Page 22 of The Someday Daughter
“Surprise,” Cleo chimes from the back. “We have a furry hitchhiker.”
“I hate surprises,” I mutter, just as Silas says, “Can you hold her while I drive?”
We stare at each other over the center console. “Absolutely not.”
“Oh, come on.” He jiggles her so her back paws sway over the seat. “Can we try? She’s a wonderful road trip companion.”
“How long is this drive?” I ask, eyeing Puddles. Her breath is hot and smelly, wafting at me with every exhale. I imagine my blouse slick with slobber.
“Ninety minutes,” Mick offers from the back seat, and I hold up both hands.
“It’s a no.”
“Give her to me,” Cleo says, sticking her hands between the front two seats. She wiggles her fingers, sharp green nails flashing. When Silas eases Puddles off to her, Cleo looks at me through her long eyelashes—glittering with glued-on rhinestones. “She’s a pug, not a piece of poop.”
“I didn’t say she was—”
“You’re treating her like one,” Cleo says, settling the loaf that is Puddles into her lap. “She has feelings, you know.”
“The summer is young,” Silas says before I can respond, finally dropping into the driver’s seat and shutting his door. “We have time to make a dog person out of Audrey yet.”
“Everyone’s a dog person once they meet the right dog,” Mick says. He reaches forward to squeeze my shoulders and I slide down in my seat, feeling acutely like I made the wrong choice in coming here. “Puddles is definitely the right dog.”
“Anyway,” Silas says. I watch his eyes flick up, check on Puddles in the rearview, before he taps the blinker and eases us onto the road. “Sadie was my math tutor. Does that answer your question?”
I look at the side of his face, half-hidden behind dark sunglasses and that baseball cap. Silas called Sadie hisbonus mom, so... “No?”
He smiles crookedly, casting a glance my way. “My dad hired her to help me after my mom died. My grades were terrible, along with everything else about me.”
I turn away from him instinctually, tensing at the honesty of this admission. We don’t even know each other.
“Sadie was at the University of Michigan then,” Silas says. He punches on the radio, and something acoustic fills the car. “In Ann Arbor. At first she was just helping me with algebra, but thenshe kind of stuck around to help me with everything else. Lily, too—my sister.” I hazard a glance in his direction but he’s staring straight ahead, eyes on the road and one hand on the wheel. The other drums his knee, casual, like this is the easiest thing in the world to talk about. “Our dad was having a hard time—Lily was seven and I was thirteen and Sadie kind of saved us, I don’t know. She took a job at American right before my senior year and I didn’t really know where to go for college so I went there.” He slows for a stoplight and looks over at me, and I’m grateful for the sunglasses between us. “My dad had no idea what to do with us after my mom died. And Sadie just became our family.”
What happened to your mom?It’s right there at the back of my throat, waiting to be asked. But I can’t make myself say it, and as music fills the space between us, Silas looks at me again. He laughs, shaking his head a little.
“What?” I say.
“You know that termresting bitch face?” I frown, bracing for the insult. “You have resting mathematician face.” His eyes flick to mine before falling back to the road. “Like you’re always trying to figure something out.”
“Probably how she wound up in this car with you two idiots,” Cleo says, but there’s something unquestionably affectionate about it. From the corner of my eye, I see her reach forward to tickle her fingernails along the back of Silas’s neck.
The plaza in Taos is a scaled-down version of the one in Santa Fe, an unshaded park surrounded on all sides by tourist shops. The park is bare and hot, its few trees doing little to provide relief from the afternoon sun. I watch Puddles totter into the grass and squat to pee for the third time since we left the car.
“So,” Cleo says. She’s holding Puddles’s leash while Mick and Silas buy us ice cream, and her eyes flick to mine behind her square yellow sunglasses. “That was kind of gnarly last night.”
The show is the last thing I want to talk about—especially with Cleo, who seems to hate me. The Polaroid camera dangling from her neck sways precariously as Puddles tugs her farther into the grass.
“If I called out my mom like that in public, she’d evaporate me. Like, ream me so intensely I’d simply vaporize.” She cocks an eyebrow at me. “My mom’s not Camilla St. Vrain, though.”
“Lucky you,” I mutter, and Cleo studies my face.
“Why do you hate her so much?”
“I don’t hate her,” I say, though it feels more like an automatic response than one I’ve actually considered. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“I mean, sure,” Cleo says. “She’s your mom. That shit’s always complicated.”
“What’s complicated?” Mick asks, stepping up beside us and extending a mint-chip ice cream cone in my direction. Silas hands one to Cleo, something rainbow swirled and exactly as colorful as she is. She trades him for Puddles’s leash and I wonder, not for the first time, what exists there between them.
