“Just checking, attitude,” I muttered, noticing the mom who had been talking to Dallas turn around and head over in our direction. It only took a moment for my brain to process who the parent was.

It was definitely Christy, the person who had gotten me suspended weeks ago.

From the way her face was tilted down, even with a pair of aviator glasses on, her attention was focused on the lower half of my body. Something in my brain recognized that this wasn’t going to go well, but something else in my brain said that I needed to behave. I could be an adult. I was not about to get suspended again, damn it.

So I smiled at her and said, “Hi,” even though I was grinding down on my back teeth, expecting the worst. Where I’d last seen him, Dallas was standing by third base, his head facing our direction. I could tell his forehead was wrinkled, but he didn’t make a gesture to move. What was this about?

I’d only seen him at practice once in the week since he, Jackson, and Miss Pearl had come over for spaghetti. We had waved at each other since then and that was it. I could have stayed after practice to talk to him, but by that time rolled around, I still had two boys to feed and put in bed. I didn’t have time to wait around for the other parents to give me a chance to talk. I didn’t take it personally that he wasn’t shouting from the rooftops that we were friends and spent time outside of practice together. There was also that big thing that always seemed to hang around my thoughts while we were at practice: the last thing I wanted was any kind of drama from the other parents thinking something dumb about us.

“Josh, go finish warming up,” I told him when Christy didn’t return my greeting as she came to a stop at an angle to me on the other side of the fencing. Josh frowned as his gaze bounced back and forth between the other mom and myself. “Everything is fine.”

Josh hesitated for one more second before nodding and putting his facemask back on, taking the bottle of water with him.

Before I could even open my mouth to ask what was going on, her words came at me, sharp and straight like an arrow. “You need to go change.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Your shorts, Diana. They’re inappropriate,” the mom, who hadn’t spoken to me once since our incident, said.

I went from one to ten instantly, courtesy of her words and choice of tone that was 100 percent bitchy and nothing else. I didn’t like her to begin with, so my patience was already in the negatives by the time she’d opened her mouth. But I tried my best to be mature. “I’m a grown woman, and they’re not that short or inappropriate,” I told her coolly, my hands instantly going to my sides. My fingertips were on the hem of my shorts with my hands straight down; it wasn’t like I was palming a bunch of bare thigh.

“I wasn’t asking what you thought about them,” she said, her reflective sunglasses flicking down to my thighs once more. “I don’t want Jonathan being exposed to that.”

Be mature. Be an adult. Be an example to Josh, Diana, I tried telling myself. I’d say I only halfway failed. “What is that? Thighs? Half of a woman’s thighs that he’s seen every time you’ve taken him somewhere?” That sounded a lot more smart-ass than I’d intended it to.

She could obviously tell because I could sense the tension coming off her body. “I don’t know what kind of places you take Josh, but I don’t take my Jonny any places like that. There’s children here. This isn’t a brothel.”

A brothel. Had this bitch really just said brothel? As in I worked at one or hung around one? Really?

I glanced over my shoulder because she was talking so fucking loud. Couldn’t she use her inside voice and just talk to me? I wasn’t surprised to see about eight sets of parents staring at us. Listening. So I asked her one more time to make sure I wasn’t imagining anything, “Excuse me?”

“Go buy some pants,” she said so fucking loud, I’m sure the opposing team heard her. In a whisper, with her eyes straight on me, she said, “Look, honey, I know you’re Josh’s aunt, but if you’re looking for a husband, this isn’t the place. Some of us are real moms. Look around. We’re not dressed like hookers, are we? Maybe you could learn something about real parenting from us.”

Someone cackled loudly enough for me to hear.

My entire body went hot, red hot.

I didn’t give very many people the power to hurt my feelings, but Christy’s comment went directly to my heart. Real mom. It was the real mom that pierced straight through me, robbing the breath from my lungs and the anger from my head.

Realistically, I knew my ass wasn’t anywhere close to hanging out. I knew that. It didn’t matter that there had been a handful of moms on Josh’s old team that made the girl on Dukes of Hazard look like a pilgrim. In that moment right then, I was the only one with some bare leg exposed and it wasn’t even that fucking much.

I cleared my throat, fighting back the pressure squeezing at my lungs and the heat covering every inch of my skin. What example did I want to set for Josh? That he always needed to come out on top? Some things were worth winning and other things were not. With every inch of self-control in my body, I tried holding on to the very edges of my maturity, because if someone was an asshole to you, you didn’t always have to be an asshole back.

“Christy,” I said her name calmly, “if you want to talk to me about my clothes”—fuck off and go to hell, I said to her in my brain but in reality I went with—“don’t raise your voice at me. I’m not a child. While we’re at it, you don’t know anything about me or Josh, so don’t make it seem like you do.”

Of all the replies she could have gone with, she chose, “I know enough about you.”

While I’d been friendly with the parents on Josh’s old team, none of them had ever been close enough to me to know what happened to turn us three into a family. All they knew was that I was raising Josh and Louie, and that had come up because there were Spanish-speaking parents on the team who overheard him calling me tia all the time. When they’d ask, I told them the truth. I was their aunt. I didn’t care what they thought; they could all assume whatever they wanted.

“You don’t know anything,” I practically whispered to her, balanced somewhere between being upset and really pissed. “I don’t want to embarrass you or make you feel like an idiot, so please stop while you’re ahead with the comments. Talk to me like an adult, because I bet your son is looking over here right now, and we want to teach the boys how to be good people, not big mouths with opinions and a lack of information.”

It was her turn for her face to go red and she pretty much squawked at me, “You’re going to embarrass me? You embarrassed yourself and Josh coming to a tournament dressed like that. Have a little respect for yourself, or respect for whoever was reckless enough to let you watch their kids.”

To a certain extent, I knew what she was saying wasn’t the truth, but her words were a brutal reality that managed to pick at those frayed little ends inside of me. Sticks and stones might break your bones but words could also hurt you. A lot. A lot more than they should have because I knew she didn’t know anything.

But even being aware of all of that, this knot formed in my throat, and before I could stop it, my eyes got misty.