Chapter 7 #2
“Yeah, it was delicious on its own. You bake good stuff,” he complimented, and I also said thank you. “I want to learn to be a baker and I want to get a job I enjoy as much as you seem to like yours.”
“I do like my job,” I agreed. “What are you interested in?”
He messed with his tie. “I don’t want to wear one of these every day,” he said first, but then it became clear that he’d given this issue a lot of thought.
“I always liked working with tools. In my youth, that meant stripping cars for parts, but I could find a better use for those skills. I could become a machinist.” He talked about several specific jobs and salary ranges for them.
“That sounds like a good idea,” I said, but then I groaned as I heard the instructions that my phone was issuing. “Oh, no. I hate making left turns like this. Why aren’t there traffic lights with arrows?”
“It’s a Michigan left,” he stated, as if that was a good reason for driving past where you wanted to go and then turning around.
“I’d have to get my GED. I’d have to go to trade school or community college and then be an apprentice.
That’s years of shit to look forward to and I have Lyra to worry about.
The way I have things scheduled now, I can be with her after school a lot and I’m home on weekend days. ”
“Yes, but you’re always exhausted.”
“Yeah,” he said, and sighed. “I don’t know.”
“If you quit working at the club, you’d have more time.” I hated when he went there anyway. He’d told me that there had been a lot of fights recently and he was out so late. “I know you’d miss that money but I don’t pay you very much rent. I could—”
“You do enough around the house that you shouldn’t be paying me at all.”
“That’s silly…oh, no. How am I going to this?” I asked, leaning toward the wheel.
“Let that guy go and now it’s your turn,” he answered, and I made it through the weird intersection. We were almost at the church.
“Your voice goes high when you’re anxious, too,” Silas noted. “Why do you get so worked up about driving?”
“Maybe because I started later than other kids. I was scared so got my license I was eighteen instead of sixteen, and I didn’t get as much practice.”
“But now you’re…how old are you?”
“Twenty-seven,” I answered.
“What the hell, Camille? Why’d you say it like that?” He imitated me again and repeated the number, drawing out the words sadly and then sighing deeply.
“I’ve been feeling bad about that,” I said. “My birthday’s coming soon.”
“Oh, yeah? When?”
“June,” I said, and sighed again.
“It’s September. That’s not soon,” Silas told me. “Are you upset about getting old?”
“Let’s not talk about it now,” I requested.
“It can wait until after the wedding. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get through the whole thing without falling asleep due to my decrepitude.
” Dax had always said what a drag—no, I wasn’t going to think about him.
I parked and we filed toward the church with the rest of the throng.
The building was huge, which was lucky because it seemed like Rashelle and her soon-to-be-husband might have invited the entire world.
She had definitely invited everyone from our office, and only our boss Beckett had RSVP-d with regrets.
I spotted Octavia waving at me from a pew as we walked in, but I pretended not to notice and we sat elsewhere.
But seeing my coworker made me think of a problem that I hadn’t yet considered.
I’d been very glad that Silas had agreed to come with me so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the various members of the bride’s family.
I appreciated it so much—but I hadn’t thought through what I would say about my relationship with him.
“What are we going to tell people about us? The two of us?” I whispered, but he had to deal with the woman in the pew behind us because she got very mad.
“I can’t see a thing besides your back! You’re too large,” she accused, and he said she was right about that. Since he wasn’t going to get any smaller, we stood and looked for a spot on the end of a row.
After we had reseated ourselves, he turned to me. “What did you ask? You want to know what to say to people about the two of us?”
I nodded.
“Nothing,” he told me. “We don’t have to say anything because it’s none of their business. If they ask, just do this.” He stared directly at me, and his blue eyes were coldly terrifying.
I would have run as fast as my slingbacks could carry me if he had turned that expression on me for real…
but we would have to say something. I couldn’t just glare at my officemates like I wanted to gut them with a dull knife, which was what his face had told me.
I thought more about the problem as I admired the different outfits I saw, until the ceremony started.
Then I spent my time trying not to cry because I really didn’t want to get red eyes and also ruin my makeup. It was a struggle.
