Chapter 11
The other shoe did drop, but not how I was expecting.
In most ways, our lives had continued to go well after the holiday.
Dax’s social media had been silent lately and none of his friends (the ones I knew about) were posting much—so his club promotion business must have been on hiatus and the Pickle-Dick Posse had either disbanded or was taking a break, too.
Lyra was still hanging out with Boris after they got off the bus and they always had snacks at our house.
This was because Mrs. Alford would only give them saltines to eat, and also because Silas was teaching both of them how to do origami.
He had also started to clean up the scary basement so that it would be more of a fun indoor play spot, since it was now so cold outside.
Snow and/or freezing temperatures were always in the forecast.
So that was all fine. Work was a little touchy because Beckett had let Octavia know that she would now be reporting to me.
He had made the announcement to everyone in the department, first by explaining that his time away from the office had shown him how valuable we all were to the company and had reminded him how much he appreciated our hard work and dedication.
“Sorry,” Rashelle said, because she had teared up and needed a tissue. “It’s because I’m…never mind.”
We all knew what she’d been about to say and Octavia wasn’t surprised by what Beckett had said about my promotion, either.
He had already spoken to her about it, so it wasn’t sprung on her in front of everyone else.
They all turned to congratulate me and then to stare at her, and our office manager got nervous.
When the Four-Squared project had gone awry, Iker had borne the brunt of a lot of her anger.
She’d vented it via complaints about the office temperature, bad smelling soap in the bathroom, terrible coffee in the employee lunchroom, and inappropriate signage (she was still salty about Rashelle’s posted request that the members of the legal department stop microwaving fish leftovers).
But during the meeting with Beckett, she had held in her feelings and also congratulated me, and I was hoping for the best in that quarter.
So all that was all ok. The shoe dropped on someone else, which I found out one night when there was an eruption in the living room.
After not having a TV for a long time, Silas had recently gotten into watching sports (particularly replays of college softball games), and he was on the not-comfortable couch while I worked at the kitchen table. Then I heard it.
“Ah, Christ on a cracker! No fucking way.”
It got quiet again but I went out to see what had happened, if it was something real or if he was just upset about a batter striking out.
It was more than softball problems, though.
He was standing up from the couch and staring at his phone, the good one and not the crappy flip phone that he used to communicate with me (and, I’d noticed, it was also the number he’d given to my parents).
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Is a winter storm coming?”
“No, you don’t have to worry about driving in snow,” he told me. It was a large concern of mine. “I heard from my father. Mine, and Ly’s.” Rather than explaining, he held out the phone and I took it.
“Hey. I’ll be coming thru Detroit in Dec. Be there for Xmas to see the kid,” I read aloud.
“No way. No fucking way,” Silas repeated as he slumped back onto the couch.
“’The kid?’” I quoted. “Does he mean Lyra?”
“Yeah, he means her but he never knows her name. I remember when she was born and he called me. It was because he’d gotten arrested and wanted my help with bail, not because he was at the hospital watching his only daughter come into the world.
The road salt licking piece of shit.” He paused. “I shouldn’t say that.”
“If he got arrested and missed her birth, then he deserves the insults and that was creative,” I said. “He is a salt licker.”
“I mean that I shouldn’t say that Ly’s his only daughter,” he corrected me. “I have no idea how many other kids he actually has and there may be ten or fifteen other little girls out there. Maybe more.”
“Oh.” I was unable to do anything to prevent my “disgusted and repulsed” expression.
“Yeah, that’s gross,” he agreed. “He’s a real Uncle Horndog.”
“I kind of wish that phrase hadn’t entered your vocabulary. And he’s coming for Christmas?”
“No, he won’t,” Silas told me. “We’re still going to Kentucky.
” He had hope that he’d have a license to help to drive us there, but if not, he wanted to break up the trip by spending a night on the road so I wouldn’t do a straight shot.
When we arrived, he planned to sleep in another motel so he could avoid my childhood bed.
“I’ll tell him no,” he continued. “I can meet him somewhere else so he can’t come mess with Lyra.”
