Joe was a master of the awkward silence, but even this situation was making him squirm like his clothes were two sizes too small. A car ride with Logan, the two of them heading out this morning to a house build nearby. Logan looking anywhere but at Joe. Joe not knowing what the hell to say to this sixteen-year-old.

He remembered that he'd lost his virginity at that age, and that he'd been working a summer job at Gastaldo Concrete, but he'd been a big boy even then, and the fact that this skinny, flaxen-haired kid wanted to work in construction for his first job seemed ludicrous to him. He had no idea where he would put him without endangering his life. 

Lauren had been insistent, though; Rachel claimed the kid wanted to earn some money and start saving for the day when he would escape the bonds of parenthood, biological or foster, and Lauren thought they should encourage that, if only to occupy the boy over the summer so he didn't fall into delinquency. Joe admired the boy's gumption, at least, and to his credit, or maybe to Rachel and Al's credit, he'd been ready to be picked up at the time arranged. Another plus was that Johnny was bringing his own sons to the site; maybe the three of them could work on something together. 

It occurred to Joe, to his dismay, that he'd never considered bringing Tosh into the family business in the same way Johnny did his sons. Tosh was still too young anyway, but even still, it had never crossed his mind. The boy was a dreamer, a creative. He never showed any enthusiasm for construction vehicles the way some boys did; that was usually a good sign a kid wanted to work with their hands. He was sure Lauren wouldn't hear of Tosh doing this kind of work anyway, not her sweet little boy. He found he was okay with it too, and there was still time for him to decide what he wanted to do with his life.

"So..." Joe said, just to say something. "School over? How's it feel?"

Logan looked at him and said, "Good."

That was it. No elaboration.

Joe cleared his throat and said, "So, since this is your first day on a construction site, I'm going to give you a full safety orientation, and I'll be working next to you all day to show you the ropes. You're going to wear a hard hat at all times. I'm happy to see you have steel toe boots. Where'd you get those?"

"Uh, Rachel and Al bought them for me."

"Oh. That's very nice of them. Those aren't cheap."

"Yeah. I'll pay them back once I start earning some money."

"Well, that's up to them to decide. They might consider it a gift to start you on your working life. I'd do the same thing for my son."

Logan blinked at him for a second. "I'm not their son, though."

"Right. Of course. Sorry. I just meant, you know, they care about you."

Logan squirmed and shrugged, clearly uncomfortable with any discussion about feelings like any boy his age.

"So," Joe said. "Have enough to eat in that lunch box of yours? It's surprising how hungry you can get working all day."

Logan looked at his lunch box and said, "I don't know. I hope so. Al put something together for me."

"Well, if you find yourself short, maybe Johnny and I can take you guys out for a snack. My brother's bringing his two boys, you'll meet them today."

"Oh." Suddenly Logan brightened. "So, I won't be the only young guy there?"

Joe chuckled. "Not today, anyway. If you decide to stay on, you might be, depending on how serious Vic and Tilly are about the family business."

"Vic and Tilly?"

"Their names are Ludovico and Attilio, but try saying those names on the school yard."

Logan actually chuckled. Then he paled. "Sorry. That wasn't very nice."

"Ah, don't worry, they've heard it all, and they're more than capable of holding their own."

They drove in silence a little longer. "Speaking of summer jobs," Joe said. "Did Al ever consider getting you into the library? Just as an option."

Logan shrugged. "I can't remember ever being in a library."

He couldn't either, but he didn't want to be an example for adult behaviour. Now that he thought about it, maybe he should ask Al to help recruit Tosh into the library when he became old enough to work; it seemed more up his alley. "It's good work," he said. "Probably less wear on your body."

Logan shrugged again. "Maybe. I've just never had a job before, so I appreciate any experience I can get."

Joe nodded, impressed with his open-mindedness. "It will be a good first job on your resume."

"Will it? I don't know how to make a resume. They talk about it a lot in career education in school, but I'm always like, how can you have a resume if you've never had a job, but how can you get a job if you don't have a resume?"

"The age-old question," Joe agreed. "To be honest, I don't recall ever making a resume. I got jobs through people I knew, just like you are now, and then I went into business with my brother, and then I never needed a resume again."

Logan nodded shrewdly. "Going into business for myself sounds like a good idea."

"It's risky. I wouldn't recommend it until you've worked a few years for other people, and you get a sense of what people need and what skills you have. It takes a lot of money to start, and it's a lot harder than it looks on TV. Most businesses fail in the first year."

"Oh." The boy seemed to deflate in front of his eyes.

"Don't worry," Joe said, feeling the need to cheer the boy up. "You'll have years to decide what you want to do with your life." 

