Chapter 30
Lex
Mama
"Lex."
"Yes."
"What time is it?"
"Seven-fourteen."
"On a Sunday?"
"On a Sunday."
"Why are you awake?"
I think about how to give her this without making it large. I think about the velvet pouch in the nightstand six feet from her head. I think about the conversation I have decided to have with my mother in approximately two hours.
"I have to go see ‘Mitéra’ this morning."
Maeve lifts her head from my chest. She’s looking at me.
The gray-green eyes are still half-asleep.
The frown deepens, but not in alarm. The look is the look of a woman who has been married long enough to register the difference between ‘I am going to deal with a thing’ and ‘I am going to do a thing for which the doing is the point.’
"This morning."
"Yes."
"Alone."
"Yes."
She studies my face for a long beat.
Then she says, very quietly, "Okay."
She doesn’t ask why. She doesn’t ask what for.
She’s, in the last seven hours, heard me say ‘I am going to ask you with my grandmother's ring’ and she’s heard me say ‘I want to do it the Greek way’ and she’s heard me say ‘I want to ask my mother first if she’ll give me her blessing on this family,’ and she’s, in the precise way of a wife who has been listening, putting two and two together while still mostly asleep against my chest.
She lays her head back down.
She says, "Bring me coffee before you go."
"Okay."
"And tell ‘Mitéra’ I love her."
Something in me goes still. The word in her mouth.
‘Mitéra.’ She’s not used it before. She’s been listening to me say it in Greek to my mother for fifty-six days, and on a Sunday morning at 7:16 AM, with her face against my collarbone, said it back to me.
The word is the right Greek for the woman my wife has been calling ‘Eleni’ for two months and is about to start calling something else this morning.
I do not say anything for a long time.
Then I say, "I will."
? ? ?
I drive to Brookline at 9:32 AM.
The morning is gray. The roads are mostly empty.
Sunday in Boston in late January is the smallest version of the city, the version that knows the work week is forty hours away and is using the gap to be quiet.
I have the velvet pouch in the inside pocket of my coat.
I have not taken it out of the nightstand in forty-two days except to clean it and check the prongs at the Beacon Hill jeweler on Day 14.
The pouch is warm against my ribs through the coat lining.
I am not nervous. I am the man I have been preparing to be since 2005, when I was sixteen years old and stood at the side of my grandmother's hospital bed and made her two promises in the fierce, private Greek of a boy who didn’t yet understand what he was agreeing to.
I park at my mother's apartment building at 9:51 AM.
Petrov is downstairs. He nods at me as I pass through the lobby. He doesn’t ask why I am here without my wife on a Sunday morning. He’s, in the last fifty-six days, learned to identify the version of his boss who has come on family business and is not to be slowed by operational questions.
I take the elevator to the fourth floor.
My mother opens the door before I knock.
She’s in her Sunday dress. The navy one with the small white embroidery at the collar and cuffs, the dress my grandmother bought her in Thessaloniki in 1992 on the family's last trip back to Greece together, the dress my mother has worn for every important conversation of her life since my father's funeral in 2010.
The dress is the ‘I am ready for what you have come to say’ dress.
My mother has been wearing it since approximately 9:00 AM when she woke and decided, with the settled certainty of a Greek matriarch who has been waiting for her son to come to her on a Sunday morning, that today was going to be the day.
She doesn’t say ‘good morning.’
She says, "Come inside."
? ? ?
Coffee. Greek pastries. ‘Kourabiedes’ on a small white plate in the center of the table.
The same shortbread cookies she sent home with Nora yesterday.
She’s been baking again. I do not ask when.
I sit at her kitchen table and she pours coffee into the small cup with the gold rim that has been in this kitchen since I was a child.
She doesn’t sit.
She’s at the counter, her back partly to me, and she’s doing the deliberate work of a woman who has resolved that the way she’ll not start crying in the next ten minutes is by keeping her hands occupied with cups and spoons.
"‘Mitéra,’" I say.
