Seeds of Tomorrow

Two

Forty fuckin' years old. Goddamn. Krist still couldn't believe he made it to be officially over the hill. It felt like once he and Atira had gotten married, time went by too quickly. Before he knew it, Rocco was nearly eighteen, Gabriel would be fourteen in the fall and Audrey was turning thirteen.

Life was better than he could have ever imagined twenty years before. He had a career, a stable career, a fine-ass wife, and good kids-even if that oldest one drove him crazy, he meant that in a loving way of course.

Shit, Rocco had been taller than him for two years, standing close to 6'3, he'd gotten the height from Marcus' side of the family. Brad had been something like 6'3, 6'4 and their father was over six foot. While Krist was borderline tall at an even six feet, Rocco had begun referring to him as "Short King" the moment he realized he was taller. Krist would argue he wasn't even short to which Rocco would grin and reply "Sounds like something a short king would say," before patting him on the top of the head like one would a small child or a dog and walking away.

Fucking Rocco. Linda, Krist's mother liked to remind him that he and Rocco were a lot alike, "he gets his smart-ass personality from you, you know". And it was true. There were a lot of similarities between the two, aside from the obnoxiousness. Rocco, as his father had been as a teenager, was completely girl crazy and the girls loved him. Whereas Krist had to learn how to spit game, Rocco was a natural. Something that Krist attributed to his Fernando.

Rocco must have been around fifteen when Krist picked him up from school on a sunny fall day. His son had grown a good six inches that summer and was growing into himself. He saw him waiting out front with a small group of girls who looked at him like he was a celebrity, he saw that all-too-familiar look on his son's face and decided it was time for the talk.

Krist had plotted out what he meant to tell the boy but instead, it came out as him lecturing Rocco about he "better not be doing no fucking, I am not old enough to be not fucking grandpa!"

"You aren't even that young though", Rocco grinned.

"Bro. I'm fucking serious. Look at your Uncle Fernando! He was a grandpa by the time he was thirty-three!"

"Aaaand he loves it."

Krist sputtered a few half words before dropping the conversation completely, feeling dumb and old. What he wanted to tell his son was that he, himself, hadn't been much older when he knocked his girlfriend up, something Rocco hadn't known. It was a sore topic, the baby had passed in utero around twenty weeks and it was just a mess that he didn't want to relive.

Instead, he settled for an awkward lecture and called it good. How the hell could he manage to talk about the same shit to other peoples' kids yet struggled to talk to his own about it.

Other topics, like drugs, for instance, were easy to beat into Rocco's head. Krist had lost a few people in his life to them, had done some really stupid shit while on them, and often dragged Rocco with Fernando and Madison to provide street outreach. Rocco smoked weed, something Krist tolerated so long as he stayed on track and wouldn't have tripped if his boy experimented with psychedelics but anything else, hell naw.

Everyone who'd known Krist since his younger years gave him a ton of shit about the overprotective father he'd become, especially Jeordie.

"You really ought to let him make his own choices, he's a good kid. You were already a fuck yp at his age, you breathing down his neck isn't going to stop him," he'd always tell Krist, which was true.