“Maybe she should get the chance to know him,” I suggested. “He’s her father.”
“He’s her father,” he repeated. “Yeah, and she’d probably say that she wanted to see him, but she shouldn’t. I need to keep her away from both her parents because, and this is generous,they’re two of the biggest assholes on the planet.” When I didn’t immediately respond, he looked over at me. “Are you doing the lawyer poker face?”
I had been trying to. “You know best in this situation,” I answered. “You understand all the players and you’re the person who loves Lyra more than anyone.”
“But?”
“I have a different perspective,” I said. Since Thanksgiving, he hadn’t brought up my adoption and neither had I. As I’d said then, it wasn’t a big deal and it didn’t make much difference, because I had two wonderful parents who loved me and that made me a truly lucky woman. But…
“Tell me,” Silas said. “Share that perspective.”
“I would have done anything to know my birth parents,” I confessed. “Not everyone wants to, but I did. A lot.”
“Belle and your dad kept you from them?”
“No, no,” I answered immediately. “They never would have done that.” He needed more information in order to understand, but I had a hard time talking about this—even after so many years. “I never knew either of them but it wasn’t because of my mom and dad. They died, so that was it.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I kept asking you, too, when I can see that you don’t want to talk about it.”
I waved that away with my hands. “What about Lyra, though?”
He sighed. “I guess I could tell her about him. She’s very smart but she’s only seven, so I don’t know. And chances are, he’d setup a meeting with a lot of conditions and restrictions, everything exactly to his own liking, and then he wouldn’t show. I don’t want her to be disappointed.”
“Maybe her counselor would have some suggestions about how to handle it,” I said, and he looked over at me.
“That’s a good idea. I’m glad she has that woman to talk to about all this shit, when I’m too thick to deal with it.”
“You aren’t,” I countered. “But you’re very close to the problem and sometimes that makes it harder to see solutions. How did you deal with it when you were a kid yourself? Did you know your father?”
“I knew his name and I would have recognized him if I saw him in the street, but that’s about it,” Silas told me. “I saw my grandmother a lot, and she was always nice, but she didn’t have much to do with him, either. He was a trucker and he lived somewhere in the Southwest, I think, but he didn’t come visit even when he was in Detroit. A few times, my mom brought me some place so I could meet up with him, but he was never interested in me until he noticed that I was getting big. Then he said I should play football but even back then, I could tell that he was hoping for something for himself, like attention or a payday. I told him to fuck off. I actually had wanted to play and I had made my middle school team but after that, I quit and I never touched a football again. I showed him, right? Maybe I could have been good at something.”
“You’re good at a lot of stuff. There’s no payday with Lyra, though, so why does he want to see her?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He took his phone from me and stared hard at the screen, as if there might have been more to that stupid message. “It’s the first time he ever did this. I guess I have to figure out what the hell he wants.” He typed something. “There. Done.”
“What did you say?” I wondered.
“I wrote, ‘What the hell do you want?’ That’s all I need to know,” Silas explained. “I don’t care how he’s feeling or doing, and I don’t care if he’ll be alone with a monitor lizard for the holiday.”
“It’s a direct request,” I agreed. “What about Lyra’s mom? Does she ever show any interest in her daughter? Where is she now?”
“I think Vegas,” he said, which was what he’d mentioned before, too. “She left Detroit and she’s never looked back. My dad might have more information. I don’t hear much but he has dropped a few hints about seeing her now and then, mostly about sleeping with her.” He glanced at me and suddenly smiled. “Is that gross, too?”
I must have been looking like it was. “How much older is he than Lyra’s mother?”
“It has to be at least thirty years. He always had younger women around after he left my mom. It pissed her off a lot,” Silas said. “She used to complain to me.”
“About your dad’s girlfriends?”
“Yeah, and I guess she shouldn’t have done that. You’re not supposed to say shit about your kid’s relatives, according to a class I had to take to get guardianship of Ly. I learned somegood information in there, a lot about baby care, but nothing prepared me for having an actual kid around. I guess I’d thought they were like pets, like you could leave them at home for a while and do your thing and that would be ok. I was never doing my thing, never ever. It was hard enough with Lyra and she was three. Can you imagine having a baby?” His face showed emotions that looked like “disgust” or “repulsion.”
I tried to shrug. Yes, I could imagine that well.
“Personally, I remember being alone a lot, because my mom worked as much as she could. We didn’t have much choice in that.” He shook his head. “I also thought that kids would do what you told them, but I should have known better. I never did anything that anyone said. Nope, and I never listened, either. That was a mistake.”
“I listened to people too much,” I countered. “I trusted adults and I got myself into problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