He realized, though, that might not be true, not if Logan intended to be on his own as soon as he was able. Then what? Did he intend to look after his sister as soon as she aged out? It horrified him to think of this boy responsible for sweet little Emma. He'd met the girl many times whenever she hung out with Naomi, and though Naomi was a little younger than her she acted years older than the poor girl, who, Al and Rachel had informed him, struggled with challenges stemming from fetal alcohol syndrome. Logan would have a hard time supporting both of them with her needs, especially when he was just starting out in the work world.

Joe secretly hoped that either their mother finally cleaned herself up and took responsibility for them, or Al and Rachel took permanent custody of Emma; the two of them, to his surprise and delight, had flourished as parents. Al especially was sweet to the girl, helping her with every task as if she were five; shoe tying still presented challenges to her. Rachel, cool aunt to Naomi, made it her mission to give Emma everything she never got from her alcoholic mother, who only seemed able to raise her children whenever she hooked up with a new boyfriend, who never seemed too thrilled to take them in. Joe couldn't imagine Al and Rachel giving Emma up without a fight, and Logan would have a hard time taking her with him if he ever decided he was ready. What Joe wasn't sure of, however, was whether Emma would want to stay with Al and Rachel or go off with Logan, and whether she could make that decision on her own; she worshipped her older brother, and that clouded her thinking.

Joe pulled in a block away from the build, and the two of them climbed out of the black Toyota Highlander. Joe opened the hatch and found Logan a hard hat, cinching it to the correct head size, snug but not too tight. "You can leave your lunch box in here. We'll take all our breaks together."

"Okay," Logan said in relief, sneaking glances at the site, which must have seemed bare and raw to the boy, its frame looking like a skeletal hand bursting from the earth.

They strolled to the site, where a few subcontractors were already setting up. Joe inspected the frame for a few moments. "See what we've done so far," he said, gesturing to the footings. "First we clear the area and dig the trench for the foundation. Then we build the temporary wood frame to pour in the concrete. Once the concrete dries and cures, we take away the temporary frame, and now we have a concrete footing on which to build the frame of the house. The footing takes the weight of the house, but see how there's still all this space around the footing leftover from where the trench was dug? Now all the soil we dug out to make the trench has to go back to fill in the spaces, so the footing doesn't move too much and the house stays steady."

Logan nodded as if he knew what Joe was talking about. "Is that something I can do?" he asked.

"You read my mind. It'll be repetitive and boring, but it's crucial to the whole construction. You can make a major contribution with something that luckily doesn't require a lot of skill."

Logan smiled at the thought of being crucial to anything. "Okay," he said with enthusiasm. "I guess I need a shovel."

"Come with me." He led Logan to the pile of earth the backhoe had left from digging the trench. A wheelbarrow sat next to it, and a shovel stood straight in the mound. "I'm going to demonstrate to you how to shovel dirt. I know it sounds easy, but I'm going to show you how to move your body so that you put the least amount of effort into your dig for the greatest return. I know you probably want to prove yourself by going at it hard, but that will actually work against you, and I will be more impressed with you if you do it my way and take a gentler pace."

Logan nodded and watched avidly as Joe demonstrated, showing how he wanted Logan to position his legs, his hips, his waist and his arms when they held the shovel at every stage of the process, and then showing how much dirt he thought Logan should take with each shovelful, which was less than Logan could handle but over a whole day would feel heavier and heavier. He showed him how to position the wheelbarrow so that he would move the least amount needed to drop the dirt in. He showed him how to bend and use his legs when digging lower, and how to brace himself when digging higher so he didn't bend backwards and injure his back. Once he demonstrated with a few shovelfuls, he let Logan give it a try, and gently corrected him when he thought he might be overextending himself. Logan got the hang of it quickly, and Joe could tell he wanted to go faster, but held back, remembering his admonition to go at a gentler pace. 

"This should be enough of a load here," he said when Logan filled the wheelbarrow not even at the line.

"Are you sure?" Logan asked.

"See how it feels when you take the arms up. Remember, use your legs when doing the initial lift. Don't strain your back. Don't use your arms at all, they're just holding the arms of the wheelbarrow. Use the wheel at the front to point where you want to go.  Good. Now you're rolling. It might feel light now, but over the day you'll be thanking me for taking it easy on you. Soil gets really heavy, really fast. It's like water that way."

Joe led him back to the footings, and showed him how to position the wheelbarrow while shovelling the soil back out and into the space between the footing and the trench. They finished unloading their first wheelbarrow full of soil by the time Johnny showed up with his sons, and Logan was grinning proudly at his first act as a working person.

"Hey, boy," Johnny called to Joe. "Who do you have there?"

"Johnny," he said, "I'd like you to meet Logan. He's Al and Rachel's foster son, and he's out of school now, so we thought we'd see how he'd like a summer job with us."

Johnny offered his hand to Logan, who took it shyly. "Good to meet you," he said. "Rachel's great, I bet it's nice staying with her."

Logan shrugged. "It's okay. Better than some foster homes, for sure."

"Logan, these are my boys, Vic, twenty-three, and Tilly, twenty-one."

