Josh rattled off the date coming up in less than two months.
Under normal circumstances, the exchange might have been creepy, but in the last two years, I’d sat through so many Select parents talking about ages and sizes, that I knew this was baseball related. It all suddenly came together for me. Ginny had mentioned a handful of times in the past about her cousin coaching the baseball team his son was on. A son that was around Josh’s age. I also faintly recalled seeing a baseball trophy at Dallas’s house when I’d gone in there. For whatever reason Trip had come over, both he and Dallas had scouted Josh from our playing on the front lawn.
Huh.
Wait. Did that mean Dallas was a coach too?
“We have an 11U team this year,” Trip explained, answering my question without even meaning to. “Tryouts are next week and we need a couple new players.” Those blue eyes that were exactly like my boss’s shot back in my direction for a split second before moving back to Josh damn near instantly. “If you’re interested and your mom lets you—”
Bless Josh’s soul, he didn’t correct him.
“—you should come by.”
The overly excited “Yeah?” that came out of Josh’s mouth made me feel terrible for not making more of an effort to find him a team sooner.
“Yeah,” my neighbor replied, already patting around on his back pocket. He pulled out a worn, brown leather wallet and fished through it for a moment before taking out a business card. To give him credit, he handed me one first and then Josh another. “We can’t make any promises you’ll get on the team, but—”
“I’ll get on the team,” Josh confirmed evenly, making me smile. What a cocky little turd. I could have cried. He was a Casillas through and through.
Dallas must have gotten a kick out of his confidence too because he smiled that genuine, straight, white-tooth smile he’d used on Lou earlier. “I’ll hold you to it then, man. What’s your name again?”
“Josh.”
Our big, rough-looking neighbor with a shitty brother, who hung out at a motorcycle club’s bar, but somehow also coached little kid baseball with a biker, thrust a hand out at Josh. “I’m Dallas, and this is Trip. Nice to meet you.”
Chapter Six
“Joshua!”
“I’m coming!” the voice down the hall yelled in reply.
I tipped my chin into the air, eyeing the clock on the wall with a grimace. “You said that five minutes ago! Let’s go or you’re going to be late!” And we all knew how much I hated being late. It was one of my biggest pet peeves.
“Thirty seconds!”
Louie’s snort had me glancing down at him. He had his backpack on, and I knew without looking that it was filled with either the tablet he and Josh shared or his handheld game console, snacks, and a Capri Sun. I didn’t think Louie knew what it was like to not be prepared; he got that from his Larsen side because God knew he hadn’t gotten it from his dad. He had his shit together better than I did, as long as I didn’t take into consideration the number of things he lost after they left the house.
“He’s lying, isn’t he?” I asked him.
Sure enough, Lou nodded.
I sighed again, gripping the strap of my bag tighter. I’d stuffed it with three bottles of water and a banana. Where Lou was the prepared one, Josh was not.
“Josh, I swear to God—”
“I’m coming!” he hollered, the sound of what I was sure was his bag hitting the wall confirming his words.
“You got everything?” I asked as soon as he stopped in front of us, his bag thrown over his shoulder, bulky and heavy. I stopped asking him if he needed help a year ago. Big boys wanted to be big boys and carry their own stuff around. So be it.
“Yeah,” he replied quickly.
I blinked. “You got your helmet?”
“Yeah.”
I blinked again. “So what’s that on the coffee table?”
His face turned pink before he lunged for the helmet he’d left there the night before. Last year, I’d made him a laminated checklist he needed to go through before going to practice. If I’d had to drive back home to pick up a glove or socks again, I would have screamed. Looking back on my childhood now, I wasn’t sure how my mom hadn’t dropped me off at the fire station. I used to forget everything.
“Uh-huh,” I muttered before waving him forward to go through the door first, followed by Lou and then Mac.
Josh was huffing and puffing as we drove to the facility where the 11U Texas Tornado played. In the two weeks since Trip and our neighbor had invited him to try out for his team, he’d been making either my dad, Mr. Larsen, or me go out and play with him nearly daily. I could tell the fire in the furnace of his little heart was stoked and more than ready to go for a sport he’d been playing since he was three years old, running to the wrong base.
We’d both looked up the team one night to make sure they were legit. They were; they’d won a good number of tournaments, too. The last two years, they won State, and they’d done well at Worlds. Sure enough, both Trip and Dallas were shown in several of the pictures posted on their page, tall and obviously tattooed and not looking at all like the kind of men who would coach boys a fourth of their sizes. I’d also learned my boss’s cousins’ full names: Trip Turner and Dallas Walker.
I’d met a lot of parents who ended up coaching their children’s teams because they had been unhappy with who had been teaching their kids in the past, but it was still weird. Trip was a member of a motorcycle club, for God’s sakes. I had no idea if Dallas was or not, but I figured that was a negative because I’d yet to see a motorcycle come down the street. Weren’t bikers supposed to be doing biker stuff instead of spending entire weekends at tournaments and teaching kids values? And what was biker stuff anyway?
The important lesson I seemed to keep forgetting was that you couldn’t always judge a book by its cover.
So, if Josh wanted to try out, I wasn’t going to stop him. All I could do was hope he kicked ass and kept it together. None of us liked to lose. Him especially.
The facility where the team practiced at was about a twenty-minute drive away, located near the edge of town. They shared the space with a softball branch. With only ten minutes to spare before the tryouts were set to start, I rushed Josh and Lou out of the car.