CHAPTER TWO
“Mornin’, baby bear. Smells good.”
Lyra turned at her father’s rough morning voice, full of a night’s sleep and a lifetime of smoke. He stood at the end of the kitchen counter, stretching one arm out and scratching his belly with the other. He wore his usual just-out-of-bed ensemble of threadbare pajama bottoms and a stretched-out white beater. His long hair, still thick and brown though he was in his fifties, was morning-mussed; so was his heavy beard, also still thick and brown.
“Morning, Pop-o-Matic. It’s coffee-cake muffins in the oven, and I’m about to scramble eggs. You want them spicy?”
“Just cheese. We still got those bacon crumbles from before?”
“Cheese and bacon scrambled eggs, comin’ right up.” Always scrambled eggs. Lyra hated fried eggs, the way the whites were all ... ugh. She’d failed many times at making actual omelets, too. So scrambled.
Since her parents’ divorce, when she’d chosen to live with her father, she’d been the family cook. That designation did not, unfortunately, mean she was especially good at it. She could follow a recipe fine, and she liked doing it, but she had no creativity of her own. And she’d never be able to use a knife like a chef. Her chopping style—her whole cooking style, really—was slow and methodical.
Luckily, her father was a meat-and-potatoes dude. Very easy to please. Where food was concerned, at least.
Taking down his favorite coffee mug, one she’d bought at an arts and crafts fair the Christmas before last, Lyra filled it with fresh coffee and added the caramel flavoring he loved but wouldn’t admit to in public.
She brought his coffee to the table, where he’d taken up his place at the head and opened the morning paper. He still subscribed to an actual paper, not that the Laughlin paper was exactly robust. As he took the cup from her, he lifted his head for their ritual exchanging of cheek kisses. “Love you, baby bear.”
“Love you right back, papa bear.”
As she walked back to the range to start the eggs, he asked, “Where’s your brother?”
Lyra busied herself with the eggs. Her bedroom window faced the front of the house; she had a good view of the driveway, so she knew Reed, her older brother, hadn’t come home last night.
That shouldn’t be a problem; both kids were full-on adults now. Reed was twenty-six years old. If he wanted to stay out late, that was his choice.
Except that Reed was gay, and he’d been on a date last night.
Their father was a good man. An excellent father. But he was a hard-boiled, rough-and-tumble guy, a guy who lived hard and rode harder. He struggled to get his craggy, curmudgeonly head around the idea that his only son, apple of his eye, all six-foot-six inches of solid, perfect high-school jock muscle, liked dick.
Reed had always been gay. Lyra had known about as early as he had. But Laughlin was a small town and, despite all the neon glitter of the casinos, pretty damn backward for the people who actually lived here. Reed hadn’t come out until a couple of years ago. Before that, he’d been firmly closeted, even doing the whole cliché of the starting quarterback dating the head cheerleader through most of high school. He hadn’t really started living the way he wanted to live, regardless of what people thought, until last year.
First and foremost, Pop loved his children. Period. If he ever heard anybody say anything remotely against Reed, he would strip them for parts—and had done so at least twice Lyra knew of. When Reed had come out to him, he’d been quiet for a while, and then he’d said something that could be summed up as,You are my son and I will never love you any less no matter what. If this is who you are and what you need to be happy, I want you to have it. But I got some things to work through on my own. That okay?
Reed had told Lyra later he’d almost cried with relief. It was about the best-case result. Real honesty and real love. Acceptance even before there was understanding.
But Pop was disappointed, certainly, and he struggled to understand. So on a morning like this, when he knew Reed had been on a date, he wasn’t exactly great with him being out all night. He wanted to be but wasn’t there quite yet.
She’d gone without answering his question long enough that he answered it for himself. “Didn’t come home, huh.”
“Nope. Must’ve been a good date.”
Pop grunted—then turned it into a throat-clearing. “I guess.”