Not even Louie fell for my joke; they both just ignored me before heading into their rooms to drop off their bags with Mac trailing behind them, ignoring me too.

Grumpy much?

“We have to do the lawn. Don’t take forever,” I yelled after them.

It was Josh who let out a drawn-out grumble, pausing at his doorway. “Do we have to?”

“Yes.”

“We can’t do it tomorrow?”

“No. I get off work too late and the mosquitoes will be bad.”

“I have homework,” the little ass lied.

“You’re full of crap,” I stated. He always got his homework done on Friday; I’d bet my life on it. I had my brother to thank for getting him on that path early on in school. He hadn’t let him go out and play until he got his stuff done.

There was another drawn-out sigh and the sound of a door—a closet door probably—slamming shut. Good grief, I hoped he was going to get over this crap soon. Wasn’t it only girls who went through the horrible hormonal phase? Even then, wasn’t that when they were in their teens?

Luckily, neither one of them gave me any more verbal grief as we all trudged out the back door to fish the lawn mower out of the shed in the back. Mac was terrified of the noise it made, so he was left inside the house. There were three huge spider webs on the door, and I only screamed once as something scuttled across the floor as I pulled out the mower and the two rakes I’d taken from my dad’s house on my last visit.

I handed the boys each a rake. “You rake the leaves. I’ll pull out weeds.”

Josh frowned fiercely but took the garden tool from me. Louie… well, Louie wasn’t really going to get much done, but I didn’t want to raise a lazy butt. He could do his best. With gardening gloves on—I double-checked for roaches living in the fingers—we spent the next hour doing the first half of the yard, only taking a break for water and Gatorade and to put sunblock on the boys when I noticed the back of Lou’s neck getting pink. How could I have forgotten about putting sunblock on him?

Once the weeds had been yanked out and bagged, and half of the leaves were lumped into multiple small piles throughout the yard, the boys stood off to the side, wiping sweat off their faces and looking so done I almost laughed.

“Is that it?” Josh asked.

I slid him a look. “No. We still have to pick this all up and mow the lawn.”

He dropped his head back and let out a groan that had me blinking, unimpressed.

“J, you’re basically a grown man—” I started to tell him.

“I’m ten.”

“In some countries in the world, you could be married right now. You’re pretty much the man of the house. You’re almost as big as I am. I’m going to let you mow the lawn—”

“I’m a little boy,” he argued.

“You’re not that little. What do you want to do? The front or the back?”

Despite everything, Josh knew what and how much he could get away with, and he had to be aware that he wasn’t going to get himself out of the mow job. It was happening no matter what he said. So I wasn’t surprised when he sighed. “The back, I guess.”

“You want to go first or second?”

“First,” he grumbled.

“I can do the other part,” Lou interjected.

“Goo, the handle is taller than you are. You’ll end up running your brother and me over, hitting a car, mowing down a cat or two, and catching something on fire. No thanks. Maybe when you’re sixteen.”

He took it as a compliment, his expression practically beaming. “Okay.” Like he was really proud of the mayhem I thought he was capable of.

“Let me show you how to turn it on, J,” I said and went on to instruct him how to use the machine even though I knew for a fact he’d done it with my dad a few times.

By the time Josh was done, I’d shoved and tripped Louie into three different piles of leaves, and then we had to clean them up afterward. The backyard wasn’t perfect, but I wasn’t going to bust Josh’s balls over it, and I settled for sticking my pinky in his ear. “Good job, hambone. Now you have to bag the leaves in the front with Goo.”

The expression on his face made it seem like I was trying to poison him or something. His shoulders slumped and he lumbered toward the front yard with Mac barking from inside the house; I’d closed the dog door on him so he wouldn’t sneak out while we’d been busy. I finally let him out, shutting the gate in his face to leave him in the backyard. Josh was still bumbling around when we got to the front, and I didn’t think twice about putting my index finger to my lips while his back was turned and telling Lou not to say anything.

He didn’t.

In what would probably be one of the last times I was capable of, I picked Josh up in a cradle hold while he screamed, “No! No! You better not!”

I laughed, noting subconsciously how heavy he was.

He shook his head as he thrashed in my arms. “No!”

Obviously, I ignored him even though he was inches from my face. “Louie, he’s saying yes, right?”

“Uh-huh,” the little traitor agreed, his hands over his mouth as he giggled.

Eyeing the biggest pile of leaves, I walked over to it, struggling more than just a little with Josh’s weight as he yelled, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”

“Do it? You want me to drop you in the leaves?”

And as he kept yelling for me to have a heart, I dropped him like a sack of potatoes. He’d live. My dad had done it to me enough times as a kid in piles smaller than this one. A couple of bruises weren’t going to kill him.