Maybe Swearing Will Help (SWAT Generation 2.0 3)

And after I put him to bed twenty minutes later, making sure that he was wrapped up tight so he wouldn’t be able to work out of his swaddle, I crept out of the room.

Right into Ford’s arms.

“It’s been six weeks,” he growled.

I licked my nervous lips.

“Yeah,” I admitted. “But I also started work yesterday. I have this case that I need to look into. All the detectives have been stumped. And I have a few from Longview…eek!”

When he tossed me onto the bed a minute later, there was no protest anywhere in sight.

Because Ford was right.

It had been six weeks.

And six weeks without Ford felt like a lifetime.

***

Ford

The car pick-up line was hell.

And I knew exactly why Ashe didn’t feel like she was up to it.

She’d started back at work today, and had woken up twice through the night with FJ, and then again for the day well before she had to wake Chevy up for school.

Whatever you do, don’t get into Lane B.

Ashe’s words from earlier, after our doctor visit, stuck with me as I pulled up in my cruiser to the entrance of the school parking lot.

I’d already been in line ten minutes, which was another thing Ashe had gotten so pissed about lately.

She said that the elementary school and the intermediate school, which now shared the same pick-up and drop-off line, now got out at the same time as well. Something new that’d started this year in comparison to Chevy’s last year in school.

Thinking that she was overreacting, but not willing to admit it, I smiled and told her that I would swing by on my break to get our son.

“Hi, Officer,” one of the teachers purred.

I smiled, even though that smile didn’t reach my eyes. “How’s it going?”

The teacher blinked rapidly at me, and I assumed that was her trying to flirt.

“It’s going good. Lane B.” She grinned widely.

Lane B.

Fuck.

But, I guess if I truly wanted to experience what Ashe had been going through with the pick-up line, I had to be in Lane B to do it.

So, being one of the first ones in Lane B, I was thinking it was going to be good.

I was wrong.

Very, very wrong.

Seeing as I’d never done the pick-up thing before, only the drop-off, I had no idea how it all worked.

But the teacher mid-way down who was taking our numbers and then relaying it to people inside smiled and pointed at me to wait at the end of the parking lot, and the teachers would bring my son to the car.

Thinking that it was good, I did as requested. Then waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

All the while, I kept an eye on the cars that’d come in after me.

Everybody but two more parents got directed to Lane A.

And, over the course of the next ten minutes, thirteen cars found their way through Lane A, all of them from behind me.

This happened over and over again.

By the time the eighteenth car had passed, I’d had enough.

Getting out of my cruiser, I walked over to the first parent in that line and smiled.

“This happen all the time?” I asked.

The parent sighed long and loud. “God yes. I hate Lane B.”

I grimaced and kept walking, nodding my head at the man in the third truck. And the fourth.

It was at this point that only the stray person was trickling in, and all of them were going to Lane A.

I crossed along the crosswalk and headed up to the teachers that were steadily getting kids in the cars at lane A.

“What,” I said to them as they came back for more kids, “exactly is the point of Lane B?”

The two closest to me froze.

“Umm,” one replied intelligently.

“We’ve been sitting over there for going on” —I looked at my watch— “twelve and a half minutes now, and not one of our kids have been brought to our cars. And, saying that, every single car that came in behind me has gotten their kids.”

The teacher could only point behind her. “If you want to…”

I did.

So I pushed past her and made my way into the front doors of the school, hearing my kid before I even saw him.

The thing was, I knew that my kid was wild.

It was just going to happen seeing as how bad Ashe and I had been as kids.

This was our payback. Our coming to Jesus.

This was what we got for being so bad to our parents—or so my parents liked to say.

‘I hope one day you have a kid that’s twice as bad as you.’

And that’d been said no less than a hundred times as we were growing up.

And little Chevy was definitely that.

When I got inside, there was a teacher with her back to me talking to someone just inside the door.

“…We’re going to take him over there once they all get through,” the teacher replied. “Teaches them for giving us these heathen kids.”