“Shouldn’t that be her choice, too?” I asked.
I also sat on the couch. The room was so cozy with the Christmas tree we’d put up (Silas reached the very top with no ladder, even with the big size that the tall ceilings permitted).
We had decorated it with their grandma’s stuff, and I thought it was beautiful.
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe she should get the chance to know him,” I suggested. “He’s her father.”
“He’s her father,” he repeated. “Yeah, and she’d probably say that she wanted to see him, but she shouldn’t.
I need to keep her away from both her parents because, and this is generous, they’re two of the biggest assholes on the planet.
” When I didn’t immediately respond, he looked over at me. “Are you doing the lawyer poker face?”
I had been trying to. “You know best in this situation,” I answered. “You understand all the players and you’re the person who loves Lyra more than anyone.”
“But?”
“I have a different perspective,” I said. Since Thanksgiving, he hadn’t brought up my adoption and neither had I. As I’d said then, it wasn’t a big deal and it didn’t make much difference, because I had two wonderful parents who loved me and that made me a truly lucky woman. But…
“Tell me,” Silas said. “Share that perspective.”
“I would have done anything to know my birth parents,” I confessed. “Not everyone wants to, but I did. A lot.”
“Belle and your dad kept you from them?”
“No, no,” I answered immediately. “They never would have done that.” He needed more information in order to understand, but I had a hard time talking about this—even after so many years. “I never knew either of them but it wasn’t because of my mom and dad. They died, so that was it.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I kept asking you, too, when I can see that you don’t want to talk about it.”
I waved that away with my hands. “What about Lyra, though?”
He sighed. “I guess I could tell her about him. She’s very smart but she’s only seven, so I don’t know. And chances are, he’d set up a meeting with a lot of conditions and restrictions, everything exactly to his own liking, and then he wouldn’t show. I don’t want her to be disappointed.”
“Maybe her counselor would have some suggestions about how to handle it,” I said, and he looked over at me.
“That’s a good idea. I’m glad she has that woman to talk to about all this shit, when I’m too thick to deal with it.”
“You aren’t,” I countered. “But you’re very close to the problem and sometimes that makes it harder to see solutions. How did you deal with it when you were a kid yourself? Did you know your father?”
“I knew his name and I would have recognized him if I saw him in the street, but that’s about it,” Silas told me.
“I saw my grandmother a lot, and she was always nice, but she didn’t have much to do with him, either.
He was a trucker and he lived somewhere in the Southwest, I think, but he didn’t come visit even when he was in Detroit.
A few times, my mom brought me some place so I could meet up with him, but he was never interested in me until he noticed that I was getting big.
Then he said I should play football but even back then, I could tell that he was hoping for something for himself, like attention or a payday.
I told him to fuck off. I actually had wanted to play and I had made my middle school team but after that, I quit and I never touched a football again.
I showed him, right? Maybe I could have been good at something. ”
“You’re good at a lot of stuff. There’s no payday with Lyra, though, so why does he want to see her?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He took his phone from me and stared hard at the screen, as if there might have been more to that stupid message. “It’s the first time he ever did this. I guess I have to figure out what the hell he wants.” He typed something. “There. Done.”
“What did you say?” I wondered.
“I wrote, ‘What the hell do you want?’ That’s all I need to know,” Silas explained. “I don’t care how he’s feeling or doing, and I don’t care if he’ll be alone with a monitor lizard for the holiday.”
“It’s a direct request,” I agreed. “What about Lyra’s mom? Does she ever show any interest in her daughter? Where is she now?”
“I think Vegas,” he said, which was what he’d mentioned before, too.
“She left Detroit and she’s never looked back.
My dad might have more information. I don’t hear much but he has dropped a few hints about seeing her now and then, mostly about sleeping with her.
” He glanced at me and suddenly smiled. “Is that gross, too?”
I must have been looking like it was. “How much older is he than Lyra’s mother?”
“It has to be at least thirty years. He always had younger women around after he left my mom. It pissed her off a lot,” Silas said. “She used to complain to me.”
“About your dad’s girlfriends?”