I wasn’t convinced a sprig of parsley trapped in melted plastic was on our side, but I wasn’t fussy. I’d take all the help we could get.
CHAPTER 12
ZEKE
“Why is Callum still here?” Jos crossed his arms and planted himself in the kitchen doorway, his school backpack still slung over one shoulder.
“He’s staying for a week,” I hedged. Callum’s car was in our drive, but he was out running right now after having skated at practice all morning. I got tired just watching him, although I was not sad about those thighs. We’d run together yesterday morning and watching those thighs in action had almost made it worth being badly smoked and gasping for breath halfway home.
“Yeah, butwhy? He has a house right there.” Jos tilted his head towards the Fitzpatricks’.
“Because his uncle just moved in and Callum doesn’t get along with him, remember? So he’s going to hang out here for a bit. And it works out, because I start night shifts tomorrow, so you’ll have someone around.”
“Why do you have to work different shifts like that? It sucks.”
“It’s my job.”
“It’s stupid. Why would you make cops change their shift every week? Aren’t you, like, sleep deprived? Doesn’t it make you grumpy and likely to shoot people?”
I chuckled. “I sure hope being grumpy doesn’t make me shoot people.” When Jos huffed a frustrated sound, I added, “Different departments do it different ways. A couple of places I know, the cops do two twelve-hour days, then two twelve-hour nights, and then they’re off for five days, then they do it again. That would be worse.”
“Yuck.”
“And then there are places where the shifts rotate every three months, and some where the officers pick a shift and they don’t change.”
“So why aren’t you working one of those places?”
“You want to move across the country?”
“No! I want things to stay the same. I want to go to school and come home and eat dinner and go to bed and not wonder where you are or who’s in the house.”
“You know where I am. There’s a calendar on the fridge.” I’d put my schedule and Callum’s and Jos’s school on one page, and stuck it up with magnets. We had the info online, of course, but seeing it all together on paper made things easier.
“That’s not what I meant.”
Well, what did you mean?I converted that to, “I’m listening.” I’d been reading parenting-a-teen blogs, trying to learn something, andlistening not confrontingwas high on the list.
Jos stared at me for a while, and I wondered if he’d just shrug and head to his room like he had way too often in the month since Krystal died. Finally, he said, “Night shifts are the most dangerous. I looked it up. There’s, like, more crime and less cops and it’s dark and everything. Why would you want todothat? Why are you a cop anyway?”
“Because it’s what I’m trained to do,” I hedged.
Jos snorted at my bullshitting. “That’s no kind of answer. I never thought… When you babysat for me, you were the oneletting me do stuff Mom and Dad never did. You snuck me cookies after I brushed my teeth. You let me sit on the kitchen counter.”
Jos had been a monkey as a toddler. It was morecouldn’t stop himthanlet him. But I guess I didn’t flip my lid over it like Krystal had.
“Dad was more like a cop,” Jos went on. “I could see, if he’d retired, he might’ve…” His voice trailed off thickly. He coughed and said, “But not you.”
“Truthfully?” I said. “I’m not entirely sure how I ended up here. Part of it was Dad, losing him. I wanted—” Wanted him to be proud of me, especially since he was struggling with me being gay. “Wanted to honour his memory, to do some good in the world, like he would’ve if he’d lived to retire. I’m not the military type, but I could do law enforcement.”
“What about the other part?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t have any particular talent, nothing I really wanted instead. Joining the police force was straightforward, and it let me support myself.” Krystal might not have cut me out of the will, but she did let me know, after Dad died, that even with his benefits, there was no extra money for college and it was up to me to figure myself out.
“So you’re just going to keep doing it till someone shoots you?”
“Jos, I told you, it’s not that dangerous.” The worst part really was the stress and the toll of shift work and the nasty stuff we saw and worked around, day to day. More cops died of mental health issues than crime, but I wasn’t going to put that fear in my little brother’s head.
“Do you even like it? Mom’s dead and Dad’s dead and we can’t make them proud or happy or anything now, because they’re in a hole in the ground. So why do you even want to do it anymore?”
