Page 40 of Lost and Found

“Apparently, you guys were called out to a lady who slipped in a store parking lot last week? Broke a hip?”

“She seemed lovely and all, but she was a little old for me, Bea.”

“Hergranddaughter,” I say, eating one of the cucumber slices I packed. “She works here with me, actually. An aesthetician. She was off when you came in for your haircut, but she’s . . . she’s very pretty and very nice. Her name is Zoeie.”

“Pretty and nice,” he says wryly. “The rarest of all attributes.”

“She clearly cares a great deal for her grandmother, too.” I can’t hide the grin in my words.

“Oh yeah, absolutely. Enough to worry about getting her rocks off as her grandma was loaded into the back of an ambulance.”

“Careful now. That savoredstronglyof judgment,” I say, halfway to laughter. Then, more seriously, “Maybe she was interested in connection, Silas. Companionship.”

“Already told you. I’m no good for it.”

I doubt that. Since he’s already been perfectly companionable to me, even in the face of my weird resistance.

We fall quiet again, but this time, it feels precarious. Like there’s a match hovering beneath our bubble and all it needs is a spark. “I’ll give you her number. Just to hold on to. Maybe you’ll be ready to do something with it later.”

He sighs raggedly. “All right, Bea.”

“I made the extra lunch for you, by the way,” I admit, fiddling with another cucumber slice. “I mean, I had packed my own and there was plenty left over, so I left that for you. Don’t want you to think you really ate mine. I also made a couple extra cutlets for dinner, too, if you want some.”

“Thank you.” Two gruff syllables.

“You’re welcome.”

“Do you want to eat together again tonight?” he asks. “I’m off. I was thinking of driving out to the Point. The newsletter email from Starhopper said it’s supposed to be one of the clearest nights of the year to see the Milky Way. I could pack dinner to go for us?”

“Yeah.” Yes, I do want to do that. I want to get over my newfound shyness, and this will be perfect to knock me out of this weird funk. More exposure therapy. “Yeah, I’d like that. I won’t get home until about seven, though. You good with eating later?”

“I am an indiscriminate, enthusiastic eater, Bea-Bea Gun.”

“Hate that one.” I won’t address the rest of that sentence, even if something unzips between my ribs.

“Yeah, officially crossing that one off my list. Not my favorite, either,” he agrees. “See you around seven.”

On my drive home later, I decide to give Bonnie a call. We catch up on her summer calendar and make plans for her to take me to the transfer appointment. She asks me about Silas, and while I’m somewhat selective with what I share, I’m open when it comes to talking about him helping me and being there for me. We avoid talking about my mom. The majority of our conversation is light and easy in a way that makes me feel winded. Which is probably why I start to cry the moment I realize she is.

“I’m sorry, babe. I don’t know why I’m being like this,” she says, pushing out a damp laugh. “I’m just so happy you’ve got a friend. I’m happy you’re doing well and that I’m doing okay, too. But then every time I even think that, I feel this . . . this . . .”

“Guilt,” I finish for her.

“Yes. And we both know she would have hated that. But still, I want to feel everything.”

“I do, too.” I want to keep feeling all of it. “When I feel whatever it is that comes now, it’s like she’s . . .here.” Notalive, I know. But still here, present in the pinch of my heart, in the band around my throat. The shaky smiles that tug at my mouth when something reminds me of her. Even the insipid guilt is better than the numb emptiness of suppressing it.

“Devin doesn’t get it at all,” Bonnie says, and my knuckles go white around the steering wheel. “I’m so worried about her, Bea. The way she can hardly talk about her sister. She thinks the idea of a new baby in the family is preventing me from closure, and I keep telling her that I don’t want closure from my own child. I can’t have her here anymore, but I can have everything else I feel.”

“Devin is . . . Is Devin angry atme, Bonnie?”

The slight catch in her breath is unmistakable. “Oh, sweetie, I should not have said anything. Devin isn’t angry at you. She’sangry at the universe, and she’s not handling it well. Please forget I said anything.”

I don’t forget it at all. Not for the rest of my drive home, or loading into Silas’s truck, or on the short drive to the Point, where he’s backed us into a spot and set us up with a pair of low-slung chairs and a folding table in the bed, tucked inside the shelter of his camper shell. I haven’t forgotten it one bit.

I know I’m being a lackluster dinner partner, distracted and bland. But I can’t stop recalling Devin’s face when I first told her and Bonnie about Merritt’s eggs and what she wanted me to do with them. The thing I didn’t want to believe was the anger that was blatantly there.

Even before that, trying to understand Devin and Merritt’s dynamic when we were kids. As the older sister, Devin had seemed entirely too cool and unapproachable to me, and could oscillate between being Merritt’s worst enemy and her biggest idol. One minute they’d be best friends just like we were, then cut to hurling the most volatile insults at one another the next, to total apathy in another. Sometimes, especially toward the end, I got the sense that Devin felt I’d encroached on her rightful duties as Merritt’s sister. I was the emergency contact. I’d taken her to treatment more. I’d run her to the hospital whenever she inevitably got sick. In some ways, Merritt and I were closer, I think, but in many other ways, this had just come down to logistics. Devin was a dental hygienist with two kids. I had the ability to drop everything.