Chapter 10 #3
“Really?” Silas asked me. He shook his head ruefully, but he was smiling. “You should have seen her at her friend Rashelle’s wedding,” he told my mom. “Tears for days.”
“Cammie is soft at heart,” my mom said fondly. “She always had a romantic streak. Do you remember when you waited below the window—”
“Mom, let’s not get into all the mistakes I made with boys in high school,” I interrupted, and Silas laughed.
“How about you?” my mother asked him.
“Not much of a romantic streak, unless you count the time I got sentimental over my motorcycle when it died for the final time,” he said. “That was sad. No major mistakes with girls in high school, either.” He lowered his voice and told me, “Probably because I wasn’t going to high school.”
“You’ve never married?”
He lost his smile. “Uh, no. I never felt the need, Mrs. Carpenter.”
“Please call me Belle,” she said, and he started humming under his breath. “Well, not everyone has to. But Camille has always dreamed of having a family.”
“Silas and Lyra are already a family,” I pointed out.
“You know what I mean. Children of your own,” she said, and I had understood that.
“That might happen,” I said vaguely. “Someday.” Swiping and clicking may have worked for my former teacher, but my own attempts at finding someone that way had, so far, been less than thrilling.
Was it too much to want someone smart, funny, kind, strong, serious, handsome, and hard-working?
How about someone who didn’t want to lick your feet, like the one guy I’d matched with, or the other one who explained that he was looking for a sugar mama/cougar and I might have fit the bill?
Well then, what if I lowered my standard to only “unlikely to cheat on you with another woman in the closet of a nightclub?”
I’d been weeding through a mountain of single guys in the Detroit area, and none of them had given me any hint of a spark.
Rashelle, who had spotted a familiar icon on my phone when we’d ordered lunch, had suggested that I didn’t have to find a stranger.
If I was in the market, I could always get together with her cousin.
“The teenage escort?” I’d asked, and she’d shrugged and told me never mind.
My mom wasn’t going to give up so easily now. “You’ve always been a person who goes after what she wants,” she noted. “You have high standards. Generally.”
Not with Dax, though—she didn’t say it, but I understood and I nodded.
She wouldn’t have been the first to suggest that I might have deserved more than what I was getting from him.
This wasn’t a conversation that I needed to have, again, and it wasn’t something that Silas needed to hear. But he was already chiming in.
“You weren’t a fan of her former boyfriend,” he mentioned, and my mom said she certainly was not.
She started telling him the exact kind of embarrassing stories that I had put a stop to before, like about the time that Dax had stood me up on New Year’s Eve, how he’d lost the puppy he said he’d gotten for my birthday (and that was why he hadn’t given me a present), and how he’d once left me while we were on vacation in New Orleans and had headed to Florida with a friend instead.
I had been sad on New Year’s Eve, I’d been very worried about the puppy (until he’d finally admitted that he’d made it up), and I’d made my own way home from Louisianna.
“It’s for the best that you decided not to marry him,” she concluded.
“For the best,” I echoed. If I hadn’t gotten my ring tested or gone to Chateau Moderne that night, we would still have been together.
“Definitely for the best,” Silas agreed, and under his breath he said something about a human guitar string. But he hadn’t wanted to marry any of the women he’d been with, either. He had “never felt the need,” he’d explained to me before, and I remembered that now.
“Why are you glaring like that?” he asked. “Did I miss a spot on that plate?” He took it back from me and rewashed it.
The plate was not the problem. “Why didn’t you ever get serious with any of your girlfriends?” I asked. “I’m guessing that you had a lot of them.”
“Not so many, Belle,” he informed my mom before turning to me. “Why do you need to have a number?” he asked.
“You know a lot about me,” I said. “It’s only fair.”
“I didn’t know what you just told me about…” He didn’t want to say it in front of her, but I understood that he was referring to how I hadn’t ever mentioned that my parents had adopted me.
“Because that’s not important.”
“Neither are my former girlfriends,” he responded. “They’re all former, right? Why do we need to talk about them? I didn’t care when we moved on. It was a much better outcome.”
“Oh, ok. I get it.”
“What the hell—sorry. What does that mean?” He turned off the faucet and turned to face me.
“I understand you perfectly. You’re a member of the ‘it was all her fault’ club.”
“What?” He seemed genuinely confused.
“You’re totally innocent, blindsided by the breakups. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“When did I say that?” Silas demanded.
He hadn’t and maybe I was projecting a little. Or I was projecting a lot. “Never mind,” I told him, but he did.
“I’m not saying that I was the perfect prince but I wasn’t always to blame. The last woman I was with is currently doing a stint in Huron Valley Correctional Facility for voluntary manslaughter. The one before that stole my car. I got it back,” he assured my mother, whose jaw had dropped open.
“It sounds like you also had trouble picking the right person,” she said.
“I wasn’t actively looking for a relationship,” he explained. “More like…more like just, uh, having fun. We both knew that nothing would come of it. We were just…it was not…serious. I mean…” He trailed off again, but this time, he just stopped.
