Free A Man for the Summer by Ruby Laska

homework done and their lunchboxes packed and showered her with love and enthusiasm, and all she had to do was keep Oreos in the cookie jar. She had no idea how to do the other stuff. The hard stuff—actually raising the child.
    All those details could wait. For now, why invest her emotions in what might turn out to be yet another disappointment?
    “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” she said briskly. “The odds of me being…of this working are pretty darn slim. Most couples have to try for at least five or six months before conceiving, and that’s… trying .”
    Her words hung heavily in the air between them. Her little euphemism—“trying”—rang shrill to her own ears. Most couples plan for a baby together, want the baby, make love with their hopes and dreams shared. At least, that’s how she’d always thought it would be. Even the surprise babies in her family, she was sure, had been not entirely unexpected by their delighted parents.
    “Well.” Griff got to his feet. “Like you said, we’ll just wait and see. I’m heading back to the motel. I need some sleep.”
    Junior jumped up too.
    “You’ll…uh, call me?” There was no way he was going to stay. He’d come to his senses, probably three steps out her door, and soon he’d be on the highway again. Which was fine. It was exactly what she wanted. But he had wanted to know, so…
    Griff raised an eyebrow at her. “So you can bite my head off again?”
    “Uh, no.” Junior was suddenly embarrassed, didn’t know where to put her hands. She settled for crossing them across her chest.
    “It’s okay. Yeah, I’ll call you. Let’s both get some rest.”
    He closed the door carefully behind him. The sound of the latch was almost deafening in the empty house.
     
     

 
     
    CHAPTER FIVE
     
    He tried. He really did. For two hours Griff gritted his teeth and pulled his pillow over his head and counted backwards from a hundred, but he couldn’t get to sleep.
    It was the damn kids.
    There had to be a hundred of them, some sort of rural version of the urban kid gangs that bombed down his street on their bikes and skateboards, upending pedestrians and risking their necks in the uptown traffic.
    Kind of like he used do twenty years ago down Astor Street.
    But they were louder here. Yeah, maybe it had something to do with the fact that Poplar Bluff, Missouri didn’t have a whole lot going on during a long summer weekday morning, so the shouts and crashes were magnified in the silence.
    Griff would give anything for a few sirens, even a motor vehicle accident—no doubt he’d be lulled to sleep like a baby.
    Finally he gave up and yanked the twisted sheets off. The light in the motel room was filtered through the aquamarine curtains, giving the place a slightly underwater look. Still groggy from his lack of sleep, Griff stood and stretched and felt distinctly disoriented.
    Griff was rarely disoriented.
    He gave the curtain rod a vicious tug and glared out into the bright noon. Sure enough, a crew of boys who looked about eight or ten years old had rigged a makeshift skateboard jump out of some old plywood and a stack of cinderblocks, right in front of the motel, in the grassy median that separated it from the main road.
    Griff stifled a grin. Nothing could stop a kid from building a ramp when they’re the age when they want to go flying off it. He had built his own using a roll of duct tape and a chaise lounge filched from winter storage in the basement—and paid for it with a week’s grounding.
    He opened the door and was blinded by the sun, which sent a searing pain directly from his eyes to his brain.
    “Hey!” He yelled, his voice croaking from disuse. “Keep it down out here!”
    The boys, surprised, stopped and turned to look at him. There were, he was surprised to see, only about four or five of them, deeply tanned kids tough enough to be barefoot on the hot asphalt.
    There was one kid with a shock of red hair and a grin that was just a