Page 14 of The Other Side of Green

Believe me, I wanted him to go away.

“I can stand here all day.” He shifted his weight onto his back leg and stretched against the door with all of his spine.

“I’m cooking because today is the third day, right? Which means we will have people in and out all day. And secondly, I went to the store and bought all the food.”

He surveyed the produce along the side and arched an eyebrow. “How on earth did you carry it all back?”

I waved my hands at him. “With these.”

“Lyra, you didn’t have to do this.”

That statement should come with a trigger warning. Like all the other things I ‘didn’t have to do’. Didn’t have to sing in church. Didn’t have to play the violin. Didn’t have to leave Grams and go to college. Didn’t have to see Jack and get my heart broken. Didn’t have to. Didn’t have to. Didn’t have to.

I let out a long, slow breath. “See anyone else doing it for her?” I looked around the empty kitchen where I’d worked quietly by myself for the last hour.

“I can help.”

“You know she’s never let you in here. You burn the sauces and make the cakes flat.”

Speaking of cakes… bending down, I pulled a tray of cookies from the oven.

“You can focus on making all the teas and coffees.”

Luca nodded. “I can do tea and coffee.”

I almost smiled. Almost. But then, like poison in my brain, I remembered the secret he’d kept from me.

“You remember when Pops died, and Grams wouldn’t let anyone in the kitchen, she cooked enough food to feed the entire neighborhood,” he said.

I wiped at my face. “Just, I was young though.”

Luca dropped his head. “I hate this distance between us, Lyra.”

“Luca, there has been a distance between us the whole time you’ve kept a secret as big as this one.”

“I was trying to protect you. Protect you both actually.”

“Luca, there is six years between me and you. We don’t look anything alike, and our mother is as high a Boeing most of the time, I don’t think us not having the same father is a massive shock. You should have told me right back when you found out.”

“What, so you wouldn’t love him?”

My hand, absentmindedly wiping down where I’d spilled flour on the side, came to a halt. I couldn’t speak though.

“You trailed after him like a lost little sheep half the time. Even when you were so small, in those pretty cotton dresses Grams used to dress you in, with your red Mary Jane’s. You always trailed him. You looked at him like he’d hung the moon just for you.”

Bending over, I rested my elbows on the countertop, dropping my head into my hand. “When did you find out?” I asked. I didn’t really want to know, but maybe if I did it would make things better somehow.

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

“Mom was drunk.” I snorted but didn’t interrupt. “We were at school. Well, I was, with Jack. I came home early though, I’d a tummy ache. She was in the yard shouting over the fence. You were only a baby, crying in her arms. She was shouting and hollering, saying that she was owed child payments for putting up with your crying.”

My tongue dried, my stomach bottoming out.

“Grams marched out the kitchen door.” He motioned to the door that had banged and rattled our entire lives. “She took you and told Mom to stop her noise making.”

He stopped and I waited. “Then what?”