He jumped at the sound of his father’s voice. “Nothing,” he said immediately, but he could tell from the look on his father’s face that he wasn’t going to buy that story.

“What’s the matter? You seem a little jumpy.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Billy repeated. “I just went out to get the mail.” He handed over the envelopes he’d been holding.

The expression on his father’s face changed from puzzlement to what looked like… understanding?

But at that moment there was the sound of tires crunching gravel outside.

They both looked out the window. Hobie Beecham’s dented white pickup had just pulled into the driveway, and Hobie himself was hopping out of the cab.

“Okay,” Doug said, nodding at Billy. He put the envelopes down on the table and pushed open the screen, walking out onto the porch.

Hobie was striding across the driveway with his patented redneck swagger. He clomped loudly up the porch steps, adjusting the baseball cap on his head. “I was gonna come by yesterday,” he told Doug, “but I was on crotch watch.” He grinned, taking off his mirrored sunglasses and putting them in the pocket of his Parks and Recreation T-shirt. “It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.”

Hobie taught auto shop and driver’s ed at the high school, but during the summer he volunteered to work twenty hours a week as a lifeguard at the public pool. He was a fair swimmer but certainly no trained lifeguard, and Trish had often wondered aloud why they’d accepted him at all, since it was well known that he spent more time ogling the mothers from behind his sunglasses than he did supervising their kids. She was prejudiced against him, but she had a point, Doug thought. Hobie was big, loud, and unredeemably sexist. Proudly sexist.

Billy, in the doorway, laughed, already feeling better. He liked Mr. Beecham.

“You didn’t hear that,” Doug told him.

Hobie shook his head, chuckling. “They’re startin’ ‘em young these days.”

Billy picked up his BB gun and went to the opposite end of the porch, aiming at the aluminum can he had placed on a tree stump in the green belt, the incident with the mailman already beginning to fade into memory.

Doug and Hobie walked inside, and Hobie took off his baseball cap. He sat down, uninvited, in the nearest chair, wiping the sweat from his forehead. “Got anything cold to drink in here?”

Doug walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “We have some sun tea, some Coke, some water—”

“Anything more manly?”

“We’re out of beer. Besides, it’s not even eleven yet.”

The other teacher sighed. “Coke, then.”

Doug popped open Coke cans for Hobie and for himself and carried the drinks into the living room, handing one to his friend. “So what brings you out this way?”

“The board meeting next Tuesday.”