On the basketball court
Jackie nodded. That sounded right. She hadn't seen Sadonna Stroude around the lake in awhile, and she vaguely remembered hearing about her being placed in a home now that Kip had mentioned it. She had just opened her mouth to say something further about how safe they all were without the Stinky Cheese Woman baking the pie when Kip started going off on Eric.
She closed her mouth again and quietly listened to him berate her husband. She looked over at Kip the way a mother would look at her child when he was asking why the sky was blue, where the North Pole was, or what exactly happened to people when they died and went to Heaven. It was somewhere between bemusement and defeat. Kip had a point. Eric could come across as arrogant at times, and he was pretty hard on Kip after his father's murder. He had good intentions though. His heart was in the right place.
Truth be told, she was taken aback by Kip's rather harsh assessment of Eric in much the same way that she was completely baffled by her husband's insistence on keeping Kip at a safe distance after that Christmas. Eric and Jackie had seen Kip playing in his yard and around the lake. They had talked to his parents at The Clubhouse functions like this one for years, bought him Christmas and birthday presents, and they had both watched Kip become the man that he was now. And Jackie thought he had turned out to be a great man.
But, of course, they hadn't been able to see what the LeClef's didn't want them to see, which was something that Jackie felt terrible about in hindsight. She thought she should have known better. She wasn't sure if it was just her maternal instinct on overdrive, or if her interest in Kip stemmed from the years she had been neglected and verbally abused by her own mother. Either way, Jackie sometimes wished that it was possible to go back in time and protect Kip the way he had needed to be protected. A feeling that her husband did not seem to share with her, no matter how many times they discussed the LeClef family tragedy.
"Well, I think, deep down, he knows that too," she sighed, just barely catching the ball that he passed to her. "It's not like I can tell him what to do, Kip. He is his own person. But I'm sorry if anything he's said has hurt you." She dribbled the ball back and forth for a second and then ran up to the basket for a layup, missing by about five inches. She did manage to catch it as it bounced off the backboard though, and she eagerly threw it in Kip's direction. "And for what it's worth, I don't think you're a killer."