He lugged the books to the car and then went on his way to the next stop. He ended up getting the kids toys and blankets and some other things. His car was more than half full with stuff by the time he got to the grocery store, and filled to the brim when he got out of there.
Feeling accomplished, he drove back home, humming along with Fall Out Boy on his Spotify playlist.
* * * *
The evening and the next day went by in a blur of finding recipes he could “fix” and cooking experiments. He was so very into his job, that when he finally got a decent, healthy tomato sauce together and made some meatballs to go with it, he was excited enough to call Justin.
“Del, what’s wrong?” Justin asked, his voice rough with sleep.
Del looked at the time on his microwave. Shit.
“Nothing, shit, sorry, I didn’t—I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”
“No, I’m awake now, what’s going on?” Justin sounded much more awake now, and Del banged his forehead against the kitchen cabinet door.
“Sorry…I got an idea and cooked and…I may have gotten a bit too enthusiastic.”
For a moment there was silence, and then Justin chuckled. “Will it keep until lunchtime tomorrow?”
Del looked at the bubbling sauce and let out a sigh. “Yeah, it will.” Then he realized Justin had a point. “Shit, that’s another thing I have to think about!”
“Okay, okay, Del? Get some sleep. I’m dropping Wyatt and Scarlett over as soon as I get Harper on the bus. Remember? Tomorrow’s Monday?”
Del, already distracted, made a noncommittal hum. Then he caught up on the fact that Justin wanted him to acknowledge his words. “Yes, Monday, right. I’ll be up and ready. I’ll pack some of this for your lunch so don’t make yourself anything.”
“All right. Stop cooking, Del. It’s nighttime.” Justin chuckled again. “Seriously, Del. Get some sleep, you’ll need it. Goodnight.”
“Night,” Del said, put the phone down, and looked around the kitchen.
Luckily he was good at cleaning after himself. That was the first thing he’d learned in the first kitchen he worked at. Making a mess and leaving it wasn’t only unsanitary, it also made things dangerous. He still remembered the tongue lashing one of his fellow trainees had gotten from the head chef when he’d forgotten a knife on the table. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but the guy had used it to cut chicken and they were prepping beef next, and contamination could be a horrible thing.
Del left the food cooling, cleaned what there was to clean in the kitchen, and then went to take a shower. By the time he got back downstairs to put away the cooled sauce and meatballs, he was seriously dragging his feet. Yeah, he needed all the energy he could muster for tomorrow. Justin had been right.
He went upstairs to his bedroom and faceplanted in bed, hoping the school bus would wake him up like usual, because frankly he couldn’t be bothered to find his cell and set an alarm.
Within two minutes, he was asleep. 9
First, Justin had been drowning, and then barely treading water, but now, two weeks after he’d come back to Enterprise, he thought that maybe he was actually starting to get somewhere. Having Del watch the kids while Justin went to work was like winning the lottery—though Justin worried that looking after them was more of a time suck than Del let on. It had to be, right, when Justin was somehow finding time to get so much else done even now he was working three days a week? He worked Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Mondays, because that’s when the new stock came in, and Fridays and Saturdays because those were the feed store’s busiest times. Justin mostly lugged bags of grain and bales of hay out to people’s trucks, and stocked shelves whenever he wasn’t doing that. Sometimes he went and hung out by the chicks and the ducklings, and wondered if the kids would like it if they got some chicks. Maybe he could do that in the future, and start repaying Del for all his babysitting with fresh eggs or something. It wasn’t much, but it would be a start, right?
So somehow, despite having more time in his week taken up with working, Justin felt like he was finally getting on top of things. He’d fixed the front door so that it actually opened smoothly now, and only knocked over the old umbrella stand twice in the process. He also threw out one of the umbrellas in it, since it stank of mold, and wiped down the others, and the old walking stick that he thought had maybe belonged to his grandfather. He’d scrubbed the bathroom walls and ceiling down with bleach to get rid of the mold while the kids slept one night, and he’d even managed to get so far ahead on the laundry that he’d done all the bedding and curtains one day. It made the house stink a little less of old cigarette smoke. There was still a faint unpleasant smell of something dead in Justin and Scarlett’s room, but Justin wasn’t quite ready to go knocking holes in the walls to look for it. He settled for blasting the room with Lysol spray for now
It wasn’t like he and the kids spent too much time at the house anyway. The kids spent most of their time with Del, and so did Justin when he wasn’t working. He’d worried at first that they were all intruding, or that Del would get sick of them or something, but his broad smile whenever he opened the door to them seemed just as genuine as ever.