Gavin Chalmers: booooooooo
Alex Jones: Have you met the other owner yet? You have to tell us what he’s like
Joe didn’t know why any of them cared. It wasn’t like he planned to keep the house with this guy. From the sound of things, it was in rough shape. They’d probably just agree to put it up for sale and split the proceeds. Joe could use some extra money to tuck away. Meg was likely to land a scholarship or two, what with the swimming thing, but Gavin, Will, and Alex might want to go to college one day too. Joe couldn’t afford to just send them, but he could help. And he could stand to put some money away for himself, since winter tended to be slow on the whole tree-trimming-and-landscape-work front.
Meg Mitchell: Yeah, how’d he know Grandma DeeDee anyway?
Gavin Chalmers: Maybe he was her boyfriend!
Alex Jones: Gross
Gavin Chalmers: Yeah sorry didn’t think that one through
Alex Jones: Is he a senior citizen?
Meg Mitchell: Is he a serial killer?
Will Wiebe: Is he hot?
All three of them reacted to that with the finger-pointing emoji. Et tu, Meg? Joe thought. Evidently being uninterested in ever having a love life of her own wouldn’t stop her from meddling in his. Who raised these hellions?
Oh. Right.
Joe Romano: Oh my God
Joe Romano: I’m muting this chat
He didn’t. He just put his whole phone on mute.
Then he frowned, looked at the time, and opened the chat again.
Meg Mitchell: He’s just worried about you cause you haven’t dated anybody since Assface
Alex Jones: You need to get over him. He sucks
Gavin Chalmers: And the best way to get over him is to get under someone else!
Jesus Christ.
Joe Romano: Aren’t you all supposed to be in class right now?!
He swore to God these children were going to make his hair fall out before he turned thirty, and then he’d have to kill them all.
They weren’t technically his kids, even if he loved them like they were. He’d been Meg’s first swim instructor, back when she was a little tadpole of a thing, seven years old and all arms and legs. Of the bunch, Meg had the best family life. Her parents worked a lot back then, but Grandma DeeDee was a steady presence; she’d supervised every lesson Joe gave. Meg also had the only house with a pool, so Alex, Gavin, and Will had gravitated to her place and often ended up waiting around for her to finish. Joe had clocked the way they watched the water, the holes worn in the toes of Alex’s sneakers, the fraying hem of Gavin’s shorts, and then he’d seen them all flailing in the shallow end, and—look. Meg was never going to become a Division I swim champ if she had trauma from one of her friends drowning in her pool. It wasn’t like it was that hard to teach the rest of them how to stay alive.
And if Grandma DeeDee suspected Joe did it because he was an only child of divorced Mexican Catholic and Italian Catholic parents, and all his cousins had gobs of siblings and he’d always been kind of lonely, she was kind enough not to say so out loud, and simply suggested she repay his kindnesses with lunch.
But lunch and swimming lessons turned into driving them home when it started raining or got too dark to ride their bikes on unlit county roads, digging out his old clothes for the boys, and sitting with the group and DeeDee to cheer Meg on at her first swim meet. It turned into a cheering section of his own at church-league softball games, a car full of kids to take out for ice cream after, and a house that sometimes rang with laughter.
Joe was furiously glad he’d lucked into these four siblings by choice. But like hell was he going to let Gavin fail grade twelve English.
Gavin Chalmers: Whoops gotta go bye Joe!
Joe sighed, checked the clock again, and opened a message to Starling instead.
Joe Romano: Remember when you said adopting four children as a teenager was a bad idea?
Starling Bell: Will asked you if the house guy is hot, didn’t he?
