I just managed to hold in my sigh as I turned to face her house. I waved.

“She’s waving at you,” Louie’s helpful ass explained.

Damn.

“I’m sleepy,” he added immediately afterward.

I didn’t need to look at Josh to know he had to be exhausted too. They were both usually in bed by nine on nights that didn’t fall on baseball days. “Okay. You two can go inside while I go see what she wants, but lock the door behind you, and if someone tries to break in”—this was highly unlikely, but stranger shit had happened—“Lou, call the cops and blow that train horn under your bed I know your Aunt Missy bought you for your birthday while Josh tries to break a skull in with his bat. Got it?”

They both seemed to deflate with relief that I wasn’t forcing them to go over to Miss Pearl’s.

“I’ll only be fifteen minutes tops, okay? Lock the door! Don’t turn on the stove!” I said, watching them nod as I started off across the street. I turned around once I was on the other side to make sure the door looked securely closed and not left half open. By the time I made it up to Miss Pearl’s driveway, she was at her doorway, wearing a snow-white robe over a dark purple nightgown with her cat in her arms. “Hi, Miss Pearl,” I greeted the older woman.

“Miss Garcia,” she said, smiling at me a little. “I’m sorry for botherin’ ya in the middle of the night—”

I chose to ignore the “Miss Garcia” and smiled at her calling ten the middle of the night.

“—but the pilot light on my water heater went out. If I get on the floor, I might not be able to get up, and my boy isn’t answerin’. Would ya mind helpin’ me out?”

Pilot light? On a water heater? I could faintly remember my dad working on ours as a kid.

“Sure,” I said, not knowing what other option I had. I could look it up on my phone, I hoped. “Where is it?”

Maybe that was the wrong question to ask because she gave me a funny look. “In the garage.”

I smiled at her and immediately reached for my phone in my back pocket. As she walked me through her house and into the garage, I quickly looked up how to turn a pilot light on a water heater and managed to glance at the basics behind it. So when we stopped, I asked, “Do you have a lighter or a match?”

That must have been the right thing because she nodded and walked over to a work table pressed up against one of the walls, pulling a box of matches out of one of the drawers. I shot her a tight smile when she handed them over, hoping like hell she wouldn’t be one of those people who stood there watching and judging.

She was.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket again and, in front of her, looked up the model of her water heater on the Internet and read the instructions twice to be on the safe side. When I set my phone down, I made sure to meet her gaze; I smiled and then did exactly what I was supposed to. It took a couple of tries, but it worked. Thank you, Google.

“All done,” I let Miss Pearl know as I got to my feet and dusted off my knees before handing over her matches.

The older woman raised one of those spiderweb thin eyebrows as she accepted the matches. “Thank you,” was her surprisingly easy answer without any comments about what I’d done.

“You’re welcome. I should get going back home. The boys are waiting for me. Do you need anything else?”

She shook her head. “That’s all. Now I can get my bath in.”

Beaming at her, I walked toward her front door and waited until she caught up. “It was nice seeing you, Miss Pearl. Let me know if there’s anything else you need later on.”

“Oh, I will,” she agreed without any hesitation. “Thank you.”

“No problem. Have a good night,” I said to her, already three steps down her deck.

I had made it to the intersection of her walkway with the sidewalk when she yelled, “Tell your older boy good luck with his baseball practice!”

“I will,” I told her, not thinking anything of her comment. She’d probably seen him lugging his equipment around. It wasn’t some big secret.

Two minutes later, I was inside the house after banging on the front door for a solid minute and then having Josh ask, “What’s the password?”

To which I responded, “If you don’t open the door, I’m going to kick your butt.”

Which got me: “Somebody’s in a bad mood.”

I had barely closed the door when I got bum-rushed from behind. Two arms went around my thighs and what felt like a face smashed into the small of my back. “I know what you can tell me tonight.”

“You feel good enough for a story?”

He nodded. He looked like he wasn’t feeling well, but he wasn’t dying yet. My heart ached just a little as I turned around in Louie’s arms to look down at him. “What are you in the mood for, Goo?”

Those blue eyes blinked up at me. “How did Daddy know he wanted to be a policeman?”

Chapter Seven

“I sold all your stuff while you were with your grandparents,” I told Josh on Sunday after his grandparents had dropped them off following their weekend together. Both boys looked tanner than they had before leaving for the weekend.

I didn’t know what I would do without their involvement in our lives. That saying “It takes a village to raise a kid” was no joke. Louie and Josh had five people who cared for them full time, and sometimes it still didn’t seem like enough. I seriously had no idea how single parents with no close family to help made it work.