But Silas hugged me. He pulled me against his chest, holding me tightly against the hard muscle. “Be careful. Be careful when you stop, even for gas. Be aware of your surroundings. Lock your doors.” He had more warnings but I was so happy to be held that I missed most of them. I put my arms around his waist and I wished that I wasn’t wearing the extra-thick down coat that went down past my knees and the long-sleeve T, the fleece, and sweatshirt underneath it. I wanted to feel more of him.
“All right.” He put his hands on my shoulders and stepped back so that I lost that warmth, comfort, and love—not love, but maybe affection and caring? Friendship? A simple connection with another human?
It was gone, no matter what it was, and I felt much colder than before. “All right,” I echoed, and got in the car to drive to Kentucky. I cranked the heat but I still felt the chill, and the tears on my cheeks made it worse. I was really, really going to miss them.
But when the long, tiring trip was finally over, I determined that I would put on my “content and serene” expression for my parents. First, I didn’t want them to suspect that I would ratherhave been elsewhere and second, I knew what my mom was thinking. She had probably told my dad so that he was thinking it as well.
She worked around to it gradually on Christmas Eve. “How is the speed dating, Cammie?” she asked me.
“What?” I had my phone in my lap, hidden by my napkin so they wouldn’t know that my attention was partially diverted from the beautiful dinner. I’d just received a short text from Silas’s phone (all the flip phone texts were short since they were such a pain to write): “Hi. L.” I simultaneously got teary and also smiled.
“You can put your phone up on the table, honey,” my dad advised. “What are Lyra and Silas doing?”
“Excuse me,” my mom said, lowering her eyebrows at him. Then she repeated her question to me. “How is the speed dating?”
“I haven’t tried that yet,” I answered. I did place my phone next to my plate, after I made the font bigger so that my dad could read what Lyra had sent. “I’m still doing a few different apps but I haven’t met anyone in person yet.”
“Then how is that dating?” she asked.
“I guess that it’s more like browsing,” I admitted. “I’m putting myself out there, though.”
“Tell Lyra that I found your first glove in the attic,” my dad directed me. “Tell her that I cleaned it with saddle soap and oiled it up, and it’s ready for her to use.”
“You did? Daddy, that’s so sweet. She’ll love it,” I said. “Silas and I are looking at teams for the spring. The signups start pretty soon.”
“Excuse me!” my mom said again, and drew down her brows. Unlike other people who could pull off “threatening” very well, my mom just looked cute. “Let’s talk about you seeing other men,” she said pointedly.
That was what worried her: she thought that I had chosen the wrong guy to fall in love with. Again. As we washed the dinner dishes, I tried to reassure her. “Silas and I are friends,” I mentioned. I tried not to think of the feeling of his body against mine when he’d hugged me in the driveway, and of the shivers I had gotten. It was just nice to be touched, that was what it was.
“He did make it very clear that he’s not interested in a relationship,” she pointed out, and that was true. He had no interest in getting married and he’d expressed his relief that he didn’t have children. Even when I showed him extremely adorable videos of babies on my phone, he never did anything more than grunt and he never watched the whole thing. To be fair, my father (who loved actual babies, in person) was equally uninterested in those videos, but still. It was something of a sign.
We had been to church on Christmas Eve so the next day, the actual holiday, I had nothing to occupy my time except to stare at my phone and wait. Well, I had brought legal work with me but my mom had made me put it away. Up until now and as he’d promised, Silas had been calling frequently. We’d discussed his strategy for preparing their Christmas dinner (he was makingsteaks, which I thought was ambitious) and he’d told me about his Santa strategy, too. We’d talked until it got pretty late and I was whispering so that I wouldn’t disturb my parents in the room next door.
“I never did much about Christmas,” he had told me. “I remember being pretty little and asking my mom if Santa would come and bring me a…I think I was asking for a truck to play with, but that part’s fuzzy. She started to cry and told me no. Then she explained that Santa was actually parents but she didn’t have any money, and she’d tried to get me what I wanted at one of the toy giveaways but she’d waited too long so they only had some baby dolls and makeup stuff left. I told her it was ok and we didn’t bother with Christmas after that.”
“Oh.” That had made me very sad, but Silas had kept talking matter-of-factly, as if it didn’t bother him.
“I guess that’s why I like to do the Santa stuff for Ly. I was sneaking around the yard ringing the sleigh bells earlier tonight, and I went over to Mrs. Alford’s and did it there, too. I told her first so that she wouldn’t come out and beat me with a stick, and she was pretty happy. Gave me some saltines.”
“We have cheese you can add to those.”
“I’m full from dinner,” he assured me. “And Lyra’s stocking is also full, so much that it’s about to explode right now.”
I really had gone overboard. “Do you see a stocking for yourself?” I had asked.
“There’s one here with my name on it, and it looks like someone made it out of yarn. Was that what you were doing when you kept putting a pillow over your lap and saying, ‘It’s nothing?’”
“Do you like it? I think your favorite color is black, but I wanted it to be more festive.”
“I love it,” he had told me. “There’s something sticking out of the top that looks like a turtle with a tail made of hair.”
“That’s a papier-mâché bust of you,” I’d explained. “It’s an amazing likeness.”
He’d laughed very hard but had said that he was absolutely not going to laugh when he saw it again on Christmas morning. I knew that, because he would never have hurt Lyra’s feelings.
“Is there any news about your dad?” I had asked, and it had felt like tension suddenly filled the air around me, even hundreds of miles away.
“Last I heard, he’s coming. He still won’t give me a time but in the final message I sent, I told him that I will let him in between the hours of eleven AM and twelve noon, and that’s it. If he comes before or after, there’s no entry. So I guess we’ll see if he can tell time, and if his dying wish to see his daughter is going to trump his lifelong ambition to be the most selfish person on the planet. That guy sucks,” he sighed. “He’s like a candy cane you already licked and then you find a hair stuck to it.”