“Oh, I see,” my mom said, and it was a very short sentence but it seemed to contain a lot of meaning. “If you don’t need my help, I’m going to go check on your father,” she told me.
I assured her that we were good and I knew that I’d have to assure her later that I didn’t have my hopes pinned on Silas as the man of my future.
“She’s not mad at you,” I told him, because he was looking concerned, and I dried the dish that had once held mashed potatoes.
Those had gone over better at the table than the herring casserole, which no one but my dad had tried and he only did because he was nice.
Boris had looked nauseated but I had to give Mrs. Alford credit for teaching him manners.
When Octavia had offered a heaping spoonful, he hadn’t said anything about imminent death by stinky fish and cheese.
He had only shaken his head and told her “no thank you.”
“I think your mom is mad,” Silas countered. “I didn’t mean to piss her off, but you got all over me.”
“Sorry. It’s none of my business why you led on your girlfriends and then didn’t make a commitment.”
“Camille, fuck! I didn’t do that,” he said angrily. “I explained it.”
“Fine,” I said, and we washed and dried quietly for a while. “Why?”
“Are you really asking why I didn’t want to marry a woman who killed someone?”
“I’m asking why you ended up with a woman like that, even if it was just for fun,” I retorted. “You’re always saying things to me about how bad Dax is, but at least he never went to jail.”
“It’s prison, sweetheart.”
“Don’t call me that,” I said irritably. I didn’t like when he said it sarcastically, like he was now. Once or twice, he’d seemed to say that word with real feeling, and I didn’t mind it then.
“Ok, Camille,” he answered, also irritated.
“Well?” I prompted. “Are you going to answer my question about your poor taste?”
He thought for a moment, washed another glass, and then said, “No.” I hung up my towel and left to watch football with my dad and mom. Lyra was sitting on her lap.
I had organized a tour of Detroit for the next day, and she and Silas were supposed to come. I wasn’t sure that he would want to after we’d gotten into that fight, though.
“What?” he asked when I suggested that idea to him the following morning. He put down the scary razor he used when he shaved but he still had a load of white cream above his beard. “Are you talking about what happened yesterday when we did the dishes? It wasn’t a fight.”
“No?”
“No. Come in here.” He pulled me into the bathroom before I had time to protest. “I was going to talk to you last night, but I didn’t want to bother Lyra.
” She and I were sharing her room, since my parents had my bed and we’d all decided that the two smallest people would do better together. She didn’t seem to mind me.
And speaking of sharing a space—
“This bathroom is small,” I said, because Silas and I were crammed close. “Why are you in here?”
“Your father is using my shower. It’s just a pan, so he doesn’t have to step into a bathtub to get in,” he explained, and I thought that was very nice. Maybe he had bad taste in women, but he didn’t have a problem giving up his bathroom to my dad, who needed it. “Have a seat.”
I did sit on the toilet lid, because that put an inch or two of space between us. “What did you want to say to me?”
“We’re not fighting,” Silas stated.
“Ok. I’ll see myself out of—”
“Camille, damn it! Are you still pissed at me?”
“No,” I said. “No, I’m really not. I was surprised yesterday. First I was mad, because I was thinking that you did the same thing to your girlfriends that Dax did to me.”
He put down the razor. “Don’t ever compare me to that piece of pickled herring.”
“I changed my mind,” I soothed. “I realized that it’s you and I who are alike.”
“We both enjoyed the cranberries your mom brought.”
“We both choose bad people to date,” I corrected. “We have bad taste.”
“I don’t,” he protested. “It’s a coincidence that three of the women I was with had to flee the country.”
“What?” I gasped. “Why did they have to do that?”
He shook his head as if he was frustrated. “You’re missing the point.”
“As far as I can see, the point is that you picked terrible people, you’re not the marrying kind, and there’s beard hair all over the bathroom that I use. Oh, you’re also bleeding!”
“Fuck,” he said loudly, at just the same moment that my mother knocked on the door.
“Excuse me,” we heard her say very clearly, and then both of us answered.
“Just a minute, Mom!” and, “I’m sorry, Belle.” We glared at each other.
“I’ll come back later,” she said. “No, Lyra! Don’t go into the bathroom without knocking, baby.”
“Who’s in there?” Lyra asked from outside the door.
“We’ll be right out. I mean…” I watched Silas hold in the words he wanted to use. “I’ll be right out, Ly. Put your shoes on and get ready to go.”
We listened to them troop down the stairs and then he did open the door. He stepped into the hallway to free me, too.
“You read it all wrong,” he told me again, but he didn’t offer a better explanation, and he didn’t have to.
He didn’t owe me that, and I didn’t need to stand there waiting.
I nodded and went downstairs, and we managed to get through the rest of the long weekend without any additional arguments, bloodshed, or herring.
It still wasn’t the Thanksgiving of TV. But this was life, and things didn’t wrap up neatly with credits rolling and the assurance that everything had gone just like it was supposed to.
I loved those movies.