“We go Del?” Wyatt asked hopefully as he peeled his crusts off and ate them.
“Not today, Wyatt,” Justin told him. “Del is busy today.”
Wyatt nodded solemnly, and Harper shot Justin a narrow look.
Justin took the opportunity to check his messages:
Hey. Everything okay in there? Missed you guys at breakfast.
His heart clenched as he typed out his response:
We’re ok. Have fun with Abigail. Ttyl.
They lingered as long as they could over their picnic, and then headed back to the house. It was lunch time, and Scarlett was due for a nap. Justin hoped that Wyatt would want one too, and that maybe Harper would stay in the room with them with a book or something. The less Uncle Steve saw of the kids, the less likely they’d do something to trigger his temper.
Deflect, deflect, deflect.
There was a beat-up old orange truck in the driveway when they got back, and the sound of a football game was blaring from the TV when they went inside. Justin took the kids to their room, and changed Scarlett on Harper’s bed before putting her into her crib.
“Do you want to take a nap too, Wyatt?” he asked.
Wyatt shook his head and frowned.
“Okay,” Justin said. “How about you and Harper read for a while?”
Harper pressed her mouth together like she was about to go off on a tirade, but then she just nodded, and grabbed a picture book from under her bed and climbed up onto her mattress. “Let’s read this one, Wyatt.”
Justin closed the door on them and went into the living room.
“Hey,” he said to Uncle Steve. “I’m back. Did you want anything?”
“We got any chips?” Steve asked, cracking open a beer.
“I don’t think so.” Justin looked at Uncle Steve’s friend. He was a thin, sallow guy with sharp features and scraggly facial hair. He was wearing a flannel shirt, faded jeans, and a trucker’s cap pulled low over his face. Justin didn’t recognize him.
The guy was sitting up and leaning over the scarred coffee table. He was rolling a joint, and Justin wanted to tell him not to, but the man was Uncle Steve’s friend, and this was Uncle Steve’s house.
“I could make you something for lunch,” he said instead.
“You’re a regular little Martha Stewart, ain’t you?” Uncle Steve said.
The guy with the trucker cap snorted and his thin mouth turned up into a sly smile. “He sure is.”
Justin fought down his flash of panic that the guy somehow knew. Knew that he was gay, and that the sly smile at Uncle Steve’s Martha Stewart joke was some kind of dig at him for it. He struggled to keep his voice even when he spoke. “I was just gonna put some frozen pizza in the oven.”
“Yeah,” Uncle Steve said, his eyes fixed on the TV. “Do that.”
Justin retreated, his heart pounding.
* * * *
The rest of the day was quiet. Uncle Steve and his friend—Al, Justin had discovered—drank and watched TV, and the kids generally kept quiet enough to keep off Uncle Steve’s radar. There was one incident when Scarlett started crying, but Justin rushed to her and changed her, and then took her outside until she calmed down again.
Still, Justin felt like he was crawling out of his skin by the time the day was ending and he was helping the kids get showered and dressed for bed. The kids couldn’t live like this, that much was clear. Justin didn’t want them growing up the way that he had, scared of his own shadow in the times that Uncle Steve had been living with them, and acting out whenever he wasn’t. He wanted the kids to grow up in a normal household, with a family who loved them. Not one they had to walk on eggshells around.
He carried Scarlett into her room, and put her down in the crib that was jammed between the beds. He helped Wyatt clamber around the crib to get to his bed.
“Goodnight,” he said, his heart breaking when Wyatt waved at him in response and Harper glowered. He switched the light off and pulled the door shut.
Al was still here, and the TV was still blaring, so Justin went and sat in the kitchen. Clearly he wasn’t going to be able to sleep until Uncle Steve went to bed and freed up the couch. Hopefully Al would have left by then too.
Justin scrolled through the messages on his phone. Most of them were from Del, and they were old, and they were about stuff like homework and lunches and what the kids were up to while Justin was at work. Some people might think they were mundane, but to Justin they felt magical. His eyes stung as he read back through them all, matching them to his memories. He missed Del, and he needed Del, and right then in that moment when he felt the loneliest he ever had, all his reasons for having taken the kids home seemed so stupid. Maybe Del did want them all to be his family. Maybe Uncle Steve wouldn’t care if Justin was gay. Maybe Emily would be able to sign something saying it was okay for Justin and the kids to live with Del. And maybe Justin’s ideas of pride and being Del’s equal partner were just fantasies. Because how could he be? That wasn’t a thing he could fix in a weekend, or even a few months on his own. It’s not like Del was standing still and waiting for Justin to catch him up. Justin would never be able to do that.