Page 9 of Love By the Slice

She might not see that anytime soon because of her class schedule, so he added, “But I asked the middle schoolers to tell him to come.”

Rowan was about the age when you had to sit a boy down and say, “This is deodorant, and you need to use it every day. These are socks, and you need to change them every day.” Could it be more? A while back, Greg had heard about some people having a weird body odor because of a medical problem, but he couldn’t remember what they were supposed to do. Go to a doctor, probably. Shelly couldn’t make the kid go to a doctor, could she?

It was an hour until Shelly replied, “Yeah, I figured. When will he come back?”

It hadn’t occurred to Greg until this moment that if the boys came back with their Rowan-coupon expecting a discount, it wouldn’t happen unless Greg was the one behind the counter. But Greg wasn’t on every day. In fact, he wouldn’t be on for a few days now.

He texted, “That might be a problem.”

“We’re going to have to tell Ezra and Lacey what’s going on. We can figure this out.” That came pretty quickly, followed by, “Did you get a sense of why he’s a pariah?”

Greg texted, “They said he smells bad and won’t talk to anyone.”

Dead silence from his phone.

Greg assembled and cooked three pizzas by the time Shelly replied again. “We need to help him.”

Wasn’t that the goal all along?

She chased that with, “We should find out what grade he’s in and ask the school to do a wellness check, and then we should see if we can help. Maybe get him better clothes. Maybe access to a laundromat. I hope they don’t remove him from the home.”

Greg replied, “Why would they?”

“An underfed kid who’s not getting clean clothes and can’t take a shower?” Then a pause. “You’re right, they’d probably leave him there. Social services isn’t the best.”

That sounded bitter, so he replied, “And here you said social services didn’t get the respect it should get.”

She shot back, “Not always that much to respect.” Followed a second later by, “Sorry. It’s just a sore subject. They’re underfunded and overworked. Anyhow, we should figure something out for him.”

Greg took an order over the phone, then added it to the stack of orders coming in online. This wouldn’t be a terribly busy night, but they’d sell out the Loveless One Hundred. The rush and ebb of work gave him time to think.

Shelly had leaped right to assuming Rowan didn’t have clean clothes or access to a shower. Could that be true? Could kids be homeless? It made sense, but probably it was just a thing that would work itself out over time.

She texted him, “I’m going to alert the school for a wellness check now, before we talk to him.”

The school would fix it. Or maybe Rowan’s family just needed their washing machine replaced. But the school should have resources and stuff. It would be fine.

She texted an hour later. “I wish we knew where he lived.”

That would be a massive breech of privacy, right? To go track down the kid’s family and show up at their door? “What would you do?”

“Make sure the family’s all right. Figure out what’s wrong.”

And then, “No one ever did that for us.”

Greg replied, “No one?”

Based on how Ezra described their childhood, Greg found that hard to believe. Ezra said some days there hadn’t been food at all.

Shelly replied, “No one who did anything about it. We got gift baskets from time to time, but nothing to get us out of there.”

Shelly was aiming straight for the worst case scenario here: wholesale neglect and starvation, as opposed to maybe a mischievous kid who forgot to change his socks. The school would ring the doorbell, and it would turn out Rowan didn’t know you were supposed to use two laundry detergent pods for a full load.

It wasn’t really their problem to solve, in other words. But he’d help Shelly because she seemed so driven.

And, anyhow, it was keeping her talking. They hadn’t texted this much in the past couple of years, so if they could help a kid and he could get her closer to him, well, those were two good things that could happen.

CHAPTER SIX

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