Pushing himself to his feet, Kyle motioned toward a chair. “Sit down. I’ll be right back.”
He returned carrying a glass of lemonade for Jacob and a handful of cookies for both of them. He wasn’t sure what the rules were on predinner snacking, but as skinny as this kid was, he didn’t figure a couple of Oreo cookies would do any permanent damage.
“Thanks.” The boy accepted the snack with the eagerness of the average hungry teenager.
“If this is against the rules, you were never here.”
Jacob grinned. “Gotcha.” He twisted a cookie apart and licked the filling.
Kyle took a bite of his own cookie and washed it down with a swallow of tangy lemonade. He hadn’t asked why any of the boys had been placed here at the ranch, but he was pretty sure Jacob was the one with the abusive, alcoholic father. Which probably explained the boy’s noticeable nervous twitches, he thought sympathetically.
“How do you like it here on the ranch?” he asked the boy, feeling the need to initiate some sort of conversation.
Jacob shrugged. “It’s not so bad. Graciela’s a good cook. Cassie makes cookies for us sometimes. Shane talks tough, but he’s pretty easygoing, really.”
“What about the others?”
“Memo and Jared don’t say much, but everyone knows you better listen when they do. We’re not scared of them or anything,” he added quickly, “it’s just…”
“You don’t like disappointing them.” Kyle remembered the hollow feeling he’d get after he’d broken some house rule and Jared had given him the look that said he’d expected better. Earning a smile or an approving pat on the shoulder from Jared Walker had been a heady reward for a kid who practically idolized the taciturn cowboy. He wouldn’t be surprised if all the foster boys came to feel that way about Jared.
“And Molly?” he asked, thinking of the one family member Jacob hadn’t yet mentioned.
Jacob rolled his eyes. “I know she’s your girlfriend and all, but she’s a real pain when it comes to schoolwork. I mean, we all like her, but sometimes we’re just not in the mood for homework and stuff. Other guys at school blow off their homework all the time, but we’ve always got to turn ours in, even if there’s a good TV show or a ball game or something on. Elias calls her the homework tyrant.”
It took Kyle a few moments to catch up, since his brain had sort of frozen in response to Jacob’s opening comment. “First, Molly’s not my ’girlfriend,’ she’s just an old friend from when I lived here myself. As for the schoolwork, I know you think it isn’t important, but it is. Those other guys blowing off their homework and thinking they’re too cool to study? Check with them in ten years when you’ve made something of yourself and they’re still asking, ’Do you want fries with that?’”
Jacob sighed. “That’s the kind of thing Jared’s always saying.”
Kyle chuckled. “Where do you think I learned it?”
The boy munched another cookie, took a sip of lemonade, then asked, “So what was your story? How’d you end up here?”
Kyle didn’t take offense at the question, since he had initiated the conversation, but he wasn’t fond of talking about his past. He answered without embellishment, “My single mom got sick and couldn’t take care of me. She died while I was in my second foster home, before I came here.”
“My mom ran off a few years back,” Jacob murmured, gazing down into his lemonade with another twitch of his facial muscles. “She got tired of my dad yelling at her and hitting her—and I guess she got tired of me, too, since she didn’t take me with her.”
Kyle knew how much it hurt to be abandoned by a mother—his own had pretty much turned her back on him even before she’d gotten sick. But because he knew that a kid needed something positive to hold on to, he said, “Maybe she wanted to take you with her, but she didn’t think she could take care of you.”
Obviously, it wasn’t the first time Jacob had been offered something along those lines. “Yeah. Maybe.”
“You’ve had a tough time, and it isn’t fair that you had to go through it,” Kyle said bluntly, remembering what he’d heard about the boy’s father. “Still, you should consider yourself lucky that you ended up here. Take advantage of what you’ve found here, okay? Let the Walkers show you how to stay on the right path, so you don’t end up making the same mistakes your parents made.”
“Were you lucky to be here?”
“You bet. The other homes I was placed in—well, they didn’t work out. I was starting to get really
bitter, thinking maybe no one in the world cared about me—and then I came here.”
Jacob nodded. “That’s the way I was at the other home. I didn’t like the people there, and I don’t think they liked me much, either. It didn’t help that my dad kept showing up and making trouble for them. They hated that. But Jared said he could handle it.”
“He can handle it.” All these years later, Kyle still tended to believe that Jared Walker could pretty much handle anything.
“Yeah. Even though Jared’s older than my dad, he stays in real good shape. I’m pretty sure he could take him.”
“I don’t think it will come to that. But you can feel safe here.”
Jacob seemed to sink a bit more deeply into his chair. “He was here a few days ago. My dad. They don’t think I know, but I heard him yelling and I looked out the window. I heard him say he’d be back.”