Chapter 13 #2
“I don’t know what to say,” Silas told me quietly.
He shook his head and lowered his voice further.
“I was up last night trying to think of something, but I couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t…
” He glanced at his sister and I thought that I understood.
He meant that there was nothing good to say about their father.
“We could just be silent for another moment,” I suggested and he nodded. Then he pulled both of us close to him and we looked at the man’s name and the dates of his birth and death, just a square of paper that summed up a lifetime.
It was also quiet on the ride home, and when we got there, we saw that several other neighbors had left things at the front door.
Lyra asked if she could go play and her brother said yes, so she went over to the Alfords’ house.
“That’s a better way to deal with it,” he said as he watched her look carefully and then cross the street. “Just move on.”
“She didn’t know him as a person. She didn’t even know his name,” I said. “It’s probably hard to take in the idea that he’s dead.”
“Hell, it’s hard for me, too. He was never a part of my life.
I won’t miss him,” he assured me. “I don’t care much that he’s actually dead, because it won’t be much different from when he was alive and just ignoring the fact that he had children.
He did send me pictures of women sometimes, like I would be interested in who he was screwing.
Christ on a cracker. I have to take this stuff off.
” He went upstairs, and once he was back in jeans and a T-shirt, he went down to the basement.
Then I started to hear some really loud, off-putting noises. It sounded like maybe, someone was ripping out walls…
Yes, that was what Silas was doing, which I saw when I went downstairs.
I started to cough at the dust he’d raised and I blinked at the damage.
“I’m going to fix this up nicer for Ly,” he told me.
He lowered the bandana that he’d tied over the lower half of his face, and he wiped sweat and dust off his forehead with the back of his hand.
“She deserves a lot more than playing on cracked concrete underneath pipes that drip on her.”
“The pipes don’t drip and she likes the basement,” I told him. “She and Boris have a great time down here.”
He was already shaking his head. “I’m going to fix this and then I’m going to do her room. I should fix your room, too.”
“Mine? I like my room.”
“No, it’s all just shit that my grandmother picked up sixty years ago. You should have something nicer, newer. The kitchen, too, right? The burner on the stove doesn’t work. We need a new one.”
“Maybe a new burner, but we don’t need a whole new stove,” I answered.
“I’m not asking you to pay for it,” he assured me. “I’m going to start stepping up more around here.”
“You already do that!” I said. I also stepped up, over a pile of debris that he’d created when he’d ripped down a wall that had separated the washer and dryer from the rest of the room.
He held out his hand to help me. “You do tons of stuff around the house, and you have a job. You’re starting the GED class next week and then you’ll keep going with a new career. Don’t you think that’s enough?”
“No. I don’t even have a goddamn driver’s license. What if something had happened to Ly and she’d needed me? What would I have done? I had to wait for you to buy me a car. I can’t live like this, like a deadbeat.”
“A—what? You’re not—”
“If I died today, what would I have to show for it? A piece of paper with my name on it? That’s it,” he told me. “I’ve done nothing. I’m turning thirty-three tomorrow and in more than three decades, I’ve accomplished jack shit. Nothing,” he repeated.
“I don’t agree with that,” I argued. “You took in a little girl—”
“She’s my sister,” he said dismissively.
“You didn’t have to. Just because you’re related, it didn’t mean that you had to take parenting classes and adopt her. You didn’t have to bring her to the library, teach her math, go to the pool, and basically structure your whole life so that hers would be better.”
“That’s what you do,” he told me. “That’s what you do when you love someone.”
“I know, but I’m saying that you didn’t have to love her. You could have decided, ‘Nah, let the state of Michigan take over. I want to keep having fun with women who are about to go to prison.’”
He looked at me for a moment, and then a small smile disrupted the dust on his face. “I wasn’t spending all my time with murderers.”
“But you could have acted like your dad. When he was presented with fatherhood, he ignored it. He went out and committed a crime rather than seeing his daughter arrive in the world, and I can’t imagine anything more special and important.
You’re not like that at all. You wouldn’t be just a name and dates on a piece of paper,” I said.
“People would fall apart if you were gone. We would…”
“You shouldn’t cry now,” he said, and he hugged me. “I’m not dead yet.”
