Chapter 8
I looked at Lyra’s tiny bag and the contents spilling out, which consisted of one T-shirt and six library books. I had offered to help her pack but she’d said no, that she didn’t need me for anything.
So I didn’t repeat my suggestion now. “Ok, looks like you’re ready,” I told her instead. “I’m going to get my stuff together, too. Can you come with me?”
“Why?” she asked suspiciously.
“I wondered if you could, um…could you make sure my socks are matched correctly?” I improvised. She had been helping us with the laundry and was meticulous about making neat rolls with them.
She agreed to that and did check, but then she stayed and sat on my bed as I talked through my packing process. I laid out shirts, shorts, jeans, underwear, and toiletries. “There’s a chance of precipitation on Saturday, so I’ll bring my raincoat,” I mused.
“Silas says that it’s only a slight chance.” She studied the pile of my clothes. “Maybe I need to bring more stuff for myself,” she told me, and I raised my eyebrows to feign surprise. When I suggested again that I could help her, she agreed and we went back to her room.
Her brother was on his own for packing, but I trusted that he knew what to bring and that his own bag wouldn’t contain any of his band T-shirts with their scary pictures.
My parents, who were big Tammy Wynette and Glen Campbell fans, wouldn’t have appreciated them, and they would get to see what he wore…
because we were all preparing to go to their house in Kentucky!
Lyra was taking a day off from school (Silas had made sure it was ok) and he was already free for the weekend, because he had quit his job at Chateau Moderne.
He had mentioned that off-handedly and then, just as casual, had suggested that he and Lyra could come with me to visit my parents.
“She never gets to do too much and maybe you’d want the company on that drive,” he’d said, and both of those things were true.
I also wanted them to meet my mom and dad.
I thought that it would be good for Lyra and I was curious about what my parents would think of Silas.
They had hated Dax, absolutely despised him, and they had tried to keep that from me but it was pretty clear.
I hoped they wouldn’t feel the same way again—of course, the stakes were much lower.
Silas wasn’t the person I planned to marry like my ex had been.
By the next morning, we were ready to go and all of us were awake and at the breakfast table.
Silas never ate too much so early but he made an effort now because his sister mimicked everything he did, and she needed food to start herself off.
Both of them were quiet in the morning and took a while to warm up, and I moved around getting the house ready for our absence.
“I don’t think you need to put rubber bands on the cabinet handles,” he said, breaking the silence.
I jumped a little. “I was trying to keep anything from opening them while we’re gone. I went home one weekend when I lived in my former apartment, and something got into the food I had,” I explained.
“Mice?” he suggested, and I made a face.
It might have been mice, and I was glad that I didn’t live there anymore.
I left the cabinets alone and soon enough, we were on our way—then we had to stop because Lyra had forgotten to go to the bathroom, and we were on our way again.
We all stayed quiet as we drove out of the city on roads that were just beginning to get busy with Friday morning traffic.
The two of them were still waking up and I had to pay careful attention to the other cars.
When the workday started at Whitaker Enterprises, I fielded several calls from people there, putting them on speaker and then once pulling off at an exit so that I could put my full attention on a problem.
Both my passengers were quiet and neither complained while I did those things.
In fact, I saw Lyra listening instead of reading as I tried to talk to Octavia about her Four-Squared project, which was concerning me.
When I hung up and after Silas helped me merge back onto the interstate, she had something to say.
“You sound smart.”
“Camille is smart,” her brother told her.
“Thank you,” I said to them both. “That’s nice of you.”
“Are you the boss of everybody there?” she asked me.
“I’m pretty high up in my department, but I’m not the boss of the whole company,” I explained.
“But she could be, if she wanted to,” he added. “You too, Ly. You can be the boss.”
I looked in the mirror again and saw her nodding a little, her lower lip pushed out as she considered it. “Could you, too?” she asked him.
“Probably not, because I dropped out of high school. The easiest path to being a big shot like Camille is getting your education squared away.”
