Chapter 17 Dearer Than Gold
DEARER THAN GOLD
LANEY
“Warm enough for you here, Mom? I know you like the heat.”
A rush of wind through the lacelike cedar boughs answered me. Despite nearing the end of June, it was still barely seventy in the shade of the big tree, where my mother’s grave marker lay next to a container holding the sunflowers I’d brought.
“Well, it’s never going to be Paros,” I said as if she’d replied in the negative. “You moved to the Pacific Northwest, Mom. You should be used to it by now.”
It was one of the reasons she ended up starting a fashion company that focused on sweaters, she said. No matter what the season in Seattle, she was always cold.
As the sun dropped a bit farther to the west, a few rays slipped under the boughs and over the marker.
I turned my face toward them, as if to soak them in on behalf of my mother, who no longer could.
Overhead, there was a distant call of gulls making their way down to the Sound, and beyond them, the low thrum of a ferry horn.
“It’s almost ninety in Boston right now,” I informed her. “I don’t know how I’m going to deal. I have Dad’s skin, so I burn no matter what.” I wore SPF 50 on a cloudy day.
I sat for a few more moments in the sunshine, brushing a few fallen cedar needles from the marker and picking at a dandelion that had sprouted next to it. Even now, I could feel my mother tapping her foot beside. Get on with it, Laney. Say what you need to say.
I sighed, even though my heart rate quickened, as it always did whenever I considered what I was about to do.
Two weeks ago, Ronan Black had shown up at my best friend’s wedding just days after we had woken up married, and instead of producing the annulment we had both agreed upon, he had surprised us both by asking me to remain his wife.
And I had shocked us both, I thought, when I agreed.
Since then, things had been a blur.
Ronan Black was not a patient man. While he had wanted me to fly with him to Boston literally the day after the wedding, I had insisted on at least a few weeks.
Megan was still on her honeymoon, which meant I’d just have to talk to her about everything when she got back.
Meanwhile, I had been hard at work using some of the money Ronan had sent to hire new staff for Meráki, finding a new teacher to take my place at the yoga studio, assigning my feral cat a new neighbor to feed him, and packing up the rest of my life to spend the next six months in Boston.
I’d barely had time to say goodbye to any other friends. Or keep doctor’s appointments. There would be time for all of that in Boston, right?
Now I was leaving. Today, as it were. And I hadn’t told either of my parents—dead or alive—what was happening.
“So…” With one finger, I traced the curling edges of her name on the headstone. Antonia Karolides Fisher. Beloved wife and mother. The words felt inadequate for everything she’d been.
God, just spit it out.
“I’m getting married,” I told her. “Well, I got married, to be exact. Almost weeks ago in Vegas, if you can believe that.” I continued to run my finger over the A of her name, which was larger than the other letters.
“I know, I know. It’s not in a church or in Greece, like we always imagined.
Or ‘daughter of the year’ behavior. Don’t tell Dad.
I still don’t even remember doing it. But…
” I sighed. “He’s something. I don’t know.
A little crazy, but in a good way, I think.
But, Mom, I just… I have to do something, you know?
Things have to change. Dad’s totally checked out.
The shop is fading. You’ve been gone for a whole year now, and until I met Ronan, life was like walking through mud.
Slow. Not going anywhere. Then I met him, and it’s like he is life. ”
I smiled to myself, remembering the conversation I’d just had with him yesterday. Although we hadn’t seen each other since Ronan had spent that one night in my bed after the wedding, we usually talked multiple times a day.
He liked a good video chat more than texting—to see my face, he always told me.
To make sure my face wasn’t actually a figment of his imagination.
What we couldn’t discuss via our screens, he’d send me over email or text.
Pictures of places in Boston he thought I would like.
Passages from whatever book he was reading (usually something to do with the ancient world).
Once, an entire essay he’d scribed at two in the morning about Why Zeus Was the Worst (it mostly rested on an exegesis of “Leda and the Swan”, of which the first line read: “Dear Zeus: No one wants to fuck a bird. Just ask the girl out if you like her”).
Yesterday, I’d answered his FaceTime right after teaching my final yoga class. I’d been red-faced from spending the final ten minutes of class in an inversion with my students, my hair was springing out of my bun in a thousand different directions, and sweat was dripping down my temples.
His immediate greeting was, “What in the actual fuck, Ari? Who looks that good after sweating like a pig?”
