Keeping It in the Family (Linstead)

Chapter 132

Finishing up the paperwork on the successfully concluded case meant that Jay arrived home an hour later than usual. He had sent Erin a text ahead of time to let her know, and she had said she would have Kayla make dinner late accordingly.

"I'm home!" he called out after walking into the house.

"Hey, we're in the living room!" Erin called back.

"Apart from me!" came Kayla's voice from the kitchen. "We have handmade pizzas for dinner. They'll be about fifteen minutes!"

"Perfect, Kayla, thank you," Jay said as he took his coat off and hung it up. He had heard nothing from Clementine, which was unusual. He went straight to the living room to investigate. He found her sitting on the couch they called Kayla's couch, sitting apart from Erin and Henry, who were on the usual one. She was timidly playing something on her iPad, seeming not wanting to be noticed. Something had obviously gone on.

"Clem?" he asked.

"We've had words," Erin reported. "When Kayla picked her up from school, she was told that Clem had been excluded from lessons all afternoon for fighting at lunch break."

"We were wrestling, not fighting," Clementine mumbled, not looking up.

"Yes, they were wrestling. I gave her a telling off about wrestling at school, and it's not going to happen again. Is it?" Erin asked, looking at their daughter.

"No," Clem mumbled, still looking at her iPad.

"Put that down and look at your mom when you speak to her," Jay said. He hated telling Clem off, but he recognised that it had to be done when she deserved it.

Clem put the tablet down and looked at Erin. "I won't wrestle in school again. Or anywhere, because I'm not allowed to learn."

Jay decided he would handle that one. Considering she had already had the riot act from Erin, he decided to go a different way about it. He sat down next to her. "Now, Clem, we know you want to learn to wrestle, but that's not the way we behave in this house. You know better than that. And you know you shouldn't be wrestling in school."

"I know," she said, now teary-eyed because she had let her dad down. "I just want to wrestle so much."

"Your mom and I will think about it," Jay promised. "But we don't have much money right now, and we can't reward bad behaviour. So before anything happens, you're going to have to prove you can improve your behaviour and never wrestle at school again."

"Okay, I won't," Clem assured him. "We weren't hurting each other anyway, it was just the teachers being stupid."

"Whether you think that or not, no more wrestling," Jay said firmly. And he let that draw a line under the matter, going on to ask her about the game she had been playing, before going over to the other couch and taking over from Erin in having Henry on his lap.

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Later, with Henry and Clementine asleep and Kayla upstairs in her room enjoying some down time, Jay and Erin had some precious time to themselves.

"So, I have some news," Jay said as Erin cuddled up to him and he put an arm around her.

"Me too, but you go first."

"Oh, hang on, look at this," Jay said. The TV was on, muted, showing a Chicago news channel. The big story of the day was the rumours that Dominic Boyd would be withdrawing from the Illinois gubernatorial election, which would make Bayley Martinez the governor. A breaking news graphic had just appeared at the bottom of the screen, beneath a shot of a podium. The news ticker said that Boyd would be announcing his withdrawal imminently.