Page 49 of Sean's Sunshine
“So what are we going to do?” Sean asked delicately.
“Stalk them.” He wasn’t even sorry about it either. “I’m going to park down the street, scope out the place, and make sure the old man isn’t there and the kids aren’t running with more punks, like Miguel, or shooting smack, or any of a thousand shitty things that could have happened while I was gone.”
Oh, that rankled. His entire life he’d thought, “Hey, the old man is a complete asshole, but at least the kids are okay.” And then he got kicked out, and he thought, “Well, this sucks, but at least the kids will be okay.” Except his little brother was at the park looking like he was about to break into Billy’s boyfriend’s car, and Billy’s sister had gotten married and moved the fuck out of the house. Where the fuck was Berto—erm, Robert? He was the next oldest; he’d be, what? Seventeen? A senior in high school? Lily would be a freshman? Then Miguel, and finally Cora—short for Corazon because she was the family’s heart, right? She’d be nine years old. Was she homealone? Three years Billy had been building a wall between his heart and these kids he’d spent his life caring for, and one hug from his little brother and the wall was crumbling, and he was falling apart.
“Hey,” Sean said softly. “It’s not your fault. You were kicked out of their lives. You didn’t run away from them.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t make a whole lot of effort to go back, either,” Billy retorted bitterly.
“You were beaten and kicked out,” Sean snapped, and Billy was actually heartened because all that patience worried him. “And you know what?You were a kid too.”
“I was twenty years old when I got kicked out!” Billy retorted. “Remember? Me, skating on the old man’s rent?”
“You think that’s the reason you didn’t leave?” Sean sounded disbelieving. “You really think that?”
“Yes!” He paused. “No.” He sighed. “Yeah, no. Probably not.”
Sean sighed too. “I get it—you were the oldest. So was I. I made sure my little sisters weren’t picked on, and Charlie and I had each other’s backs. I fed the kids when the folks were at work, and I made sure the other kids were dressed before school and occupied everyone when the grown-ups were doing what they had to do to have a household. Iget it. You were responsible.”
“They were mine,” Billy said, turning onto Cannonball and all but groaning. God. He’d known his parents needed both incomes, but this street.
“Sure they were,” Sean said gently, looking around. “But your parents were the ultimate authority, and you know what? They let you down. They ripped that part of your life away from you. You want to know why you didn’t go back? Because you were too busy trying to figure out who you were without them.That’swhy you didn’t go back. So that’s fine. Let’s go stalk your family.”
Billy scowled and parked the car across the street and a couple houses down from the duplex his brother had indicated. The house they were in front of had a neatly trimmed lawn, and while all the shutters were drawn, the porch was at least swept. But that was not the case with the rest of the duplexes on the block. There were a lot of ragged lawns on that block, a lot of cracked driveways and sidewalks. Trees that had only been trimmed by the city to make way for power lines and cars but still hung dangerously over the duplexes themselves, and cars that had been parked for months, if not years, each one with an accretion of dust, pollen, and detritus.
Billy muttered the house number he was watching, and together he and Sean monitored the outside of a beige stucco duplex with cracked walls and sagging gutters. The lawn was too displaced by the roots of a giant tree to be even, and the tree roots had cracked the sidewalk in front of the house and in the driveway as well.
The garage door opened, and Billy could see a battered minivan inside, and then a young girl—high school age, probably, with generous curves and a messy bun of curly black hair on top of her head—came out with a baby on her hip.
“Lily,” Billy murmured. “The baby is probably Teresa’s. Miguel said she got married and got out.”
“Cute kid,” Sean said, and Billy smiled.
“Yeah, well, the old man’s genes don’t suck. Just the old man.” The baby had the unmistakable features of Billy’s family. Pointed chin, wide-set brown eyes, little dimples they could see from across the street. This baby had a big happy smile, though, and Billy thought wistfully that he would have loved to bounce Teresa’s baby on his shoulder when it went through the colicky time, and how he would have been a proud uncle with a stroller, probably from the first day it had been born.
Billy swallowed hard, not sure he was going to get out of there without losing his shit and feeling like a complete asshole. His hand went to the ignition, and he thought desperately about bolting, when Lily, who had been about to set the baby—probably nine months old—on a blanket under the tree, paused and looked up at their car.
And she froze.
Reluctantly, Billy made eye contact with his younger sister, and the excitement he saw flash across her face almost made him want to run faster.
“Oh God,” he moaned. “I gotta… I gotta go.”
Sean’s hand on his thigh stopped him. “You’re an engineering student,” Sean said softly. “You’re helping a friend out while he heals. That is all any of them have to know for now. You understand me? Look at her.”
Lily waved madly, scooped up the baby, and walked across the street in her bare feet.
Against his will—not even with his permission—Billy found his hand had lifted and he was giving her a tentative wave back.
“I’m an engineering student,” he repeated. “I’ll be at Sac State next fall.”
“I’m just a friend.”
Billy turned to him fiercely and reached down to grab the hand on his thigh. “You’re my boyfriend,” he said. “And I’m helping you recover. Because you’re a police officer, and you were wounded in the course of doing your job.”
Sean’s lips quirked. “Detective,” he reminded Billy softly.
“That’s even better.”
