Stepping out the kitchen door to make sure the kids were behaving, Mitch heard Riley stomping over to him at a run. Coming to a stop right in front of him, Riley craned his neck and fixed him with an eager look. "Can we play with your tools and stuff now?" Even before he finished his question, DJ, the older and wiser brother, was already shaking his head as he came up behind him.
"After lunch," Mitch said to Riley, but he looked kind of horrified at the prospect.
As Riley sighed with disappointment at the delay, DJ dragged him off to see some bug Sammy and the kittens had found.
Rico clapped Mitch on the back. "Like you wouldn't have loved playing with all those tools when you were a kid."
"Of course I would and hopefully some sane adult would have stopped me before I maimed myself," Mitch grumbled. "You know we never got to have Sammy's friends over before now."
"Really?" Rico said.
"I didn't know any of her friends' parents. I was always struggling to make enough money, rushing to drop her off and pick her up," Mitch said. "I could never arrange anything like this."
"You missed out on all the stomping and shrieking," Rico said as he heard the kids shrieking and laughing about something. He went off to investigate. "I'll go see what that's all about and call them in to have lunch."
A few minutes later, the kids tromped into the kitchen ahead of Rico. With a lot of scraping of chairs, they sat down, and Mitch and Rico got to hear all about how they found a bug then lost the bug and Natalie tried to climb under DJ's shirt and then the shrieking started. While the kids talked over each other at the kitchen table, Rico went over to help Mitch with the pasta.
As Rico sniffed at what he made, Mitch told him about it. "It's seashell pasta with cream sauce and peas. Sammy likes it like that, and I hope the boys will too. But if you want to wake it up, you can add more parmesan and black pepper."
"I do like my pasta woke," Rico said and fixed a plate for himself and Mitch too. "I woke up yours too."
As they ate and all the kids said they liked his pasta, Mitch looked pleased.
Sammy was so proud of his cooking skills. "My dad made cupcakes too. He put our names on them with sprinkles," she bragged.
Mitch had gotten lucky with the boys' names. Putting DJ and Ry on two cupcakes wasn't as big a challenge as Sammy's name, but Mitch got it done.
Letting the kids sit on the porch to have dessert, Mitch served up the cupcakes and Rico took pictures. He captured the moment Riley licked the peanut butter frosting off his cupcake and got some on his nose and his chin.
"You licked off your name and all the frosting," Sammy said, appalled.
"Yeah," Riley said, not the least bit contrite.
"Now you don't have any," she said, pointing at the cupcake catastrophe he had created.
With sad eyes, Riley looked down at his cupcake and blinked. "Yeah," he said once again and scrunched up his face feeling the weight of what he had done.
Mitch let out a big sigh, went inside and came back out with the mixing bowl that still had a little frosting left in it. He scraped up the last of it and spread it on top of Riley's cupcake.
"There you go," Mitch said as Riley beamed up at him in gratitude.
"Don't lick it off this time, Ry," DJ told him and both he and Sammy watched him to make sure he didn't. Under their eagle-eyed supervision, Riley ate the cupcake without further incident, and Rico couldn't stop laughing.
"One cupcake, one small boy, so much drama," he said to Mitch. "That could have been tragic. You saved the day."
As he grinned at him, Rico noticed how happy Mitch looked. It was like Rico was seeing him the way he could be, relaxed and free to enjoy himself. Rico couldn't help but hope that at least some of that was because Mitch was happy to be with him.
Chapter 17
Enrico on his doorstep first thing in the morning was like starting his day with ten cups of coffee. He gave Mitch a jolt, made his heart speed up and his body feel more alive. Mitch kept waiting for the effect to wear off, but the more he saw of Enrico, the more powerful the jolt became.
Today they were going to be tackling all the stuff that was stored in the basement. Mrs. Del Rio planned to have a charity yard sale, and it all had to be sorted and brought up. She would be by later, but for now Enrico was getting what they needed ready. He assembled some boxes and took them down to the basement.
Standing at the top of the stairs, Sammy anxiously waited for him to come up. When he did, she breathed a sigh of relief.
"Now that your dad put in more lights down there, it's not so scary. You can come down too, and we can go exploring," Enrico told her. "You want to find some more pretty junk?"
Seeing that he was ready to go right now, Mitch asked him, "Shouldn't we wait for your grandmother?"