"Yes, ‘agóri mou.’"
‘My boy.’ The Greek I have been hearing in her mouth since I was four years old.
The Greek I have been hearing since before I had words for what it meant.
The Greek who arrives this morning is the unmistakable signal that my mother has already decided what will happen in this conversation and is letting me do the speaking only because speaking is what the protocol requires.
I take a breath.
I say it the way Greeks say it. Slow. Each word formed.
"‘Mitéra. Theló na zitíso tin evlogía sas.’"
Mother. I want to ask your blessing.
My mother sets down the spoon she was holding.
She turns. She crosses to the table. She sits down across from me.
She puts her hands flat on the wood between us, the way her mother used to put her hands flat on tables before saying anything important, the way Kalliope used to do, the way every Greek matriarch in our line, going back to a village outside Thessaloniki, has done before opening a conversation that mattered.
She looks at me.
"All right," she says in English. "Tell me more about Maeve."
"You know, Maeve," I say.
"I know the woman who has been married to my son for fifty-eight days. I know the woman who walked into my apartment in November with an indictment hanging over her daughter and didn’t flinch. I know the woman who held my granddaughter when I could not. I know what I have observed."
She pauses.
"Tell me, Maeve," she says. "Not the witness. Not the lawyer. Not the woman my son chose. Tell me the woman my son sees when no one else is in the room."
I think for a long second about how to give this to her.
"Maeve has a way of standing in a courtroom that her colleagues have not figured out how to imitate. She doesn’t raise her voice.
She doesn’t use her hands. She has a way of putting one fact next to another fact in a sentence and letting the sentence do the work, and the sentence does the work because Maeve has been the woman who decides what the sentence will say long before she stands up to say it.
Federal prosecutors have lost cases against witnesses like Maeve.
They have not yet figured out how to prepare a witness like Maeve, because Maeve is rare. "
My mother nods. Once.
"Maeve looks at our daughter the way a woman looks at a thing she’s been alone with for thirty-three months.
There is a private register to it. The look she gives Nora when Nora is doing something only Maeve has been there to see.
Pulling her socks on by herself, naming a cloud, and pointing at a bird through the window.
That look is the look of a woman who has been keeping notes for thirty-three months on a child whose father didn’t know she existed.
Maeve is not letting me catch up. Maeve is sharing what she has, and there is no resentment in the sharing, but the look is hers.
The thirty-three months are hers. I will not have them.
I am building the next thirty-three from where I am standing. "
My mother's eyes are wet. She’s not letting it spill. She’s the woman who has been wearing the navy dress since 9:00 AM and has settled what she will and will not do at this table this morning.
"Maeve stayed," I say. "She stayed when she saw what I am. She walked into a warehouse in Worcester and watched me pull the trigger. She came home and ate breakfast in our kitchen the next morning. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t look at me with the look I have been waiting fifteen years to see, which is the look of a woman deciding that the cost of staying is more than she can pay. She didn’t pay anything. She just stayed."
My mother says, very quietly, "Yes."
"And the lake house. ‘Mitéra,’ you don't know about this.
I told her last night I was going to sell the lake house.
I told her I do not need somewhere to be alone anymore.
She told me no. She told me to take her there.
Take Nora there. Take you there. Take Cormac there if I must, though God help us when Cormac sees a kayak.
She told me the version of me who needed it alone is gone, and she told me to let the lake house meet the version of me who is here now. "
My mother lets out a small breath. The breath is the breath of a woman who has, just now, learned the most important thing about her son's wife she’s learned this year.
"Yes," my mother says. "That is right. That is right."
I sit with her at the table for a long beat. The coffee is cooling. The ‘kourabiedes’ are untouched. The morning light from the window over the sink has shifted by maybe half an inch since I sat down.
My mother says, "And Nora."
"I want to ask Nora to take my name," I say. "Konstantinos. The same as you. The same as Sofia. The same as me."
My mother's face does the unreadable Konstantinos thing. She says, "Yes."
