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“He’s going to help me fix up the house,” I said.
“Not buying it, Tyler,” she said, shaking her head. “Let’s go, Miguel.”
“What do you mean, not buying it?” I asked, temper flaring. “I’m trying to help you out!”
“Well, I don’t need your help.” She practically sneered, and I threw my hands up.
“This is what I get for trying to be a good guy.”
“Oh, please, Tyler. Like you would know?”
“But, I want to do this,” Miguel said, cutting through our bickering. “Tyler said he would supervise, He’d even write up reports and stuff.”
I blinked down at the kid. The word supervise had never even crossed my brain. And reports? The kid was reaching. Miguel shrugged and smiled, and damn if I didn’t start liking the kid.
“Right.” Juliette’s sarcasm was thick. “Tyler O’Neill supervising is a disaster waiting to happen.”
“Hey,” I said, “you don’t know that.”
“I know you, Tyler. And that’s enough.”
“Where are you going to take me?” Miguel asked. And from the way Juliette’s face went pale I knew it was the right question.
“Can’t imagine having a kid down at the station all day is going to go unnoticed by Mayor Bourdage.” Man, it was still weird that Gatean was mayor.
Juliette chewed her lip and then despite the impressionable minor and her old boyfriend standing witness she swore, long and loud. Creatively.
There’s my girl.
And really, in the end, that’s why I was doing this. I owed her. I owed her big.
7
It was like The Twilight Zone or something. A man comes back to his hometown with the intention of staying at an empty house and before he knows it he’s saddled with his father, a juvenile would-be car thief and his…whatever the hell Juliette was to me—old girlfriend, first love, giant pain in various body parts.
“I will be checking up on him,” Juliette said, looking stony-eyed and serious. She sized me up and I felt as though I’d just been measured for my coffin. “Every day.”
“I don’t think that’s nece—”
“And you,” Juliette talked over me like I wasn’t there, turning all her attention to Miguel. “You will go to school tomorrow. Tell Ms. Jenkins you were in a fight with the football team or something, I don’t care. But you’re at school and then you’re here and I’ll make sure,” she said. “And if you’re so much as ten minutes—”
“I won’t be,” Miguel said, quick and eager, looking nothing like the ballsy kid who’d been on my stoop this morning. Now he was all exuberant puppy, bright-eyed and wagging tail.
“No funny stuff,” Juliette said to me and some kind of wiseass comment was right on the tip of my tongue, some kind of “screw you” because she was authority after all, despite being Juliette. I really did have this thing with people telling me what to do, but then she went and blinked and those wide hazel eyes weren’t so steely, weren’t so tough. “I’m counting on you, Tyler. And you’ve got to know how hard that is for me.”
I know, I thought. I broke your heart. I hurt you and hurt you again.
Maybe it was shame, maybe it was her eyes, or maybe it was the overly optimistic vibe coming off the kid, but whatever it was my smart-ass joke died on my lips and I nodded.
“I promise, Juliette. I really do.”
She snorted, her doubt like a whole other person standing on the porch, shaking its head at me.
“I’ll come here right after school tomorrow,” Miguel said. The kid was actually smiling—well, as much as he could without popping stitches.
He thinks he’s won. But that old saying about conning a con was poignantly true in this situation, particularly when the con happened to involve a house in terrible need of fixing up.
There would be no card playing, not even Go Fish. But the boy would work.
“This is totally nuts,” Juliette muttered. “I’m gonna lose my job over this garbage.”
“Everything will be cool,” Miguel said.
“It will be,” I added my own weak assurances.
Her eyes bounced between us and I tried to project responsible adult in her direction. “I’m crazy. I’m absolutely out of my mind,” she said, and turned, walking across the lawn to her car.
I stood next to the kid, watching her go, marvelling at the way the world worked, how in Bonne Terre, the joke was always on me.
I’d kill a cactus, I thought, flabbergasted. I live in a hotel for crying out loud.
I looked at the kid.
What am I going to do with you?
“So?” Miguel said once Juliette’s taillights vanished down the road. The boy rubbed his hands together as if he was about to sit down to a feast of gambling delights. “Where do we start? Five card? Texas hold ’em?”
I made a big point of looking at the front of the house. I flicked off some of the peeling white paint, examined the sad and neglected windowsills and bounced on a few of the sagging floorboards on the porch.
