson is here?”
Why the hell did she say his name like she was saying Candy Man? It was my phone ringing that had me snapping straight up with a jolt, immediately forgetting her question. Too lazy to get up, I reached forward as far as I could to grab my purse. I strained and then strained a little more, snatching the edge of it and pulling it toward me with a huff. Sure enough, my phone was in the pocket I always left it in, and I only had to take a quick glance at the screen before I hit the ignore button at the “restricted call.”
I had just set my phone back into my bag without a word when it started ringing once more. With a sigh, I glanced at the screen and groaned, torn between being relieved I’d decided to look again and dreading the caller. “Fuck.”
“Who is it?” Ginny asked that time, all nosey.
I let my finger float over the screen for a second, knowing I needed to answer it but not really wanting to. “The boys’ school.”
The look on her face said enough. She had two sons. Getting a phone call from the school was never a good thing. Ever.
“Shit,” I cursed one more time before making myself tap the screen. “Hello?” I answered, praying for a miracle I knew wasn’t going to happen. I already had one hand in my purse, searching for the keys.
“Mrs. Casillas?”
I frowned a little at the title but didn’t correct the woman on the other line who knew she was about to ruin my day. “Yes?”
“This is Irene at Taft Elementary. There’s been an incident—”
* * *
Nothing before the age of twenty-six could have prepared me for raising two boys. Really. There wasn’t a single thing.
None of the four boyfriends I’d had over the course of my life had prepped me for how to deal with two small people who would eventually grow into men. Men who would eventually have responsibilities and maybe even families—decades and decades from now. The thought was terrifying. I’d dated boys and I’d dated idiots who were still boys no matter how much facial hair they had. And I was responsible for raising a pair to not become like them. I was about as far away from being an expert as you could get. Looking back on them now, my exes were like pieces of gum you’d find beneath a table at a restaurant.
While Rodrigo and I had always been close, at five years older than me, I had been too young to pay attention to those careful years between five and fifteen, to see how he’d survived them. All I could remember was this bigger-than-life personality who had been popular, athletic, and likable. If there had been growing pains, I couldn’t remember. And I definitely couldn’t ask my parents about it. I also couldn’t call the Larsens for advice; they’d raised two girls, not two boys, and in the span of no time, I’d figured out that for a lot of things, boys were a lot different than girls. Josh and Lou had done some shit that I couldn’t begin to wrap my head around, and I had no doubt five-year-old me would have thought the same thing.