“I’ll get that,” Silas promised. “I’m on it. Ly?” His sister nodded and they bumped fists. “We’ll brave the crowds.”
“Silas is very brave,” she told me, and I also nodded because I knew that. But even for someone like him, the grocery store on the day before Thanksgiving would be daunting. And there was some added pressure—it was something wonderful, but it also made me nervous.
My parents were coming to have the holiday here with us! Their neighbors were making the drive to northern Ohio to visit their own son, and we could go there to pick them up. I would go, since Silas was still in the process of getting his license back. But things were moving in a positive direction with that, so I had hope that he’d be behind the wheel soon himself. I also had alittle fear, since it seemed that he was going to drive a lot faster than I did when he got there.
His license status was one of many things that was moving in a positive direction in our lives. Lyra was enjoying school so much more, and that was wonderful. Silas had picked up extra hours at his moving job during the day to make up for the loss of income at night, and that had been a hit to his pocketbook but he was dealing with it. He was pretty sure that, come the new year, he would go get his GED and start pursuing more education for a future career, too, and I thought that was wonderful. The situation at my office had settled down a lot and we had managed to smooth things over with our client and get the Four-Squared project back on track. It was now mine to manage, and there were going to be other changes coming soon, too. Positive changes.
So there was no reason for me to remain so fearful, so convinced that the other shoe was going to drop. There was no reason except that I was afraid that the situation with Dax wasn’t over, although there were no outward signs of a problem. Silas had healed and the four guys who had jumped him were facing charges. We hadn’t heard a word from anyone, no threats or hip-hop intimidation, and I tried to convince myself that things were over with my ex.
Now I had to get to work but before I did, there was something I had to admit to my two housemates. “I invited someone over for Thanksgiving,” I told them. “I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry? The more the merrier,” Silas said. “Isn’t that the holiday attitude?”
“We never had anybody here before,” his sister reminded him. “What did we do last year?”
“Uh, we had chicken sandwiches with a side of Froot Loops,” he recalled. “They weren’t bad.”
I drew a breath. “The person I invited is Octavia.”
They were familiar with that name and turned to stare at me, and I tried to explain. Since the debacle with the Four-Squared project, she and I had been working together very closely. “At first, it was so difficult to spend all that time with her,” I told them, and they remembered my late nights at the office and then a lot of complaining that I’d done as we’d sat around this kitchen table.
“You said that she was not always helpful,” Lyra said. “You said that she acted prickly and didn’t put her best foot forward.”
“All those things meant that Octavia is a complete…uh, she’s really not nice,” Silas interpreted. He’d been doing his best to curb his cussing around his sister, and they’d had lots of discussions about what to say and when to say it. I felt sure that when my parents were here, neither of them would let loose with the word he’d just avoided.
“I know I told you those things, but the more I’m with her, the nicer and better she—no, that’s not exactly right. I don’t really think that she seems nicer or better,” I admitted.
“Then why did you ask her here?” he wondered.
I had wondered that myself on several occasions after I’d done it. It wasn’t like I’d suddenly discovered hidden qualities in Octaviathat made me want to be her friend. Maybe the qualities that I already knew about, the ones that had led me to call her prickly, didn’t bother me as much—maybe my tolerance for them was better. But was she bossy? Yes. Was she demanding and imperious? Yes, and yes. Was she often rude? Did she refuse to listen? Did she rant about conspiracy theories? Did she insult…
Oh, no. “I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I felt sorry for her?” I sighed. I had, and I had also seen another terrible vision of my future when she’d explained to me that she would be celebrating Thanksgiving at home with her monitor lizard, because she didn’t have family around here. Then she’d further explained that she didn’t have family anywhere that she was close to. She didn’t seem to have friends, either, and she’d been turned away from volunteering at the community center because the last time she’d been there, she’d started several arguments with the people who had come for food assistance and had dispensed a lot of unwelcome advice that no one had appreciated.
Was that my destiny, too? Was that where I was heading, into a lonely life with a lizard?
“I also invited someone,” Lyra mentioned as she took a bite of toast. “Two people, I think.”
We both turned to look at her. “What?” Silas asked, and she explained. It turned out that when they went to the grocery store, they were going to have to get a bigger turkey then we’d planned on.
It was a busy day at Whitaker Enterprises as we tried to cram in last-minute tasks before what was going to be a long weekend,and we also tried to deal with city and county offices full of people who would rather have been home baking a pie or getting their dressing together.
“We call it ‘stuffing,’” Rashelle reminded me when I mentioned that, speaking slowly and clearly so that I’d catch the difference. Her pregnancy wasn’t showing at all and she still hadn’t made any announcement about it, but I figured most of us knew. Besides her morning sickness, she’d already set up a baby registry and one of the items on it was a new outdoor grill. As we finished up our morning meeting, she told us what she and her husband were planning for their first Thanksgiving together. “We’re going crazy and making sweet potato pie. My mother-in-law is pissed that we’re breaking the pumpkin tradition.”
Pie! I had a moment of panic before I remembered that it was ok. Lyra and I had made the crust the night before and it was in the refrigerator, and Silas would do the filling when he got off work and after they went to the grocery store. He had promised to stick to the recipe, too.
“I’m bringing my famous blue cheese and herring casserole to your house,” Octavia let me know, and Rashelle got up and headed to the bathroom. “I’ll need to reheat it, so make sure there’s enough oven space for a ten by sixteen pan.”
“No, there is not,” I said. “The oven will be full and I’ve told you that we don’t need you to bring anything, Octavia. Not your lizard, either. Don’t bring your lizard.”
I wasn’t sure if she’d paid attention to anything I’d said, and we had other problems besides her herring. This morning when I’dbroken the news about my surprise guest, Lyra had also let us know that she’d invited both Boris and his grandmother, Mrs. Alford. “He told me that they didn’t have anywhere to go and they would be alone,” she had explained. “Aren’t we supposed to be generous to people? Isn’t that what you say?” she’d specifically asked me, and Silas had shaken his head.
“You’re really rubbing off on her,” he had told me, but he’d been grinning as he said it. I wasn’t looking forward to a Thanksgiving with Mrs. Alford, Boris, or Octavia, but remembering his smile now made me very happy. Even the thought of the herring casserole didn’t erase that glow.
I got through the day and spent the evening in the kitchen, and by the time I left the next morning to pick up my parents at our meeting spot in Ohio, the dinner was well on its way: the pies were baked, the turkey was in the oven, the dressing—stuffing—was squeezed onto the rack above it, and everything else was prepped for takeoff, too.
“We will follow your recipes. I swear,” Silas told me. “Will you drive carefully?”
“I always do.”
