“Is that Tripp?” Layne asked, sliding open the door, Blondie shot in and began instantly to dance around him. Once the dog was clear of the door, he threw the door to.
“What?” Tripp asked back as Layne walked to the coffeepot.
“You Tripp?” Layne repeated.
“Well…” Tripp stared at him, a funny look on his face, “yeah.”
Layne pulled the filter out of the coffeemaker. “You sure? See, the real Tripp doesn’t unload the dishwasher unless I’ve asked him ten times. I remember askin’ you to do it last night but that was only once. I got nine more to go.”
Tripp’s comically confused face split into a smile and he muttered, “Shut up, Dad,” before he turned back to the dishwasher.
“You feed Blondie?” Layne asked but he knew Tripp hadn’t because Blondie was dancing between both him and his son, unsure which one of them was going to end her enforced fast, and if she’d been fed she’d pick one or the other to bug.
“Not yet. Just got downstairs. She’s only been out a few minutes.” Tripp answered.
“I’ll get her after I make coffee. You get breakfast after you finish with that.”
“Okay,” Tripp agreed and shoved some plates into a cupboard.
Layne made the coffee and started to feed Blondie but stopped when he was about to plop the food in the dirty bowl. He stared at the bowl a second then cleaned it before he fed his son’s dog. By the time he set down the bowl, Blondie was beside herself and Layne added a trip to the Garden Center to his day’s agenda to buy her more bowls so they could put them in the dishwasher and she didn’t have her breakfast delayed.
Layne had a cup of coffee in his hand, his hips against the counter by the sink and Tripp was sitting at the island spooning up cereal when Jasper showed. He let his oldest son get his cereal and sit by his brother before he moved to stand in front of them at the island.
“Spoke to your Mom yesterday. She wants you guys to stay with me next week.”
Tripp had been looking at him while he talked and when he finished, his head dropped down to look at the milk in his bowl. Jasper had been looking at him too but his head didn’t drop down. Layne watched anger flash through his features before he looked away and Layne saw a muscle tick in his cheek.
This was another reason why he knew they were his boys. They’d pegged Stew before Layne even moved home. They didn’t like him and they didn’t like spending time with him. But more, they didn’t like him with their Mom.
Gabby might be a bitch to Layne but she loved her kids and they loved her. For this reason, Layne knew they were torn. When they spent time with her and Stew, when he got them back, they were both tense to the point of wired and it took a couple of days for them to settle in. Even not liking Layne, Jasper obviously liked him more than Stew because he relaxed when he was at Layne’s house. Then they’d go back and it’d happen all over again.
This caused Layne concern but neither of them had shared and he felt it important to let them deal with it how they saw fit. They needed him, they needed to man up and ask. Until then, it was up to them to cope.
They were torn because he knew they preferred to be at Layne’s house because Stew wasn’t there. But they didn’t want to be away from their Mom because Stew was there. If Stew wasn’t there, he wondered how they’d be. Tripp probably would take it in stride. Jasper would probably be more of an asshole.
“That cool with you guys?” Layne asked and they both looked at him.
“Yeah,” Tripp answered.
“Whatever,” Jasper muttered.
That was the best he was going to get from Jas and he’d take it.
Then Jasper decided to take his anger out on Layne and Layne knew this because Jasper stated, “Mrs. Astley is thirty-eight years old.”
This was a bizarre statement leading into unknown territory but considering he was referring to Raquel at all, Layne braced.
“Yeah,” Layne confirmed. “How’d you know that?”
“Kids know everything about Mrs. Astley,” Jasper answered.
Layne bet they did.
“You were twenty-five when Mom had me,” Jasper went on.
Layne studied his son and prompted, “Your point, Jas?”
“You said you lived with her before Mom,” Jasper replied.
Layne kept his eyes locked to his boy.
Layne had made the decision when he moved home that he would treat his sons, mostly, like men. Neither of them were kids anymore, not really, and both of them were smart. They had to learn how to be men from somewhere and Stew sure as fuck wouldn’t teach them how to be good ones, so Layne was going to do it. Therefore, he was straight with them, at all times, at all costs. They had to learn how to deal with whatever life threw at them and no one could tell you how to do that. You had to learn by experience.
Neither of them had asked about him getting shot, not yet. He was going to let them sort what they had to sort in their heads and then he was going to share more about who he was and what he did. That time was getting ripe, he knew it.
Therefore, Layne nodded to Jasper. “I did.”
Jasper got that look in his eye, the one he got when he was going to be more of an asshole teenaged kid than usual and Layne braced again.
“You like jailbait?”
“Jas,” Tripp muttered. He wasn’t a big fan of his brother’s asshole teenaged kid act either.
Jasper turned to his brother and defended himself. “She’s four years younger than Dad. They lived together before Mom, she was, like, a teenager, dude.”
Layne held onto his patience and studied his sons.
Then he made a decision.
“Don’t move, I’ll be back,” Layne ordered and walked out of the kitchen, up the stairs and to his desk. He pulled out a drawer, rifled through it and found the big manila envelope. He opened it, his fingers sifting through the pictures, he found the one he was looking for, pulled it out and walked back to his sons.
He resumed his place opposite them at the island and tossed the picture down in front of them. It skidded and Tripp’s hand shot out to stop it. He brushed it with his finger, twirling it so it was right side up to him and Jasper.
In it was a picture of Rocky. She was wearing jeans shorts, a tight pink t-shirt, her hair was down and around her shoulders and she was sitting on a high, cement wall next to a statue of a lion. They were at Purdue, her and Dave and Layne. She was seventeen and scouting universities, she’d later be accepted at Purdue as well as five other schools. She wanted to go to Purdue but she got hooked up with Layne and made the decision to stay closer to home so she’d picked Butler. Layne felt no guilt about this. Butler wasn’t sloppy seconds by a long shot.
Layne had always loved that picture. She’d been smiling, it was a little smile but the dimple in her right cheek had popped out. At seventeen, she’d made it to far beyond pretty, her sitting there, in her tight pink t-shirt, that smile on her face, young, the promise of a good life ahead of her, it was captivating both in person and in the photo. That smile, that t-shirt, her long legs exposed by her jeans shorts, ankles crossed, the promise on her face, it all defined why he’d fallen in love with her. He’d known her three weeks and in that instant, when he snapped that photo, he remembered looking through the lens and he’d lost his heart or, more to the point, gave it to her.
“That was taken about three weeks after we started going out. She was seventeen,” Layne told his boys.
“Wow. She’s pretty,” Tripp mumbled and his head came up to look at his Dad. “But she’s prettier now.”
He wasn’t wrong.
“Seventeen?” Jasper asked, his tone biting. “That’s sick, you were twenty-one.”
Jasper wasn’t wrong either. Twenty and twenty-four was okay, nineteen and twenty-three was still good, anything below that, the guy in his twenties, the girl in her teens, was frowned upon in that ‘burg.