Page 5

CHAPTER 5

EDIN

When I get to Coach’s office, I hear Mo and Coach discussing the practice. Mo isn’t happy with Mikky and she’s not afraid to tell Coach as much. I stand just beside the door as I listen.

“That’s his job,” Coach explains. “He’s supposed to go for the goal aggressively.”

“Not against his teammates,” Mo argues. “He almost hurt Silas, and that’s not okay. You don’t hurt your teammates.”

I bow my head, trying to contain my smile. The way she scolded Mikky was epic; she slammed her hand against the glass and yelled. I’m pretty confident Mikky blanched at the fury my eight-year-old turned on him.

I understand both sides. You don’t plow into your teammate at full speed and send them flying through the air to attempt a goal in practice. Hurting your teammates is only going to hurt us all. But Coach is also right, obviously. Mikky job is to make a goal.

Before Mo can get irritated with Coach, I step into the doorway and knock. Mo looks at me with a big smile.

“I hope I’m not interrupting an important meeting,” I say.

“It’s a de…” Mo looks at Coach. “What’s the word, Coach?”

Coach manages to contain his smile. “Debrief.”

“Yep. That. We’re talking about Mikky being a meany-head.”

Grinning, I hold out my hand to her. “How about we let it go for the night and wipe the slate clean for tomorrow’s practice?”

“Fine,” she agrees as she jumps down from the chair. She grabs her bag and reaches for my hand. “But if we see him in the hall, I’m sticking my tongue out at him.”

I laugh. “All right. I’ll pretend not to see it just this once.”

Taking her bag from her hand, I wave to Coach. “Thank you,” I say, as I do nearly every single time I see him. He has no idea how much it helps to alleviate some of the stress and pressure to be able to have Mo here. And that he’s so patient with her… it means a lot.

“What d’you want for dinner?” I ask.

“Spaghetti!”

Internally, I groan. I much prefer to use the air fryer and spaghetti’s not something I can just stick in and let it cook while I do one of the other hundred things on my list. “Let’s see what we have when we get home. Might be SpaghettiOs, but I’ll make sure you have noodles in meat sauce.”

“Okay.”

The walk to the frat house is about fifteen minutes, during which Mo tells me about school. Today, Missy is her best friend who brought her a double chocolate chip cookie for lunch. Just yesterday, she wished she could send Missy to the moon for liking the same boy as she did. It’s truly a rollercoaster listening to the trials of their friendship. I never know from one day to the next whether she likes Missy or not.

I’m not even sure she knows.

We move on from Missy to talk about what she learned in school today. It’s all about writing and her homework is to write an entire paragraph, which has been defined as three to five full sentences. Mo’s stressing about it a little bit since she doesn’t know what to write.

“You know who can give you some ideas?” I ask.

Mo shakes her head.

“Brent. He’s an English and writing major. He wants to write stories when he graduates.”

“Stories that I can read?” she asks.

I tilt my head and think about the last excerpt I read. “Not yet. When you’re a little older.” Ten years older, at least. Maybe not until she’s married. We’ll see how I’m feeling.

“Okay. I’ll ask him when you’re making dinner.”

Brent is one of my frat mates. I’m supposed to refer to them as frat brothers, but it feels weird to me. I manage to correct myself when I’m talking out loud, but in my head, they’re frat mates. Anyhoo, Brent’s probably one of the quietest guys in the house. He’s also kind of hippy-posh, with clothes that would have been stylish in the seventies and eighties but muted and layered like a preppy rich boy. He also wears smarty-pants glasses, as Mo says. Which she assures us all is the very highest compliment.

As soon as we’re on the sidewalk in front of the house, Mo races across the yard and up the stairs, throwing open the door and yelling, “I’m home!”

We started it as a joke. Well, I explained it to her as a joke. But really, for the first few months we lived here, I didn’t want us walking in on something inappropriate for my child to be witnessing. Thus, we always announced our presence.

I’m relieved to say it was all needless. That doesn’t mean Mo has stopped announcing our arrival, though. The usual loud chorus of “Opa!” greets her in response.

I step inside and kick off my shoes into my designated cubby. When we moved in, the guys rearranged a bunch of places throughout the house to make it more kid-friendly. One of those areas was the entry.