"With Maeve's blessing. With Nora's blessing, in the way she can give it at her age.”
"Yes."
"And one more thing."
My mother waits.
"I want to ask Maeve if she’ll let Nora carry ‘Yia-Yia's’ name. As her middle name. Nora Kalliope Konstantinos."
My mother goes very still.
She’s looking at me. The wet at the corners of her eyes finally crests the lid.
She doesn’t wipe it. She lets it run. The Greek matriarch who has been wearing the navy dress since 9:00 AM has made a decision about what she’ll allow to happen at this table, and the decision is ‘not this. This I will not hold back.’
She says, "Have you told Maeve?"
"Not yet. I will tell her after the proposal. I will ask her then."
"You promised your ‘Yia-Yia’ in 2005."
"Yes."
"On the morning she died."
"Yes."
"Kalliope made you promise her two things."
I look at my mother.
"You knew."
"Of course, I knew. Your ‘Yia-Yia’ told me what she had asked you.
She told me on the day before she died. She told me because she wanted me to know what kind of woman to watch for in your life when you finally came home with one.
She told me to wait. She told me you would know. She told me your wife would know."
My mother reaches across the table and takes my hand.
"I have been waiting twenty-one years to give you this blessing, ‘agóri mou.’ I have been waiting fifty-six days for this specific version of the asking.
The blessing is yours. It has been yours since the day Maeve walked into my apartment and held my granddaughter the way a Greek mother holds another Greek mother's child — with the understanding that this child belongs to all of us now, and we are all of us responsible. "
She squeezes my hand. Once. "Tell Maeve I love her."
"She told me to tell you the same."
My mother closes her eyes for one full second. When she opens them, the wet has stopped. She’s restored the navy dress’s architecture. The matriarch is back.
"Now," she says. "Eat the ‘kourabiedes.’ They will go stale by tomorrow."
I eat the ‘kourabiedes.’
? ? ?
Before I leave, my mother walks me to the door. She stops me in the foyer with her hand on my arm.
She says, in Greek, very quietly, "Show me the ring."
I take the velvet pouch out of my coat pocket. I open it. The ring sits on the small dark velvet square in my palm. The old European-cut diamond catches the foyer light.
My mother doesn’t pick it up.
She looks at it for a long second.
Then she says, "Niko had the inscription added in 1983."
"Yes."
"In secret."
"Yes."
"‘Yia-Yia’ didn’t know until after he died."
"No."
My mother's eyes fill again. She doesn’t let them spill this time. The dress is doing its work.
"Tell Maeve the word when she puts it on," my mother says. "Not before. The not-knowing is the gift your grandfather gave your grandmother and the gift you are giving Maeve. The word will mean more for the not-knowing."
"That was the plan."
"It is a good plan, ‘agóri mou.’"
She kisses my cheek the Greek way, both sides. She steps back.
"Now go," she says. "Your wife is waiting for her coffee."
? ? ?
I drive home with the blessing in my chest where my mother put it.
The blessing is not a sentence. The blessing is not a permission.
The blessing is the weight of a Greek matriarch who has, on a Sunday morning at her kitchen table, opened her hand and said ‘yes’ to the woman her son chose.
The blessing is twenty-one years old. The blessing is the morning Kalliope died.
The blessing is the contained, fierce architecture of a family that has been waiting for me to come home and ask the question I have just asked.
I do not tell Maeve about the blessing when I get home.
I bring her the coffee she asked for. I make her breakfast. I sit on the bed with her while she eats it. I hold her hand. I do not tell her what my mother said. I do not tell her what my mother knew. I do not tell her about the second promise.
All of it I am keeping for the proposal.
All of it I am holding in my chest like the velvet pouch in my coat pocket has been holding the ring.
Maeve says, against the rim of her coffee cup, "How is ‘Mitéra’?"
I say, "She is ‘Mitéra.’"
Maeve smiles. She doesn’t press.
She knows. She’s known since 7:16 AM.