“I’m not a big shot,” I interjected. “Also, there are a lot of different paths and success is something that you can determine for your...” I closed my mouth because Silas had shot me a look. I was aware that he really, really wanted her to graduate from high school and college, too.
“How come you dropped out of school, Silas?” she asked him. “Were you bored?”
“Are you bored in school?” he asked her back, and she shrugged.
“Sometimes. Mostly.”
He looked at me again and I knew we’d now have a different problem to discuss, once she was out of hearing.
I had also been a kid who’d gotten bored at school but I had handled it by asking for more and more work, until eventually I was doing things at a grade level a few above mine (and my teachers had been amazing as they helped me negotiate that).
But maybe Lyra was handling it by causing problems, because her brother had already started to get emails about her behavior.
“But why did you quit?” she demanded. “Why?”
“I quit,” he echoed. “Yeah, I did. There were a few reasons. You know how I make you go every day, even when you say that you don’t want to?”
“I’m not there now,” she said smugly.
“Not now,” he agreed. “But I missed a lot more than one day. My mom didn’t force me and I was more interested in running around the city.
Maybe that sounds fun, except I got into a lot of trouble and after a while, I was so far behind that it didn’t work when I tried to go back.
I didn’t understand what was happening in the classes so I caused more trouble there, too. ”
“Why didn’t your mom make you go?” she asked. “You say that you make me because you love me. So she didn’t…” But Lyra didn’t want to say her conclusion out loud.
“My mom loved me a lot,” Silas said. “You remember what Camille told you about how kids learn to love because other people teach them? My mom taught me, but she had a lot of problems that she had to deal with, stuff besides what I was doing. Like she had to make sure that we were getting enough to eat.”
“You eat a lot,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, I do. And she didn’t always have nice boyfriends. Camille talked to you about that, too, about boys being nice and respecting you.”
I shook my head. Did I ever shut up?
“I don’t want a boyfriend,” Lyra announced, and then she had more questions. “Was she so busy with them that she forgot to take care of you? I think that happened with my mom.”
“You remember it?” he asked, turning around to look into the back.
She paused, thinking. “I remember parts. I remember crying and my tummy hurt because I was hungry.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Silas’s hand clench into a fist.
“That was what I asked the counselor last week,” Lyra told him. “I asked her why my mom didn’t want to take care of me, since you keep saying that she loves me.”
I glanced over again and now I saw him wince. “What did the counselor say about that?” he asked, and she told him.
Therapy was something new for her. After the incident with the bat and Mrs. Alford’s grandson, Silas and I had discussed the idea that Lyra needed to talk to someone besides him, someone who had experience in helping kids with trauma.
Due to some bad experiences of his own when he’d been forced into therapy by a court, he hadn’t been crazy about the idea.
But he would have tried anything for her.
As we got to Ohio, I needed a bathroom break.
I’d brought a big travel mug full of coffee to help me stay alert and I got a refill for that, too.
Lyra and I came out of the station while he was topping off the tank, but we didn’t need much gas because we hadn’t driven that far.
Once again, the phone had lied about how long this trip was going to take.
Silas mentioned an issue with our speed when we were back on the road.
“Looks like you’re going about ten under.
” He pointed at the dashboard and I forced myself to push down harder on the pedal so that we accelerated.
“Next time, I’ll be able to drive.” I had bargained with another attorney (I was handling the closing for her mother-in-law’s house purchase) and she was helping him to restore his license—she thought it would happen, but timing it was difficult.
“That will be nice,” I said. He had assumed that there would be a “next time,” and I hoped that he was correct.
“You could always fly home, right? Into Nashville?”
“That’s in Tennessee,” Lyra said, because she’d been studying maps.
“I don’t like flying,” I confessed. “I had to do it for softball games in college and I barely forced myself into the seat.” I glanced into the back and realized that I could have been passing along those fears, which she didn’t need.
“There’s no good reason for me to feel that way,” I stated next. “Airplanes are perfectly safe.”