“What’s wrong with you?” Silas whispered at one point, but I was pressing my lips together too hard to speak, and I was looking up intently into the rafters to keep tears from falling. “Want to wipe your eyes on my tie?”
The man in front of him turned around to glare.
Silas nodded at him and he flipped back to face the front.
I worked harder on self-control and by the time that the vows were over, I was able to smile at the newly married couple as they walked together out of the church.
But I still needed a moment to breathe before we got into the car.
And my “date” looked extremely…I wasn’t sure how to read his expression, but maybe it was disapproving. “I’m ok,” I told him. “I should have told you that I always cry at weddings.”
“You turned the color of a strawberry while you held it in,” he said. “What’s there to be sad about? You think they’re not right for each other?”
“No, not at all! From everything that Rashelle has said, they’re great,” I assured him. I inhaled to the count of three and exhaled just the same. “I’m ready to go.”
The ceremony had been very long, with lots of readings by lots of different family members and friends. When we arrived at the reception hall, I was both hungry and thirsty. The wedding traffic as we’d approached had made me nervous, too, so I was also slightly cranky by the time we got inside.
“Do you want something to eat?” Silas suggested. “I need a beer, myself.”
“Yes, please,” I said gratefully, and I watched him move through the crowd toward the appetizer tables and bar. People generally parted for him and I could see his blonde head—
“Who is that man you brought, Camille?”
Due to the crush of other guests, I had missed Octavia’s approach. I should have spotted her, though, because she wore a hat with two towering ostrich tail feathers. They added more than a foot to her height, and she wasn’t short to begin with.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” she asked. I had tried to do Silas’s glare, but it hadn’t produced the desired effect of silence or retreat because she kept demanding answers. “Who is that man you’re with? Is he a criminal? Is that a gang tattoo that I see on his neck?”
“What? No!”
Silas himself returned at that point. “Hey,” he greeted us. He offered a plate of food to me and I took it happily. “I think I already figured out which one is Uncle Horndog. Stay away from the guy in a yellow tux,” he advised.
“Uncle…who is your escort tonight, Camille?” Octavia asked. “Is he capable of obedient behavior in social situations?”
He turned to look at her. “Do you think I’m a fu—” But before he could complete that question and this turned into a confrontation at Rashelle’s reception, I held a pig in a blanket to his lips.
“You can share,” I said, and he ate it from my hand. His blonde moustache tickled my fingertips. As he was still chewing, I said, “Oh! There’s Aunt Nancy. Excuse us, Octavia.”
“Did she think I was a damn dog?” he asked after he’d swallowed and as I led him away by the sleeve of his blue blazer.
“She acts like the same way to everyone.”
“I saw you shiver just now,” he said. “It’s a few degrees below the normal high for the second weekend in September, but the body heat in here—”
“I’m fine,” I said, and I wished he hadn’t noticed my reaction as I’d fed him the hors d'oeuvre. “Also, I don’t have an aunt here.”
“I figured that. I also figured out who that woman was when I saw how she was shaking her finger at you. You mention her sometimes around the dinner table and you say mean things like, ‘She’s not a generous person’ and ‘Sometimes I wish we had hired someone else, but that’s not very charitable of me.
’ Let’s go get more of those baby hot dogs. ”
We did, and we ran into a few other people from my office who stared at Silas but, unlike Octavia, didn’t call him a criminal.
They only seemed curious when I introduced him as my housemate (the truth, and I left it at that and attempted the glare again).
Maybe I was perfecting it because the only questions they asked were things about where he worked and if he’d ever played football.
“Nah,” he answered the last one. “I look like I did, though. Maybe in another life I would have, but the only guys in uniform that I tussled with were cops.” Munir laughed and Silas seemed surprised. He had been serious.
I remembered that Iker’s dad owned a machine shop in the area that people here called “Downriver,” meaning south of the city of Detroit, and I asked him about that.
They got involved in a long conversation but it ended up having little to do with jobs, which had been my intention.
Instead, Silas got to hear all about how Iker and his wife were going to have a baby in a few months.