It felt strange to be in this brand-new car, but Lyra loved it. She talked about how high up we were and how funny it smelled inside, but she didn’t mention anything about her father as we were on the way to the cemetery. Instead, she discussed school and a problem two kids had during a soccer game.
“They were fighting about if it was a goal or not and Iyana said that it wasn’t and that Giancarlo was stupid and I said, ‘You can’t talk to him like that,’ and she said, ‘Why?’ So I said, ‘Because he’s my friend, and I’m telling you to stop,’” she recounted. “That’s what a friend does, right, Silas?”
“Yeah, but I don’t want you to get in trouble,” he warned. “If things turn rough, tell the teacher.”
“You do things by yourself,” she answered. “I always hear you telling Camille that you take care of stuff.”
“I always tell Camille that? No,” he argued, but she said that he did. “Ok, with some things,” he admitted. “I don’t do everything by myself. I depend on her a lot.”
“Why?”
“Because I know she’ll come through for me,” he answered. “She will for both of us, right? And nobody can do everything alone, not all the time. So you should ask for help when you need it, because if you don’t, things can get too big to handle.”
“Like you could start a war,” she suggested.
“Maybe not that bad. Did I ever tell you about when I stole a case of ice cream?”
“Youstoleit?” she asked incredulously.
“Yeah, because I made a really shi—poor decision,” he corrected himself. As he spoke, I eased myself into the next lane and prepared to make one of the “Michigan lefts” that I hated. “You can do it,” he told me, and then continued with his story to Lyra. “I was about your age and I stole it from the back of a delivery van parked outside of a party store. I thought I’d sell the separate cartons for cheap and make some money. But the thing was so heavy that by the time I finally managed to drag it far enough away, all the ice cream had melted. I couldn’t sell anything and I was tired and hot. And while I’d been doing that, someone else took my bike. I got it back,” he added.
“But if you’d had someone to help you steal, then you would have been able to get money,” Lyra summarized, and he looked horrified.
“That wasn’t what I was trying to tell you. Cammie, you’re better with the lesson thing. Go for it.”
“Well, when I was in law school, there was no way to read all the material that the teachers assigned,” I said, and explained the concept of dividing labor in study groups and how we’d had todepend on each other. It was boring enough that it nearly put us all to sleep on the rest of the ride to the cemetery.
“Honestly, I didn’t get your point either,” I said as he helped me out of the truck, and he agreed that the ice cream story had gone off the rails.
“I think I’m distracted,” Silas said. Then he took my hand and also Lyra’s, and we walked to the niche that held his dad’s ashes.
It was very sad, no matter that I’d never met the guy and no matter that I might have agreed with the neighbors who’d said that he was a reprobate. Lyra looked at the temporary marker and read his full name, which she hadn’t known. We stood in the cold and I thought of my birth parents’ graves in Kentucky, not too far from where I’d ended up living later on. When I’d earned some money of my own, I’d paid for markers to be placed there. There would be a permanent one here, too.
“I don’t know what to say,” Silas told me quietly. He shook his head and lowered his voice further. “I was up last night trying to think of something, but I couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t…” He glanced at his sister and I thought that I understood. He meant that there was nothing good to say about their father.
“We could just be silent for another moment,” I suggested and he nodded. Then he pulled both of us close to him and we looked at the man’s name and the dates of his birth and death, just a square of paper that summed up a lifetime.
It was also quiet on the ride home, and when we got there, we saw that several other neighbors had left things at the front door.Lyra asked if she could go play and her brother said yes, so she went over to the Alfords’ house. “That’s a better way to deal with it,” he said as he watched her look carefully and then cross the street. “Just move on.”
“She didn’t know him as a person. She didn’t even know his name,” I said. “It’s probably hard to take in the idea that he’s dead.”
“Hell, it’s hard for me, too. He was never a part of my life. I won’t miss him,” he assured me. “I don’t care much that he’s actually dead, because it won’t be much different from when he was alive and just ignoring the fact that he had children. He did send me pictures of women sometimes, like I would be interested in who he was screwing. Christ on a cracker. I have to take this stuff off.” He went upstairs, and once he was back in jeans and a T-shirt, he went down to the basement.
Then I started to hear some really loud, off-putting noises. It sounded like maybe, someone was ripping out walls…
Yes, that was what Silas was doing, which I saw when I went downstairs. I started to cough at the dust he’d raised and I blinked at the damage. “I’m going to fix this up nicer for Ly,” he told me. He lowered the bandana that he’d tied over the lower half of his face, and he wiped sweat and dust off his forehead with the back of his hand. “She deserves a lot more than playing on cracked concrete underneath pipes that drip on her.”
“The pipes don’t drip and she likes the basement,” I told him. “She and Boris have a great time down here.”
He was already shaking his head. “I’m going to fix this and then I’m going to do her room. I should fix your room, too.”
“Mine? I like my room.”
“No, it’s all just shit that my grandmother picked up sixty years ago. You should have something nicer, newer. The kitchen, too, right? The burner on the stove doesn’t work. We need a new one.”
“Maybe a new burner, but we don’t need a whole new stove,” I answered.
“I’m not asking you to pay for it,” he assured me. “I’m going to start stepping up more around here.”