I had only been able to laugh. I’d been doing that more with Ronan that I had in a long time. It felt good. It felt right.
I hoped.
“You’d like him, I think,” I told my mother’s grave.
“He’d make you laugh, too, just like Dad used to.
And he knows almost as much about Greek history as I do, so he’d love hearing your stories about home.
Maybe one day I’ll take him to Paros so he can meet your cousins. Show him where you were raised.”
I could almost see us there. I’d visited Paros several times when I was growing up, and it was easy to imagine Ronan enjoying wine and salad under the grapevines at the house where my great uncle still lived with his family.
His face would be freckled even more by the Aegean sun, curls wayward in the breeze while he smiled at me in a rumpled linen shirt.
I blinked. Well, that was vivid. And oddly specific, though I had absolutely no reason to think he would ever want to go there.
Did I?
Why not? I could practically hear my mother demand. Is this a real marriage, Delaney, or isn’t it?
I swallowed. It was, right? It had to be. He said it was. Or at least that he wanted to find out.
What did I have to lose in finding out with him?
Nothing, right?
Or…everything?
I pushed the fear away.
Now, everything was done except for one last conversation I needed to have—and not with the person on the other side of this gravestone.
I’d tried calling my dad several times since Megan’s wedding. Our conversations were as clipped as ever, confined to brief moments when he was on his way to a pickleball game or after a mountain bike ride in the desert.
When he asked how I was, I deflected. The truth always stuck to the tip of my tongue, and I sensed he didn’t want it badly enough to press.
But, really, how do you tell your own father over the phone that in one drunken night you robbed him of walking you down the aisle? And that now you’re leaving Seattle, his dead wife’s shop, and everything else in a sudden and deeply uncharacteristic burst of spontaneity?
Maybe he would understand, I thought. After all, hadn’t his move to Arizona been similarly impetuous?
As if the universe were trying to answer my silent questions, my phone rang in my purse. I tugged it out to discover my dad’s face on the screen.
I swallowed and looked again at the grave. “Time to fess up. I’m out of time, anyway.” I answered the call. “Hi, Dad.”
“Laney bug! You’ll never guess what I shot today at the course. Seventy-eight, kid! That’s my course record!”
His voice blared through the speakers, loud and jovial, at odds with the peaceful cemetery.
“That’s, um, great, Dad. Congratulations.”
“I’m off to celebrate, but thought I’d call to say hi. I know you’ve been trying to reach me. Whatcha up to, kiddo?”
For some reason, the happier he sounded, the more I wanted to cry.
I was a terrible daughter. I really was.
Who begrudged a grieving man a bit of happiness after so many years of pain?
Did I expect him to sit here with me in this graveyard, mourning a woman he couldn’t have until the end of his days?
Wouldn’t Mom want him to be happy now that she was gone?
Of course, she would.
And I did, too.
But it was still hard.
You can be happy too. I heard her thick Greek accent along with the thought.
Ronan’s cheerful smirk rose in my mind’s eye.
“Actually, I came to see Mom today,” I managed. “I, um, wanted to see her before I left.”
“Oh, that’s nice.” Dad’s voice was immediately more sedated at the mention of Mom. “Wait, where are you headed?”
I took a deep breath. No going back now. “I’m actually… moving. to Boston.”
There was a long pause. “You’re—Boston? Wow. Since, ah, when?”
I picked at another dandelion, grateful he couldn’t see me fidgeting. “It’s been in the works for a bit. I needed to find someone to run the shop for me, train them, all of that. But it’s all done, and so I’m off. Tonight, actually.”
“Tonight? Laney, why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” There was a slight tension in his voice he was trying to hide. The instinct of a once-protective father battling with the knowledge that he didn’t really have the right anymore to pass judgment on my decisions.
“Well, I did try to call you, Daddy, but… you’ve been busy too.” I didn’t want to blame him. It wasn’t his fault. But it sort of was, wasn’t it?
“Hmm. I guess… sure.” He was quiet for a few moments. “So, why Boston? Just need a change? Or, wait, are you going back to school, kiddo? Gosh, that would be great—”
Of course, that’s why he thought I was leaving. He had needed a change. Had needed to run away from his grief, his daughter, his entire life just to manage. Why wouldn’t he assume the same of me (even if it was a little bit true)?