“Yes, of course! I want her life to be happy and easy, and I want her to have everything. I want you to be able to drive her to softball practice because you both would love it. I was thinking that you could take vacations together. You could use that truck to get yourself to work and classes. You could use it for so many things, but it was so weird for me to buy it. I get that now. I got swept up in a kind of Christmas euphoria and I got so excited thinking that you’d be glad to have it. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry for giving me the car of my dreams and wanting to make a better life for my sister,” Silas stated. “Christ on a cracker. Can you sit down?” I did, and he reached across the table to take my hand. “I don’t want you to feel…what did you call it?”
“Wretched.”
“I don’t want you to feel that way. I was overwhelmed when I saw the truck parked there and the guy was giving me papers tosign. Then I felt like such a piece of shit failure because you had to step in and do this for me, when I should have been able to for myself. My birthday is coming up and I’ve been realizing that I’ve spent much of my life acting like an irresponsible jackass. I was very happy to see that shiny truck and then I felt so goddamn bad that you were the one who had to buy it for me. Especially because I know how careful you are with your money. You support your parents, right?”
I didn’t know that he was aware of that. “Well…yes,” I said. “Partially. After my dad’s stroke, I offered to help with organizing their finances and I saw how little they were living on. I knew that they weren’t wealthy, but not how close to the bone things were. I told them that I was making investments but I put money into their accounts, too. I keep depositing part of my salary so that their monthly dividends will be higher, but I haven’t told them that. I guess I make a habit of treating people like children and stepping in to fix everything.” I was ashamed of myself. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry for helping them? Would they have let you, if you hadn’t been sneaky about it?” he asked, and I shook my head. “That’s why you did it like that. That’s why you had to give me a truck, because I wouldn’t have taken it.”
“It’s a very basic trim package,” I tried to explain. “It’s not the fanciest by a long shot. It’s as stripped-down as I could get it, but I did want heated seats. Maybe I’ll ride in there, too.”
He smiled, just briefly before he looked very serious again. “I am like a little child. I can’t pay for my life and I went in the corner and pouted about it. I need some lessons in manners from you.”
“Your manners are fine.”
“They suck,” he told me. “They suck, and so do I. It’s no excuse but I’ve been pretty thrown by the shit with my dad, too. Which I shouldn’t be, since I was the one who’d said all along that he wasn’t going to show on Christmas. I was the one who knew he’d let Lyra down.”
But honestly, she hadn’t seemed very bothered by the fact that her father had stood them up. On my way home from Kentucky, I’d been upset and nervous about how she was feeling, and I’d called so many times to talk to her. If anything, she was acting relieved that he hadn’t come.
Part of her reaction was due to how Silas had minimized it for her. He’d told her that plans were up in the air, that their father was working, and that the guy was terrible about remembering stuff. He’d even told her a funny story about their dad misplacing his eighteen-wheeler, which Lyra had thought was hilarious. In other words, her brother had set the bar very low. But she had been conflicted about seeing her father anyway, and she hadn’t said anything to me that signaled that she felt abandoned or even sad.
The moment I’d walked in the door after my drive from Kentucky, it had been obvious that Silas himself was upset by what had happened on Christmas (or what hadn’t happened). As much as he’d insisted that this behavior was exactly what he expected, it was still a dirty thing to do to your son, and on top of that? The man had said that he was dying! Was it even true or was he just a terrible, disappointing liar? Because he hadn’tbothered to contact anyone again, not even to acknowledge that he was alive and well. Was he? That probably scared Silas, too.
“There was a lot going on over the holiday,” I said. “I made it worse.”
“You gave me a truck! That’s amazing. That’s not worse, not in any way.” His fingers squeezed mine.
“Well, I understand that what I did was weird and inappropriate. Way too much and over the top,” I countered. “I shouldn’t have tried to act like a parent to you or a savior or whatever the heck I was doing.”
“I think you were trying to be a friend to me, which I need.”
“Like when you said that I, a stranger, could live in your house because I was scared and alone. I needed a friend like that. Before you go running yourself down, remember how you helped me pack and invited me here. And you hardly knew me, but you came by to warn me about Dax and then you made him stop…” I stopped. “What?”
He had suddenly looked worried. “I can’t get a bead on the guy. Since before Christmas, he’s been lying very low.”
“Good.”
“No, because if he’s out and visible, then I can watch him. I have been since the summer but now he’s acting different,” Silas told me. “I can’t figure out what—”
“Silas?” Lyra called from the basement. “Boris got his head stuck in the banister.”
“Seriously?” he wondered to me, but he stood to go help. “How did this happen, kid?” I heard him asking from the staircase.
After Boris was freed and went home, and when we’d eaten dinner and Lyra and I had re-read the book she was writing, I went back to my spot at the kitchen table to catch up on a little more work. I also had seconds of the dinner that Silas had made earlier. It was really good, and Ly had told me that their steaks on Christmas had been delicious, too. “He thought about putting on molasses but he said that you wouldn’t like it, and I was glad,” she had confided.
Now I was glad that Silas and I had resolved the issue of the truck, at least superficially. I still felt so awkward about it and I wondered why I had barreled ahead with that purchase to begin with. It wasn’t like me. I thought long and hard before I chose toilet paper at the store, trying to mentally calculate pennies per square, but I had jumped right into plunking down a whole load of cash for a vehicle for someone else. My mom and dad had been stunned, too.
“You do have a history of buying cars for other people. You got the wagon for us,” she had mentioned. That was what she always called the small, comfort-height SUV that I’d purchased for them a few years before. They had argued with me about accepting it. “But Silas is…honey, what is Silas to you?”
That was something else that had percolated in my brain on the drive back from Kentucky, but what I had determined was that it didn’t matter. Feelings were not important in law and I needed to approach my future plans in the same way. Wherever my heart seemed to be leading, I didn’t have to follow, and I couldn’tlet anything distract me from my goal: I needed to be single-minded in my pursuit of love—
No, that was wrong. I wasn’t going to pursue love anymore, not after how I had completely messed up my life with Dax. Now I was looking for a man who had a mindset that was similar to mine. I needed to find someone who supported my career, because I would never give that up. I also needed to find someone who was serious about settling down. He would have to be ready for fatherhood, for sure. Those things didn’t relate to being “in love.”
I thought about my conversation with Juliet Forsman earlier that day, the part when she’d explained that she and Beckett were going to be parents. “I’m so excited,” she had told me, and I could hear her smiling as she said the words. “It’s like—I know this sounds really mushy, but I think about how much I love Beckett and it amazes me that this baby is a part of him and a part of me, and that loving each other produced a human being. My sister Sophie corrects me and says that it’s the sperm and egg that created the human being, and I understand biology,” she had assured me. “It’s also love.”
I thought about Rashelle, too, and how she put her hand on her stomach sometimes when she thought no one was looking. With our glass walls, things were hard to miss. The security guard at our building was going to his daughter’s baby shower this weekend, which he was so thrilled about, and Iker our office manager never stopped talking about his future family. That was all about love, too, but not everybody took the same path. Mine could be different.