Both boys were spitting images of their dad, tall and broad-shouldered, basketball players in high school, now negotiating work and college while still living at home. They politely shook hands with Logan.

"What school do you go to, Logan?" Vic asked.

"Burnaby North," he replied.

"Good school," Tilly said. "I wish we'd gone there, it would have been closer."

"We all went to Notre Dame," Johnny said. "And Joe and I went there when we were still living in Queensborough, so you have nothing to complain about."

"If you did it for the Catholic education, I'm afraid you wasted your money," Vic said rather cheekily.

"Yeah, you're making me look bad in front of your Nonno and Nonna on both sides, not going to church anymore," Johnny said. "Are you happy?"

The two boys smirked but didn't answer. Tilly asked, "How's Aunt Lauren, Zio?"

Joe frowned. "Fine, why do you ask?" His nephews had, to his knowledge, never asked about their relatives in all the years he'd known them, self-centred Italian princes that they were.

"She hasn't been by to see Callie lately." Callie was their latest rescue, a black lab, friendly and chill, and Lauren said hello to her before her own nephews whenever she came by. Joe wondered if she realized how rude she was being placing an animal before her own kin, but part of what he loved about Lauren was that she didn't give a shit about propriety. For example, propriety had never stopped her from reigniting her teenage love with Rachel after almost twenty years of happy marriage with him; it only forced her to be discreet about it so as never to embarrass him or their family. 

He couldn't claim the high ground, either, not with Joanie welcoming him into her home on the occasional Sunday, their meetings scheduled and sanctioned by Lauren herself. In all his years married to her he'd never expected to find himself in a situation like this, yet somehow they were making it work, and were still happy together, with no one else the wiser.

"I guess she's been busy," Joe said. "Naomi's older now and getting around more, and then there's work; sometimes she has surveillance on the weekends too."

"I think what she does is pretty cool," Vic said. "Our hot aunt the P.I."

"Watch your mouth!" Johnny said, appalled, reddening, probably because Johnny felt the same way but would never admit it. Joe had seen his eyes linger on Lauren from time to time, and it both annoyed him and gave him a thrill of pride that his older brother, the man he'd worshipped when he was younger, now envied him something, especially when, in the infancy of Joe and Lauren's relationship, Johnny had thought Lauren strange and boyish, and wondered what Joe saw in her. Now his nephews were lusting after her. Wonderful.

"It's okay," Joe said, turning to them. "I'm well aware that she's hot. Just try saying that to her face, I'd love to see what she does to you."

Vic cleared his throat and turned away, and Joe thought he heard him mutter, "Pin me, hopefully." 

Joe shook his head. They also knew Lauren practiced aikido, and probably had visions of grappling with her sexually. Fantastic. He couldn't really blame them. He himself had been the grappled, to his benefit. Lauren was an energetic lover. "You boys are handsome enough to snag women your own age," he said, "so enough with the Mrs. Robinson fantasies."

They both stared at him in confusion. "Who?" Tilly asked.

Jesus, he felt old around these two. "Never mind. You know she's changed your diapers, don't you?"

Now both boys groaned in dismay. "Okay, okay, you win," Vic cried. "But I'm still thinking of going into that kind of work."

"Okay, well, maybe go into Criminology if they have it at your college, and when you graduate maybe Justiciar can start you out guarding."

"A security guard?" Vic asked in disgust. "But they're... like... minimum wage, and everyone makes fun of them."

"That's what Lauren did, start at the bottom and work her way up. Do you think you're going to start being a P.I. right away? You have to get your license first and be bonded. That takes a while."

Logan listened to all of this in awkward silence. Joe turned back to Johnny and said, "Logan's doing fill work today. Do you want Vic and Tilly helping him?"

"I'll help," Tilly said. "Dad says Vic's going to help with framing."

Joe nodded. "That's good. That's ideal, actually. Logan, you and Tilly can trade off shovelling and pushing the wheelbarrow so you don't get tired too early."

"Okay," Logan said. He turned to Tilly. "Do you know how to shovel properly?"

Tilly chuckled and said, "I guess Zio's been showing you the ropes."

"Zio?" 

"That's just Italian for uncle. Yeah, I got the same orientation when I first started. Come on, let's go."

Joe watched Logan and his new friend, for Joe could already see a little hero worship in Logan's eyes for the older boy, go back to the earth pile with the wheelbarrow and the shovel inside it. Johnny put a hand on Vic's back and said to Joe, "I guess you'll keep an eye on those two?"

"Yup, I got it," Joe said, confident that, with those two working together, they'd do well even without his supervision, and that he would have something happy to report to Al and Rachel at the end of the day.  

Thanks for reading this far! If you like what you just read, hit "Vote." If something doesn't ring true about house construction and foundation pouring, leave me a comment. I strive for authenticity. To see a flashback of when Joe, Rachel, Sunny and Al first met, click on "Continue reading."