“Who’s in there?” Lyra asked from outside the door.
“We’ll be right out. I mean…” I watched Silas hold in the words he wanted to use. “I’ll be right out, Ly. Put your shoes on and get ready to go.”
We listened to them troop down the stairs and then he did open the door. He stepped into the hallway to free me, too.
“You read it all wrong,” he told me again, but he didn’t offer a better explanation, and he didn’t have to. He didn’t owe me that, and I didn’t need to stand there waiting. I nodded andwent downstairs, and we managed to get through the rest of the long weekend without any additional arguments, bloodshed, or herring.
It still wasn’t the Thanksgiving of TV. But this was life, and things didn’t wrap up neatly with credits rolling and the assurance that everything had gone just like it was supposed to.
I loved those movies.
Chapter 11
The other shoe did drop, but not how I was expecting.
In most ways, our lives had continued to go well after the holiday. Dax’s social media had been silent lately and none of his friends (the ones I knew about) were posting much—so his club promotion business must have been on hiatus and the Pickle-Dick Posse had either disbanded or was taking a break, too. Lyra was still hanging out with Boris after they got off the bus and they always had snacks at our house. This was because Mrs. Alford would only give them saltines to eat, and also because Silas was teaching both of them how to do origami. He had also started to clean up the scary basement so that it would be more of a fun indoor play spot, since it was now so cold outside. Snow and/or freezing temperatures were always in the forecast.
So that was all fine. Work was a little touchy because Beckett had let Octavia know that she would now be reporting to me. He had made the announcement to everyone in the department,first by explaining that his time away from the office had shown him how valuable we all were to the company and had reminded him how much he appreciated our hard work and dedication.
“Sorry,” Rashelle said, because she had teared up and needed a tissue. “It’s because I’m…never mind.”
We all knew what she’d been about to say and Octavia wasn’t surprised by what Beckett had said about my promotion, either. He had already spoken to her about it, so it wasn’t sprung on her in front of everyone else. They all turned to congratulate me and then to stare at her, and our office manager got nervous. When the Four-Squared project had gone awry, Iker had borne the brunt of a lot of her anger. She’d vented it via complaints about the office temperature, bad smelling soap in the bathroom, terrible coffee in the employee lunchroom, and inappropriate signage (she was still salty about Rashelle’s posted request that the members of the legal department stop microwaving fish leftovers). But during the meeting with Beckett, she had held in her feelings and also congratulated me, and I was hoping for the best in that quarter.
So all that was all ok. The shoe dropped on someone else, which I found out one night when there was an eruption in the living room. After not having a TV for a long time, Silas had recently gotten into watching sports (particularly replays of college softball games), and he was on the not-comfortable couch while I worked at the kitchen table. Then I heard it.
“Ah, Christ on a cracker! No fucking way.”
It got quiet again but I went out to see what had happened, if it was something real or if he was just upset about a batter striking out. It was more than softball problems, though. He was standing up from the couch and staring at his phone, the good one and not the crappy flip phone that he used to communicate with me (and, I’d noticed, it was also the number he’d given to my parents).
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Is a winter storm coming?”
“No, you don’t have to worry about driving in snow,” he told me. It was a large concern of mine. “I heard from my father. Mine, and Ly’s.” Rather than explaining, he held out the phone and I took it.
“Hey. I’ll be coming thru Detroit in Dec. Be there for Xmas to see the kid,” I read aloud.
“No way. No fucking way,” Silas repeated as he slumped back onto the couch.
“’The kid?’” I quoted. “Does he mean Lyra?”
“Yeah, he means her but he never knows her name. I remember when she was born and he called me. It was because he’d gotten arrested and wanted my help with bail, not because he was at the hospital watching his only daughter come into the world. The road salt licking piece of shit.” He paused. “I shouldn’t say that.”
“If he got arrested and missed her birth, then he deserves the insults and that was creative,” I said. “He is a salt licker.”
“I mean that I shouldn’t say that Ly’s his only daughter,” he corrected me. “I have no idea how many other kids he actuallyhas and there may be ten or fifteen other little girls out there. Maybe more.”
“Oh.” I was unable to do anything to prevent my “disgusted and repulsed” expression.
“Yeah, that’s gross,” he agreed. “He’s a real Uncle Horndog.”
“I kind of wish that phrase hadn’t entered your vocabulary. And he’s coming for Christmas?”
“No, he won’t,” Silas told me. “We’re still going to Kentucky.” He had hope that he’d have a license to help to drive us there, but if not, he wanted to break up the trip by spending a night on the road so I wouldn’t do a straight shot. When we arrived, he planned to sleep in another motel so he could avoid my childhood bed.
“I’ll tell him no,” he continued. “I can meet him somewhere else so he can’t come mess with Lyra.”
“Shouldn’t that be her choice, too?” I asked. I also sat on the couch. The room was so cozy with the Christmas tree we’d put up (Silas reached the very top with no ladder, even with the big size that the tall ceilings permitted). We had decorated it with their grandma’s stuff, and I thought it was beautiful.
“What do you mean?”