There are now fifty cubby units lining the three walls. The kinds that you see in modern farmhouses with a cubby on top and bottom and then an area separating the two that has hooks and a bench to sit on. This was to make it feel more homey and give Mo a dedicated space for her outdoor things, but has had the added bonus of giving the guys somewhere to put their stuff, too.

She’s just dumping her shoes into the basket that slides into the cubby under the bench when I step inside. Then she races into the house calling, “Brent! I need your help.”

I grin as I hang her backpack on her designated hook. Since I’m not going upstairs right away, I drop my bags on a couple of hooks. They take up more than my designated space, but I don’t usually leave it there for long. No one has mentioned it when I do this from time to time.

I make my way into the kitchen and open cabinets until I find some pasta and pasta sauce. It’s vodka sauce, which isn’t Mo’s favorite, but if I add some sugar, she’s usually okay eating it. We don’t have ground meat, though. However, we have some frozen meatballs. After examining the package for someone’s name written in big black letters—how we designate something we’re not willing to share—and finding none, I decide they’ll have to work.

Half a dozen meatballs head into the air fryer while I boil pasta. I also add a small portion of frozen corn and butter into the air fryer in a metal ramekin to cook along with the meatballs, so my baby has some veggies.

Thankfully, this isn’t a meal that takes a long time. When the pasta is cooked, I add some sauce until it’s covered and heat it again until the sauce is hot. I add some sugar to taste, making sure it doesn’t have too much of that recognizable vodka sauce undertone, and then dump it all into a bowl and set it on the table.

“Mo, dinner,” I call.

She drags Brent to the table with her. I’m amused and impressed that they’re still talking about what she could write about in a paragraph.

“I need to interrupt for a minute,” I say.

Mo looks up at me expectantly. “What do you want to drink?”

“Juice?”

I look in the fridge and find an unopened box of bagged juices under the open one. This means someone took one of her juices, and, as I’m told, you can’t just replace a single bag of juice; they don’t sell them like that. And so, we have another box of juice.

Sighing, I take a pouch and set it on the table with the straw poked through.

“Thank you, Daddy.”

“You’re welcome. You can continue your conversation now as long as you concentrate on eating, too.”

Mo takes a big bite as she watches me.

I tussle her hair and head back into the kitchen to dump the rest of the food into a second bowl so I can wash the dishes and eat at the same time. I finish my dinner while making Mo’s lunch for tomorrow. While doing so, I find a new loaf of bread. The drawer in the fridge that’s dedicated to Mo is filled with more cheese, lunch meat, and cold snacks. There’s fruit on the counter. The cabinet in the kitchen that’s dedicated to Mo has also been filled.

I shake my head as I finish her lunch and put the whole thing in the fridge. I used to argue that no one needs to be buying her food; that I have it under control. But I’ve gotten a lot of pushback over the past year. They regularly remind me there are forty-seven guys in this house, and if each person buys a single thing, no one feels it.

Besides, the rule is, if you eat something, you replace it. Apparently, everyone gets into Mo’s drawers and eats a single thing. One tiny pack of fruit snacks. A little bag of cookies. A single can of pasta shit out of the six-pack.

You can’t just buy one, as with the juices. And thus, they have to buy the whole box to replace what they ate.

Sometimes, the arguments aren’t worth the hassle. I make sure the rest of the house has extra goodies, too, since buying what my daughter needs is pretty much taken care of.

When I’m finished, Mo has her homework on the table as she and Brent work on her paragraph together. Her bowl is empty. As is her juice bag. I bring them into the kitchen and wash her dishes as well.

Once her homework is done, Mo plays Barbies with the guys for the next hour. She has a whole slew of Barbies that I’m not sure where they came from. There are cars and houses and clothes to change the dolls into. The guys don’t make a single remark about Barbie that could be considered inappropriate. Not even snickers to each other.

I appreciate the respect they’ve shown me concerning my daughter. I love the way they spoil her. It was never so evident until last Christmas and her birthday when my kid had so many presents to open, she had to take a nap between them.

I may have cried a little. It feels good to be able to surround her with the right kind of people. There will probably be a lot of people arguing that frat guys aged eighteen to twenty-three are not the right kind of people to be raising an eight-year-old girl. But I strongly disagree.

