Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 68143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 341(@200wpm)___ 273(@250wpm)___ 227(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 341(@200wpm)___ 273(@250wpm)___ 227(@300wpm)
Twenty-Three
I do not do bugs. You could literally rob me with a roach.
—Sutton to Gunner
GUNNER
I was irritated.
I missed my kid.
I missed my girl.
And I hated snooty know-it-alls that didn’t take the children’s lives under their care seriously.
“I just don’t see why we should use our hard earned…”
I held up my hand. “It’s not all of the money that I laid out here in this proposal. There are also grants that you can get. The State of Texas allocates these funds to schools for the improvement of security on campuses. I can help you get them, but it’s not going to cover it all. However, you raise those funds is up to you, but I would highly suggest taking the security of your campus seriously.”
I was at a town hall meeting for the school to approve spending on the security budget that would allow us to make the school a safer place.
However, there was one member on the school board who was vehemently against the proposal to help secure the school districts, and he’d brought his cronies with him to the meeting.
They’d been heckling the members that did approve of it for an hour now, and I was losing patience.
Maybe it was time to pull out the big guns.
“I just don’t see why we need this!” the board member, Lewis, cried as he threw up his hands in frustration. “It’s a waste of money!”
Big guns it was.
I made sure to have a presentation ready for when I had to show them the why.
Standing up, I took the podium and said, “I guess it’s time for you to see why I do what I do.”
I then keyed up the slide show on my computer.
One that I added to every year as I updated their ages that they’d be right now if they had the type of security that I offered.
The slideshow popped up, and the breath left my body for a long moment as I looked at the photo of my smiling little boy.
It was the last picture I’d ever taken of him.
That morning, the day before his party, he’d been so mad at me because I’d forgotten about his party and didn’t bake the cookies the night before like he’d asked me to.
I’d been so exhausted the night before that I hadn’t had the energy to do much of anything besides take a shower and fall into bed.
The next morning when my alarm had gone off, I’d asked my Uncle Parker if he could stop for a fruit tray for the party since I’d dropped the ball.
Just as I’d been hanging up with Parker, Jett had come storming into the room mad because “fruit sucked” and “cookies were superior.”
He’d been pissed, and rightfully so.
I should’ve made the cookies.
Why hadn’t I made the cookies?
I asked myself that all the time.
If I’d made the cookies, Parker wouldn’t have had to drop him off at school. He would’ve just walked with him into class and hung out there setting up for the party like I’d volunteered him to do.
If he’d been there, he would’ve protected Jett with his life.
“This was my son,” I said quietly. The chatter died down. “He’d be fifteen right now. We’d be thinking about colleges. What he wanted to do with his life. I’d probably be touring colleges with him as he tried to figure out which school he wanted a full ride to for baseball.”
I’d said the same things so many times to so many people. Given the same story to everyone who needed to know why I did it.
Jett was always my why.
He’d forever be my why.
“He loved baseball,” I went on. “Loved it so damn much that he slept with his hand in a glove, and a ball under his pillow. From the moment he learned to walk, he was out on a baseball field with me. He fell asleep to the sharp ting of my bat cracking against a ball. He lived, breathed, and slept baseball. He was my little sidekick. My confidant. My encouragement. My breath.”
My voice cracked on the last word.
“Sometimes, I wake up, and I can’t breathe. I panic because it’s such a horrible feeling. While I’m asleep, I can forget that I lost him. But when I’m awake, it’s like I have this piece of my heart that will forever ache, because that piece was ripped away from me the day that my little boy was shot along with thirty-three other little boys and girls in their elementary school.”
I looked around at the room, taking in all the men who had been so opposed earlier.
I had their attention now.
“That day was supposed to be a day of celebration. One hundred days of school. Their first one hundred days of school.” I smiled as I remembered making that stupid shirt with a hundred dots of paint on it. “The day before, I’d picked him up early from school so we could go grab a t-shirt from Hobby Lobby. When we got home, we made a shirt for him to wear. A hundred dots to mark each of his first one hundred days.”