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I shook my head and patted the older woman on the back gently. “Cheryl, would it be okay if I hung out with you and Amelia this morning? Lyric seems tired, and I really think she could use a few extra hours’ sleep.”
Lyric opened her mouth to argue, even though the dark circles beneath her eyes told me she was as tired as I thought.
But her grandmother cut her off with a sharp nod. “Oh, yes please, Harry. We have a lot to catch up on.” Elvis Presley still played over the speakers, and Cheryl swayed with the tune. “Do you remember this song? We used to play it all the time in that old brown car you had. What was it again?” She laughed girlishly and held her hands out to me. “Dance?”
Lyric grabbed her grandmother’s hand. “Gran, no. Come on. Zeph isn’t going to da—”
“I’d love to.”
Cheryl’s face lit up like I’d just offered her a million dollars.
I pulled her into my arms with a warm smile and spun her around the small kitchen like it was a dance floor. She beamed up at me, pure delight and comfort in her aging features.
For a moment, I could imagine the woman she must have been in her youth, hopelessly in love with Lyric’s grandfather.
Amelia clapped her pudgy hands together and then reached them out to me. “Me next, Daddy Zepherin!”
With a chuckle, I swung Cheryl past the couch Amelia perched on like a tiny bird. I scooped her up into one arm, jostling her around onto my hip so she could join the dance.
“I wish we still had that record player, Harry. You shouldn’t have thrown it out with the trash last week.” Cheryl smiled at Amelia. “You liked it too, didn’t you, Lyric?”
Amelia scowled at her great-grandmother. “Amelia, Nanny. Not Lyric.”
Confusion, and then fear flooded Cheryl’s eyes. She peered up at me again, this time not with the look of love she’d had earlier, but with uncertainty.
“You’re right,” I assured her quickly. “I shouldn’t have thrown it out. All songs sound better on vinyl.”
The tension drooped out of Cheryl’s shoulders. “That’s what I said!”
“You were definitely right.” I glanced over at Lyric.
She watched on with misty eyes and an upturn of her lips.
“Go,” I told her. “Sleep. I have this. You don’t have to do everything yourself. I’ve got them.”
And maybe for the first time since I’d met her, Lyric did as she was told.
Some part of me, the dark, forbidden part I tried so hard to bury, was pleased.
8
ZEPH
The sculpture was obscene.
I knew it. If I’d shown it to anyone else, they would have known it too. Yet, every time I sat down in the corner of my room, that was the piece I was drawn to. The only thing my muse wanted to work with.
The curve of a woman’s hips and breasts and thighs. Her legs spread around the chiseled waist of a man—the slightest hint of a cross on a chain around his neck. Not caring I was spreading orange-red clay on my bare chest; I fingered the cross around my own neck. “You’re sick, Zeph. You need fucking help.”
The woman was Lyric. Even though I’d tried to convince myself the two figures were just general symbols of a romantic joining, they weren’t. The fact I kept creating them, each sculpture more graphic than the last, only made me hate myself more.
I shoved the table away angrily and dropped to my knees on the hard wooden floor. I linked my fingers together and stared up at the crucifix on my wall. “Why?” I begged the symbol. “I don’t want this. Is this a test of faith?”
There was no answer from the inanimate object.
No voice of some almighty being in my head.
The judgment all came from within, thick and fast and overwhelming.
