“She can hit the cover off the ball,” Lyra told me. “She seemed nice, too.”
We spent the rest of the ride very softball-focused, but then Lyra went over to tell Boris how things had gone as her brother and I started dinner. “Here,” he said, and passed me a jar. “Let’s use these. What are you so worried about?”
“I’m not going to put pressure on her,” I said again.
“What? Yeah, I know that,” he answered.He took the jar from my hands and cracked the top before he handed it back. “Do you like olives?”
I nodded. “My parents wanted me to have fun and I did. I loved softball, but I also thought that I’d better be good at it because I understood that it could have been a path to college. I got very serious and I lost a lot of the joy. I don’t want that to happen to Lyra.” I looked down at the jar. “Why are we having olives?”
“She won’t lose it because we won’t let her. You know what to look for and the minute we see things going wrong, we’ll step in. And I’m making cocktails. It’s Friday night,” he reminded me.
Thank goodness he intended them for something other than the potato soup we were preparing for dinner. Soon, he’d handed me a drink with an olive on a little skewer. “It’s the weakest one I ever made, just for you,” he told me. “Cheers.”
“This is very fancy,” I noted, looking at my glass.
“My grandma had a big box of supplies in the basement because she liked to have parties. She called it ‘entertaining,’” he explained. “Some of the neighbors told me about coming over here for a fun night and then sleeping it off on the front lawn.”
“Really?”
“We could have people over. What about that Munir, or the guy who always talks about having a baby?”
“That’s Iker,” I reminded him. “His wife is due any day and they’re…sorry, I won’t bore you with stories about kids.”
“What do you mean? I’m interested.”
I shook my head, smiling. “You don’t like babies,” I reminded him.
He put down his glass. “When did I say that?”
“You didn’t have to,” I answered. “You’ve made it clear that you’re not interested and you don’t want to have kids of your own.” It was a real shame, though, because he would have been such an amazing father to them.
“That’s bullshit. No, I never wanted to have kids with any of the women I was sleeping with before…or are you talking about what happened today? Who wants to stand next to a screamer? And I wasn’t saying that it wasn’t cute, no matter what themother thought. I feel pretty bad about that,” he admitted. “Why wouldn’t I be interested in a baby?”
“When Iker was going through the stages of fetal development at Rashelle’s wedding, you nearly fell asleep on the table,” I reminded him.
“He went on for about an hour while we were waiting for our turn at the buffet. Those pigs in blankets weren’t enough to hold me,” Silas explained. “I don’t have anything against kids.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really,” he answered. “Don’t assume stuff about me.”
The front door slammed. “Boris is coming to eat,” Lyra announced, and the two of them jockeyed for a place at the table. Dinner wasn’t ready and anyway, both of them had filthy hands, so they were sent to the basement while we finished cooking. I heard her telling him about softball as they went down the stairs.
And during the meal, our guest was treated to an almost moment-by-moment breakdown of the day’s assessment. “It’s so fun. I wish you could play it,” she lamented, and Silas had a different idea for him.
“How about the two of us start building those shelves for your rocks?” he offered. “After dinner, let’s work out how big you want them and draw up a plan.” The three of them left me to the dishes, which I didn’t mind because I got to listen to their discussion of Boris’s dream room and Lyra’s, too. His would be purple, but also painted (somehow) with the northern lights, and hers would be green. We’d been working on that, buyingfabric and talking about painting some of the furniture (painting it green).
If I had a baby, it wouldn’t need its own room at first, but once he or she grew and became mobile, how would Silas and Lyra respond to that? They probably wouldn’t want to listen to crying at night, and they probably wouldn’t want to deal with extra mess…well, neither of them cared too much about mess, but having an infant and then a small child in this house would obviously be a large change and intrusion.
There were so many issues to think about. I wouldn’t jump headlong into something as important and life-altering as this would be, and it wouldn’t only alter my life, either. I thought that I should discuss it with someone, and the obvious person was Silas. I looked over to the table, where he was carefully sketching Boris’s room and laughing about how he was a terrible artist. Lyra eventually took over the planning.
“More purple?” she asked her friend, and nodded seriously like she’d already known what he would answer.
Eventually, our guest had to go home, because his grandma called to lure him with a dessert she’d made out of chocolate, toffee, and saltines. Two members of our household accompanied him to sample it for themselves, but Silas came back in a minute.
“They invited Ly to sleep over, camping out in the living room. Ok with you?”
“Me? Sure,” I agreed. The kids had done the same thing here, too. As he went to find her sleeping bag, I called, “I need to talk to you about something.”
