“Grandma got the shits.” Emmie deadpanned, laying her stick across the bar top as she crawled up on the stool next to me.
“Emelia Elizabeth!” Frankie snapped, pointing her finger at her as Toby blew his whistle loudly again.
“Swear jar!” He yelled like an official on the ice, complete with hand motions. “Two dollars for a four-letter word not starting with an F!”
He tried climbing up onto the stool on my other side, and slipped, but I caught him just in the nick of time and put him on the seat. He grinned like a playboy and winked at me.
Emmie didn’t miss a beat and shrugged her shoulders. “It can cross out mom’sfuckballsfrom this morning. Which is five dollars times two because it was before eight am.”
I choked on my beer and coughed right before it came out my nose.
Emmie blinked at me without a lick of embarrassment, and I decided she was my favorite. The girl was just like her mom. “That’s very generous of you.”
“I’m cool like that.” She fired back.
“What in the ever-loving world is going on right now?” Frankie interrupted, hands on her hips as we all looked across the bar at her.
“I told you.” Emmie looked over her mom’s head at the Yosemite game playing. “Grandma’s sick. She can’t watch us tonight.”
“She just dropped you off?” Frankie asked, pulling her phone from her back pocket. “I didn't even get a call from her.”
Her daughter sighed as if the whole thing was tiresome, “She was shi—I mean, pooping her brains out, Mom. She said she was going to have to stand in the shower and let it come out both ends like you did that time you ate oysters at that cookout on a date with that weirdo from the seafood truck that delivers frozen shrimp here.”
“Enough!” Frankie rubbed her forehead, chancing a glance at me before groaning in frustration. “I can’t do this right now, Emmie. I have to work.”
“And Toby and I are going to be perfect angels while we wait for you to be done.” Emmie said in a robot voice, like she was repeating strict instructions from their grandma herself.
“Are there nachos tonight, Mama?” Toby asked, leaning up on his knees to look at the snack bar across the wide-open space, and Frankie snapped her fingers in his face, drawing his eyes back to her.
“If I catch you anywhere near that snack bar tonight, I’m going to sell you to Stew. And he’s going to sell you to the circus. Do you hear me, sir?” She sighed, looking out over the space. “What the hell am I going to do?”
She wasn’t talking to me, and in reality, I had no business answering her. But I did anyway.
“You’re going to sell them to me.” I said, glancing at Toby, whose eyes rounded slightly. “We have all kinds of things that they can help with tonight.”
“Really?” Emmie cut in, pulling on my sleeve. “On the ice things?”
“Hockey!” Toby let out a shrill scream, throwing his hands up into the air and blowing his whistle. “Hockey! Hockey! Hockey!” He chanted like he was calling for a fight on the ice.
I snorted and looked at Frankie. “We can keep them busy for you.”
“No.” Frankie shook her head and then looked over my shoulder, stiffening slightly. “No, I’ll figure something else out.”
“For what?” Trav asked, coming up behind me as Emmie jumped onto her knees to face him.
“My grandma’s sick, Mom’s stressed, and Sunshine said he’s going to buy us.”
Trav gave me a side-eye as I chuckled before explaining. “Frankie is in a jam, we’re not doing anything crazy tonight at practice, and we’re going to entertain the kids while we do it so Frankie can relax.”
She snorted behind me with an exasperated look on her face. “I haven’t done that in years, fellas. Besides, you have no idea what you’re getting yourselves into.”
“We got it.” Travis said without missing a beat, which surprised me. Not that he didn’t like kids, he coached youth clinics regularly, but he also wasn’t the type of guy to invite chaos into his life. Respectfully, Frankie’s kids were chaos wrapped in a feral raccoon layer of sticky energy. Maybe with all twenty of us guys on deck, we might be able to keep them out of trouble until the end of her shift. Maybe. “Don’t worry about it.”
I looked at her and hated the way she didn’t bite back at him or argue like she did with me. Instead, she chewed on her bottom lip, looking like she wanted to, but ended up sighing and deflating a bit. “I’ll see if I can get someone to come in and cover me.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I said as I stood up and caught Toby mid-superman jump off his stool, before lowering him to his feet. “We've got this.”
Frankie snorted as Travis and Emmie turned off toward the rink with doubtful eyes. “Good luck. And thanks.”
