My mom wasn’t going to give up so easily now. “You’ve always been a person who goes after what she wants,” she noted. “You have high standards. Generally.”
Not with Dax, though—she didn’t say it, but I understood and I nodded. She wouldn’t have been the first to suggest that I might have deserved more than what I was getting from him. This wasn’t a conversation that I needed to have, again, and it wasn’t something that Silas needed to hear. But he was already chiming in.
“You weren’t a fan of her former boyfriend,” he mentioned, and my mom said she certainly was not. She started telling him the exact kind of embarrassing stories that I had put a stop to before, like about the time that Dax had stood me up on New Year’s Eve, how he’d lost the puppy he said he’d gotten for my birthday (and that was why he hadn’t given me a present), and how he’donce left me while we were on vacation in New Orleans and had headed to Florida with a friend instead. I had been sad on New Year’s Eve, I’d been very worried about the puppy (until he’d finally admitted that he’d made it up), and I’d made my own way home from Louisianna.
“It’s for the best that you decided not to marry him,” she concluded.
“For the best,” I echoed. If I hadn’t gotten my ring tested or gone to Château Moderne that night, we would still have been together.
“Definitely for the best,” Silas agreed, and under his breath he said something about a human guitar string. But he hadn’t wanted to marry any of the women he’d been with, either. He had “never felt the need,” he’d explained to me before, and I remembered that now.
“Why are you glaring like that?” he asked. “Did I miss a spot on that plate?” He took it back from me and rewashed it.
The plate was not the problem. “Why didn’t you ever get serious with any of your girlfriends?” I asked. “I’m guessing that you had a lot of them.”
“Not so many, Belle,” he informed my mom before turning to me. “Why do you need to have a number?” he asked.
“You know a lot about me,” I said. “It’s only fair.”
“I didn’t know what you just told me about…” He didn’t want to say it in front of her, but I understood that he was referring to how I hadn’t ever mentioned that my parents had adopted me.
“Because that’s not important.”
“Neither are my former girlfriends,” he responded. “They’re all former, right? Why do we need to talk about them? I didn’t care when we moved on. It was a much better outcome.”
“Oh, ok. I get it.”
“What the hell—sorry. What does that mean?” He turned off the faucet and turned to face me.
“I understand you perfectly. You’re a member of the ‘it was all her fault’ club.”
“What?” He seemed genuinely confused.
“You’re totally innocent, blindsided by the breakups. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“When did I say that?” Silas demanded.
He hadn’t and maybe I was projecting a little. Or I was projecting a lot. “Never mind,” I told him, but he did.
“I’m not saying that I was the perfect prince but I wasn’t always to blame. The last woman I was with is currently doing a stint in Huron Valley Correctional Facility for voluntary manslaughter. The one before that stole my car. I got it back,” he assured my mother, whose jaw had dropped open.
“It sounds like you also had trouble picking the right person,” she said.
“I wasn’t actively looking for a relationship,” he explained. “More like…more like just, uh, having fun. We both knew thatnothing would come of it. We were just…it was not…serious. I mean…” He trailed off again, but this time, he just stopped.
“Oh, I see,” my mom said, and it was a very short sentence but it seemed to contain a lot of meaning. “If you don’t need my help, I’m going to go check on your father,” she told me.
I assured her that we were good and I knew that I’d have to assure her later that I didn’t have my hopes pinned on Silas as the man of my future. “She’s not mad at you,” I told him, because he was looking concerned, and I dried the dish that had once held mashed potatoes. Those had gone over better at the table than the herring casserole, which no one but my dad had tried and he only did because he was nice. Boris had looked nauseated but I had to give Mrs. Alford credit for teaching him manners. When Octavia had offered a heaping spoonful, he hadn’t said anything about imminent death by stinky fish and cheese. He had only shaken his head and told her “no thank you.”
“I think your momismad,” Silas countered. “I didn’t mean to piss her off, but you got all over me.”
“Sorry. It’s none of my business why you led on your girlfriends and then didn’t make a commitment.”
“Camille, fuck! I didn’t do that,” he said angrily. “I explained it.”
“Fine,” I said, and we washed and dried quietly for a while. “Why?”
“Are you really asking why I didn’t want to marry a woman who killed someone?”