“Don’t talk about that,” I said. “I don’t want to think about a paper with your name on it. I never should have said it.”
“Cammie.” He hugged me tighter but then tried to move away. “I’m dirty. And sweaty,” he added.
I didn’t care. I didn’t let go, not until we heard footsteps in the kitchen above us and then two voices on the stairs.
“Whoa!” Lyra said, and then coughed. “Silas, you made a mess!”
“This looks like my uncle’s house,” Boris commented. “My grandma says that he lives like an animal. Not a neat and clean one, like a naked mole rat. A gross one, like a honey badger.”
“I’m going to clean it up,” Silas told both of them. “Then I’m going to put in a new floor and install better lights so that you can see. Lights with cages.”
That was a good idea, because we’d already had two ball/bat related accidents with the bulbs.
“Then I’ll paint it to make it brighter, too. It’s going to be nice.”
“Can I pick the color? Can it be green?” Lyra asked. She started to climb over to us, and he went to pick her up. “Can I paint my room green?”
“Yeah,” he told her. “Sure, we should do that.”
I had never gotten into decorating, but I got excited, too. “I can sew,” I mentioned. “I haven’t for a while, but my mom and I used to remake a lot of clothes that we thrifted. Maybe we could make a bedspread or curtains.”
“Green ones?” she questioned, and I nodded.
“It would cool to have a thing where you could put out all your rocks to look at,” Boris chimed in, and no one had the heart to tell him that we probably wouldn’t be doing that.
“I could help you build a shelf for your own room,” Silas suggested, and our neighbor got excited, too.
I went to change out of the outfit I’d worn to the cemetery and helped clean up, and I could see the potential for the basement when he talked through it.
He’d also thought through it before he’d started swinging his giant hammer, so the destruction wasn’t quite as indiscriminate as it had first looked to me.
By dinner time (pizza, delivered, which we shared with Boris), the dust was mostly gone and the extra parts of the basement were stacked in the backyard.
Then there was more to do, because Lyra and I had to start baking a birthday cake.
We sent Silas into the living room and discussed what we would write on the top, and if “you’re the best brother in the whole world and I love you so much” would fit in an eight-inch circle.
He had specifically told us not to get him anything besides this cake (which reminded me of the Christmas truck and had made me feel hot and embarrassed).
Since this would be our only gift, we wanted it to be perfect.
When the layers were out of the oven and cooling, Lyra said goodnight to her brother and went up to bed.
It had been a long day for all of us, tiring physically due to the demo and tiring emotionally due to…
everything. I had asked her leading questions as we’d baked and she did seem to be handling it ok.
Silas would check in with her counselor, too, to make sure that we weren’t missing anything.
He was also tired, and had already headed to his room. I knocked on the side of his open door and he looked up, then raised his phone to show what he’d been reading. “This is about probate in Ohio,” he told me.
“We can find a lawyer there or I can do it. It’s a little more complicated with us being out of state.”
“Come in,” he told me, and I did and sat on the bed. “You have enough to do at work, so you don’t need to take this on. I’ll hire someone.”
“It’s easy enough but…maybe it would be better that way.” I could get the names of some attorneys in Ohio.
“Are things going to slow down for you now that your boss is in the office full-time?”
“I hope so,” I said. “One of the reasons that I wanted to go in-house, rather than trying for a job at a big law firm, is because the hours are generally better. I wanted to have more of a balance than a lot of the people I went to law school with.” When I’d applied for the job, I had been thinking that I’d soon have a family, and I wanted to be able to spend time with my kids. And with Dax, of course.
“Crack down on Octavia and make her ass get into gear,” he recommended, but I only sighed. That was a problem, one that I didn’t want to deal with today on top of everything else that was going on.
“Want your spot?” Silas patted the empty side of the mattress.
“Is that mine?”
“You fell asleep there before,” he reminded me, and I crawled over his legs to take it again.
He had a giant bed, one that hadn’t been in this room during his grandmother’s time.
He’d explained that he’d had to upgrade, due to his feet hanging off the end of what she’d had here before.
I cuddled into a ball and he pulled the comforter over me.
“There you go,” he said, and smoothed down the covers, much as I did for Lyra. “You talked me off the ledge today.”