Page 36 of Out Of A Fix

“Do you remember where she got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe let’s go get some tomorrow, if you’re not too sore after I help you clean your room and get organized.”

“It’s not as bad as you thought it was gonna be, is it?”

I shook my head in response.

“Listen, Nash—always remember that Darwin’s a narc, and he makes everything sound worse than it is. It’s like his superpower.”

I chuckled.

“I’m not a narc,” Darwin muttered, at which point we both realized, when we turned around to look, that he was standing at the now open front door.

“Oh you totally are,” Griff snapped at him.

Ignoring his brother, he closed the door behind him and then padded across the porch in his socks to take a seat on the other side of me. He leaned as well.

“You all right?” I asked him.

“You weren’t going to let them come in, were you?"

“No, I was not.”

“I knew it,” Darwin said with a sigh. “When the officers go, can we watch a movie?”

“You wanna watch a movie?” Griff sounded surprised.

“Yeah. Why?”

“You always wanna study.”

“Yeah, but tomorrow’s not a school day, so we can stay up later.”

“That’s true,” I agreed. “What movie?”

“I was going to say the Jaws one you were talking about, but I looked it up, and a dog dies in it. Tatum can’t watch it. And I don’t really like it when animals die either. I’m fine with people dying, as long as it’s not a main character.”

“That’s not terrible or anything,” I muttered.

“But don’t let Tatum talk you into any crime documentaries. She’s too young to be watching those anyway. She’s gonna have bad dreams. She’s just a kid.”

“I appreciate the advice, Dar,” I said, and he nodded smugly as we all sat there together and waited for the trash to be removed from the front yard.

FIVE

Sometimes change is gradual and happens over weeks and months. In other instances, it’s abrupt and shakes you up, and that can be good or bad. In the case of the Duchesne household, the events that began with me showing up turned everything upside down in the very best way. They started talking together, and then individually they started making different decisions, and their responses to things altered. And of course I didn’t know any different, but I got observations from each one.

“Griff said I could come in his room with Dar and play Minecraft,” Tatum told me excitedly on Monday night.

His room was clean, I could see the hardwood floor and the great rugs he and his mother had picked out, and now he had space for his siblings.

“Dar came on our walk again,” Griff said to me when we got home on Tuesday night. Griff had stayed home that day from school, but tomorrow he was going. “Two nights in a row.”

“Yeah…” I squinted at him.

“You don’t get it. He never takes time out to do anything but study. I thought his brain was gonna explode.”