“You already do that!” I said. I also stepped up, over a pile of debris that he’d created when he’d ripped down a wall that had separated the washer and dryer from the rest of the room. He held out his hand to help me. “You do tons of stuff around the house, and you have a job. You’re starting the GED class next week and then you’ll keep going with a new career. Don’t you think that’s enough?”
“No. I don’t even have a goddamn driver’s license. What if something had happened to Ly and she’d needed me? What would I have done? I had to wait for you to buy me a car. I can’t live like this, like a deadbeat.”
“A—what?You’re not—”
“If I died today, what would I have to show for it? A piece of paper with my name on it? That’s it,” he told me. “I’ve done nothing. I’m turning thirty-three tomorrow and in morethan three decades, I’ve accomplished jack shit. Nothing,” he repeated.
“I don’t agree with that,” I argued. “You took in a little girl—”
“She’s my sister,” he said dismissively.
“You didn’t have to. Just because you’re related, it didn’t mean that you had to take parenting classes and adopt her. You didn’t have to bring her to the library, teach her math, go to the pool, and basically structure your whole life so that hers would be better.”
“That’s what you do,” he told me. “That’s what you do when you love someone.”
“I know, but I’m saying that you didn’t have to love her. You could have decided, ‘Nah, let the state of Michigan take over. I want to keep having fun with women who are about to go to prison.’”
He looked at me for a moment, and then a small smile disrupted the dust on his face. “I wasn’t spending all my time with murderers.”
“But you could have acted like your dad. When he was presented with fatherhood, he ignored it. He went out and committed a crime rather than seeing his daughter arrive in the world, and I can’t imagine anything more special and important. You’re not like that at all. You wouldn’t be just a name and dates on a piece of paper,” I said. “People would fall apart if you were gone. We would…”
“You shouldn’t cry now,” he said, and he hugged me. “I’m not dead yet.”
“Don’t talk about that,” I said. “I don’t want to think about a paper with your name on it. I never should have said it.”
“Cammie.” He hugged me tighter but then tried to move away. “I’m dirty. And sweaty,” he added.
I didn’t care. I didn’t let go, not until we heard footsteps in the kitchen above us and then two voices on the stairs.
“Whoa!” Lyra said, and then coughed. “Silas, you made a mess!”
“This looks like my uncle’s house,” Boris commented. “My grandma says that he lives like an animal. Not a neat and clean one, like a naked mole rat. A gross one, like a honey badger.”
“I’m going to clean it up,” Silas told both of them. “Then I’m going to put in a new floor and install better lights so that you can see. Lights with cages.”
That was a good idea, because we’d already had two ball/bat related accidents with the bulbs.
“Then I’ll paint it to make it brighter, too. It’s going to be nice.”
“Can I pick the color? Can it be green?” Lyra asked. She started to climb over to us, and he went to pick her up. “Can I paint my room green?”
“Yeah,” he told her. “Sure, we should do that.”
I had never gotten into decorating, but I got excited, too. “I can sew,” I mentioned. “I haven’t for a while, but my mom and Iused to remake a lot of clothes that we thrifted. Maybe we could make a bedspread or curtains.”
“Green ones?” she questioned, and I nodded.
“It would cool to have a thing where you could put out all your rocks to look at,” Boris chimed in, and no one had the heart to tell him that we probably wouldn’t be doing that.
“I could help you build a shelf for your own room,” Silas suggested, and our neighbor got excited, too.
I went to change out of the outfit I’d worn to the cemetery and helped clean up, and I could see the potential for the basement when he talked through it. He’d also thought through it before he’d started swinging his giant hammer, so the destruction wasn’t quite as indiscriminate as it had first looked to me. By dinner time (pizza, delivered, which we shared with Boris), the dust was mostly gone and the extra parts of the basement were stacked in the backyard.
Then there was more to do, because Lyra and I had to start baking a birthday cake. We sent Silas into the living room and discussed what we would write on the top, and if “you’re the best brother in the whole world and I love you so much” would fit in an eight-inch circle. He had specifically told us not to get him anything besides this cake (which reminded me of the Christmas truck and had made me feel hot and embarrassed). Since this would be our only gift, we wanted it to be perfect.
When the layers were out of the oven and cooling, Lyra said goodnight to her brother and went up to bed. It had been a long day for all of us, tiring physically due to the demo andtiring emotionally due to…everything. I had asked her leading questions as we’d baked and she did seem to be handling it ok. Silas would check in with her counselor, too, to make sure that we weren’t missing anything.
He was also tired, and had already headed to his room. I knocked on the side of his open door and he looked up, then raised his phone to show what he’d been reading. “This is about probate in Ohio,” he told me.
