Island Boyz by Graham Salisbury

becoming invincible, though I wasn’t so sure I wanted to get in any fights at the beach.
    But I did wonder about something: How come Mom got me the dumbbells? I’d never asked for them. In fact, I never once in my life even thought I needed bigger muscles. So why’d she buy them?
    When I brought it up, she said, “Gee, I don’t know, Joey. It’s what your father would have gotten you . . . isn’t it?”
    I shrugged.
    Who knows?
    My father was a big fat blank spot. He and my mom split up before I was even born. I met him once when he came back to visit the islands. I liked him. He was nice to me. He was Mom’s height and was dressed in shorts, T-shirt, and rubber slippers, like everybody else. But now he lived in Las Vegas with his new wife, Marissa. That’s about it.
    I had a stepfather, too, for about a year and a half. But he was killed by his best friend in a hunting accident. Now I live with Mom, Darci, my seven-year-old sister from my stepdad, and Stella, our teenage live-in babysitter. Me, in a house of girls.
    So you could say my luck with dads wasn’t very good. The dumbbells were about that, I guessed—Mom trying to be a dad, too.
     
    One night she came into my room. It was late, maybe nine o’clock, since she doesn’t even get home from work until around seven. She picked up one of the dumbbells, then sat down on my bed and started curling it. “Got your homework done?”
    “Almost,” I said, but I hadn’t even thought about it yet.
    “Things okay at school?”
    “Yeah, sure.”
    Mom nodded. “Good. You know, I bet Ledward can show you how to use these things.”
    “Pshh,” I snickered. What did Ledward know? He was a tour bus driver, not a weight lifter. He was also Mom’s twenty-six-year-old boyfriend. She was thirty-one.
    Ledward was an okay guy. I liked him. He was Hawaiian-Chinese and big as a house. But I didn’t want him or anyone else to know I was working on my muscles.
    “I’ll ask him,” Mom said.
    “What?”
    “Ledward. I’ll ask him to show you how to use these weights.”
    “Mom, all you do is lift them.”
    “He’ll know, you’ll see.”
    She put down the dumbbell and picked up my football, then tossed it up and down, kind of clumsily. What’s going on? I wondered. Why’s she here?
    “Hey, let’s go toss the ball around,” she said. “What say?”
    I glanced out the window. It was pitch-black.
    “Okay,” I said.
    Outside, vague light glowed from the house, enough to throw a ball around. The toads were croaking down by the canal that ran past our house at the bottom of our sloped, grassy yard. I stepped lightly because sometimes they came up into the yard and dug down into the grass and hid there, and I didn’t like stepping on their bloated bodies.
    “I thought I told you to mow the lawn today,” Mom said. But she didn’t sound mad.
    “I . . . I didn’t have time.”
    Mom nodded. “Listen to me, Joey. It’s very important that you cut the grass first thing after school tomorrow, okay? Will you do that for me?”
    “First thing?”
    “Before I get home. It’s Friday, and I want the place to look nice for Ledward.”
    “All right.”
    “Thank you. Here. Catch.”
    She quickstepped back and tried to throw the ball like a quarterback on TV. It wobbled out and fell short. “Sorry.”
    I jogged up and got it, then tossed it back.
    We were only about twenty paces apart, and still she couldn’t make it. She was small, only a hair taller than me. I moved closer.
    She tried again. This time the ball made it to me.
    “You got a good arm,” I said.
    We did that a few more times.
    It was fun. We hardly ever did anything together. I didn’t know why she was doing this, but I wasn’t about to ask and ruin it.
    Mom stopped throwing and started to cry. “What’s wrong?” I said, walking over. “Did I do something?”
    She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “No . . . no . . . I just love you so much,” she said. “But I can’t even throw a