The guys have learned a lot from being around my daughter. Like expressing kindness toward each other and that little gestures go a long way. They’ve learned how tiny acts can make a huge impact. They’ve learned teamwork and how to co-parent, though I don’t ever put parenting responsibilities on any of them.

They’re now far more in touch with their own feelings because a young girl has a lot of big emotions to express. I’ve made it clear that we don’t just sweep feelings under the rug and ‘suck it up.’ That’s not the kind of girl I’m raising. And so, almost fifty guys now have regular in-depth conversations with my kid about how things make them feel.

I have to think this experiment is going to end with some really positive results.

Eight o’clock is bedtime. Mo cleans up with the guys, which is always a big giggle fest. Not just with little girl laughs, but big guy laughter as well. I have no idea what they’re doing as I grab my bags from the hall and wait for Mo in the doorway.

She smiles up at me and not for the first time I think about how thankful I am that we made it this far. She’s happy. I’m happy. There’s a roof over our heads, food in our bellies, and we’re surrounded by people who care. Life may be difficult while I try to acquire the tools and skills I need to get our life on track, but we’ll get there. I’m confident about that.

Which is a big feeling. It wasn’t too long ago that hope didn’t have any meaning to me.

“Ready, MoMo?” It’s a question I ask a lot. But something I’ve learned from my therapist is we don’t check in with our kids enough and when we don’t ask the right questions, they may not volunteer what they’re really feeling.

So I always ask if she’s ready for whatever we’re getting ready to do. I try to always afford her the opportunity to tell me if she’s not ready. If she’s nervous or scared or any other feeling.

Mo nods and takes my hand. She leads me up the stairs and I drop my bags into my room before following her into hers. Longwood U’s frat houses are enormous. They’re like mini mansions. There are bedrooms out the wazoom and an excessive number of common areas. The kitchen is enormous. I don’t know how the frat acquired this house but with the help of the alumni, they’ve kept it elegantly authentic to the period it was built while also making sure it’s up to date with modern amenities.

However, there are not fifty bedrooms. Even after converting a bunch of areas into bedrooms that weren’t initially, there are maybe thirty. Yes, I said thirty. Which means seventeen guys share.

And here I have two. One for myself, and one for my daughter. I offered to share with my daughter, but the horror I received made me laugh. I offered to share with someone else then, but the responses I received were equally alarmed.

My child might need me during the night. No. I needed my own room. We also scored our own bathroom, so Mo doesn’t have to share with guys. Guys are gross. We all know this.

I help Mo get ready for bed and then tuck her in like a caterpillar in a cocoon. She has a moon that hangs from her ceiling that we use for a nightlight. It bathes the room in a soft, white-blue glow that’s enough to see by, but not so bright that it keeps her awake.

“Goodnight, Mo. Love you to the moon,” I say, kissing her forehead.

“Night Daddy. I love you to the stars and the galaxy and the sun.”

I rest my head on hers for just a minute before leaving her. Her door is never shut all the way—just in case—and I rarely close mine all the way either. They’re both propped open and when I’m awake, I tend to sit on the floor against my bed at such an angle where I can see out my door across the hall to hers.

There’s a pile of mail on my desk when I step inside. The envelope on top is a bill from aftercare. Sighing, I drop to my bed and fall backward, letting my eyes close. For just a minute, I lie here. I’m exhausted. I need to sleep.

But there’s a lot to do. Homework. Classes to study for. At the very least, I need to get my gear out and get it in the shower so everything can be rinsed off and aired out before Mo needs the shower in the morning.

Sighing, I bring the envelope over to me and tear it open. I already know how much the bill is for. $648. Which seems astronomical since they have Mo for half an hour in the morning and only three or so hours in the afternoons. I understand people need to make a living wage, but fuck’s sake. How do they expect single parents to afford this?

“By doing gay porn,” I mutter as my arm drops to my side.

I booked three scenes for Saturday while Mo spends the day with Dak and Sparrow. While I’d like to say I’ll use the extra as a cushion, so I have some money in my bank account, I know I need to start planning for Christmas. Then Mo’s birthday a month later.

Maybe if I double and triple up on some gay-for-pay business over the next month, I can slow down a little and breathe.

The thought makes me snort. It feels as though I’m never ahead. I’m always just barely clinging to the life preserver while the waves try to pull me under.