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She felt a light itch to talk to him about it, try to help him understand, but that wasn’t how Pop worked. He couldn’t be talked into a paradigm shift. He had to get there himself.
Their mom said it was the most maddening thing about him: he would not talk out conflicts with the people he cared about. Not talk, not fight, not yell, not whisper. He changed his mind on his own or he didn’t, and everybody around him had to wait and see where he landed.
Lyra had grown up with him being just that way, so it didn’t bother her. Her dad was wonderful. Everybody had quirks and twitches; stony conflict resistance was one of his.
He was perfectly happy to work out his conflicts with people he didn’t care about, of course. Usually with violence. But he still rarely yelled.
As she pulled the muffins from the oven, the muscular roar of Reed’s Breakout rattled the window over the sink. She dumped the muffins into a lined basket, took down a third plate, and carried both to the table. Her father folded up his paper and reached for a muffin.
She batted his hand. “Hot! Just out the oven. Give ‘em a minute.”
Reed came in the side door, looking very much like a man who’d had an extremely successful date. His clothes looked like he’d picked them up from the floor, and his longish, wavy hair was mussed and finger-combed. He smelled like stale cologne and lube.
Brutus, their father’s massive wolf-dog hybrid, who’d been lounging in the morning cool, came in with him and went to his bowls to see if Lyra had maybe left him some dessert after feeding him breakfast earlier.
“Well hey there,” she said to her brother. “Coffee?”
“Hey, critter. I’ll get it. Do I smell cookies?” He went to wash his hands at the sink.
“Coffee-cake muffins. They’re on the table. You want eggs?”
“Yeah, sure. Thank you. Hey, Pop.”
“Hey, son. Have a good night?”
Though there was no edge to the question, Lyra felt Reed tense subtly. He understood the journey Pop was on and didn’t begrudge it—much—but it couldn’t be easy to know a journey was required to reach an understanding of something so fundamental to who Reed was. “I did, yeah.”
“That’s good.” Thus ended the conversation.
With a subtle sigh, Reed fixed up his coffee and went to the table. “I passed an emergency scene on the way home. That little development over by the water park. Two cruisers, an ambulance, and the coroner. You get a call about it?”
Pop brushed muffin crumbs from his hands and checked his phone. “Not yet. I don’t have the radio on yet, either. But I guess we’ll hear about it if they need us.”
Pop owned and operated a company called Haddon Restorative Cleaning. Reed and Lyra were his employees. Well, technically they were co-owners, each of them getting a share of the business when they turned twenty-one, but really, Pop was the boss.
Haddon Restorative Cleaning was not a maid service. They were crime scene cleaners. Not the world’s most glamorous job, but it paid pretty well. The only thing Lyra had ever had a burning passion to do was make art, and cleaning brains out of carpet paid a whole lot better than her silly sketches and paintings ever would.
You might think a small town like Laughlin, with a population below ten thousand, wouldn’t have much crime, but this was Nevada, and Laughlin had a rep as a Vegas satellite, with its own strip of casinos. Casinos meant crime, violence, blood. It ran under the surface more than in Vegas, maybe, but it was there. From mobsters and gangsters to suicides, there was plenty of business for the two cleaner companies in the area.
Off the books, Pop also did cleaning for the people whomadethe mess, the evidence-removing kind of cleaning. That made even better money, but he wouldn’t let Lyra work those jobs.
She brought the big skillet full of fluffy eggs to the table. Brutus followed her, eyeing the pan hopefully. “Michelle and I were planning to head to Havasu today for beach time, but I’ll call her and beg off.” She shoveled eggs onto her men’s plates.
Pop shook his head. “No, bear. You two go play. We don’t even have a call yet, and we don’t know we’ll get one. If we do, and Reed and me can’t handle it on our own, I’ll call Lonnie.”
After putting eggs on her own plate and ‘accidentally’ dropping several crumbs to the floor for Brutus, Lyra sat. “You sure?”
“Positive. Go be young today. It’s not supposed to get hellfire hot, so enjoy it.”
“Yeah, critter,” Reed said. “You’ve worked the last, like, seven or eight jobs in a row. I’ve had two breaks since you took one.”
“That’s because you have a life,” she said. “Like, dates and parties and friends.”
He laughed. “True. You know, if you, I don’t know, went out to places where people were, instead of into the wilderness, maybe you’d find dates and parties and friends.”
Lyra stuck her tongue out at him. To her father, she smiled. “Thanks. I’ll go out into the ‘wilderness’ with my friend today.” She made scare quotes around the word. Lake Havasu was a big recreation area, with boating and swimming and, were it a weekend, crowds. Hardly wilderness. Barely even nature.
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