Chapter 35 #2
Maeve has gone very still.
She’s looking at the ring.
Her eyes are wet.
"This was Kalliope's," I say. "My grandmother. She wore it for forty-seven years. My grandfather had a Greek word inscribed inside the band on their twenty-fifth anniversary in 1983. He had it inscribed in secret. ‘Yia-Yia’ didn’t know about the inscription until after he died.
I will tell you the word when you put it on. "
Maeve nods. She cannot speak.
"I am asking you to marry me," I say. "I am asking you to be my wife. I am asking you and Nora to be my family, the way Greek tradition makes a family. Fully. Formally. With everyone we love in the room."
Pause.
"Will you marry me, Maeve?"
? ? ?
Maeve cannot speak.
She’s looking at me. Her eyes are full. Her mouth is open, and the words are not coming. I am on one knee on the kitchen floor with the ring in my hand and my wife is looking at me and trying to find the language she needs, and the language is not arriving.
I wait.
I am patient. I have been patient. I have been patient for fifty-eight days, for thirty-seven months, for fifteen years, for the entire shape of a life that has been organizing itself around this exact moment in this exact kitchen at 8:54 PM on a Saturday in late January.
And then, because I cannot bear to leave her in the silence, because the patience has its limit, because she’s been waiting for me to give her one more thing in our language, I say it.
The Greek I have been carrying since the lake house.
The phrase I have been holding for nine chapters.
The two words I have been not-translating to her on every other occasion they came up between us.
"‘Eísai diki mou.’"
Maeve's voice, when it comes, is wrecked.
"I know," she says.
"I have been saying it since the lake house. Since the first time we made love. Since the night you said you would do it again every time. I have been saying it in Greek because I could not bear to say it in English yet."
"I know."
"I am saying it in English now. ‘You are mine.’ You have been mine since you walked into the gala in green in 2022. I have been yours since the same minute. I am asking you to let the rest of the world know what you and I have known for three years."
Maeve is crying. She’s not making sound.
Her hands are still in mine. Her eyes have not left my face.
The candlelight is in her hair and the small gold chain at the base of her throat is moving with her breathing and the brownstone is silent and the world has reduced to my hand and her hand and the ring on the velvet square in my open palm.
She says, "Yes."
I say, "Yes."
She says, "Yes, Lex Konstantinos. Yes. I will marry you. Yes. Yes."
I put the ring on her finger.
It fits. My mother guessed her size by holding her hand for ten seconds at Sunday dinner three weeks ago.
The ring slides onto Maeve's left fourth finger over the small gold band she’s been wearing since the courthouse.
The two rings together. The wedding band underneath, the engagement ring above.
The shape of a marriage that has been a marriage for fifty-eight days and is, this evening, becoming the marriage we are choosing for the rest of our lives.
Maeve looks down at the ring.
She holds her hand up to the candlelight.
The diamond catches the steady flame of the candle on the kitchen island.
She turns her hand. She’s the second woman in our family to wear this ring, and she’s the first woman in sixty-seven years to know it has Greek words inside it before it goes on her finger, and the inscription is a promise her husband has been keeping for her since 1983.
She slides the ring back off.
She holds it up to the light. She looks at the inside of the band.
She reads the Greek script aloud. Her pronunciation is correct.
"‘Agápi.’"
She looks at me.
I say, "Love."
She says, "Love."
She slides the ring back on. She doesn’t need help. The ring sits where it should sit. Her left hand is the left hand of a woman who is, as of 8:57 PM on a Saturday in late January, formally engaged to me.
I stand up. She stands up.
We are crying. Both of us. Finally. And laughing at the same time.
I pull her into my arms. She comes into them.
I kiss her. The kiss tastes like ten thousand things we have not been able to say in two and a half years of knowing each other and three months of being married.
Her face is wet. My face is wet. The candlelight is moving on the wall above the kitchen island, and the brownstone is silent, and the world is the world I have been building toward since the morning I first saw her in green at a Greek consulate gala in 2022.
I pull back.
I look at her.
I say, "‘Agápi mou.’"
Maeve looks at me. Her eyes are still wet.
She’s been waiting for me to say it to her, to her face, with the translation I gave to Nora six weeks ago and have not yet given to her.
She’s been keeping the column in her head titled ‘Things Lex Has Not Yet Said to Me But Has Said to Our Daughter,’ and the column has just lost its first item, and the loss is the gift I have been holding for six weeks, and the gift has now been delivered.
She says, slowly, deliberately, the Greek pronunciation careful and correct, "‘S'agapó.’"
Pause.
My whole body goes still.
She’s just said ‘I love you’ to me in Greek.
In Greek.
My language. The language she’s not been speaking to me.
The language I have been hearing her use only with my mother, only in passing, only in the deliberate syllables of a woman trying out a phrase.
She’s just used it correctly. With the accent on the second syllable.
With the soft ‘gh’ sound the way Greeks make it.
With the careful grammatical ‘I love you’ that you only say in Greek if you are saying it to someone you love.
I pull back enough to look at her.
I say, "Maeve."
She says, "I have been learning. ‘Mitéra’ has been teaching me. I started the morning after Nora was returned. I told her I wanted to be able to say things to you in your language. She’s been teaching me twice a week.
We have not told you. I wanted it to be a wedding gift. I am giving it to you now instead."
I break.
Properly. I have not properly broken in fifteen years.
I have not let the architecture come apart since the morning my father died.
The architecture is coming apart now. My legs do not hold.
I sit down on the kitchen floor with my back against the island.
Maeve sits down next to me. She pulls my head against her shoulder.
She holds me. I am crying the way I have not cried in fifteen years, the private wet of a man whose wife has just told him in his dead grandmother's language that she loves him, and who has been carrying his grandmother's language in his chest since 2005, and who has just been given his grandmother's language back by the woman his grandmother told him to marry.
Maeve is crying too. Quietly. Into my hair.
She says, into the top of my head, "You learned Greek for me."
I say, "I was born into Greek."
She says, "I learned Greek for us."
I say, "Maeve."
She says, "Yes."
"I love you in two languages."
"I know."
"I will love you in two languages every day for the rest of my life."
"I am holding you to that."
? ? ?
We sit on the kitchen floor for a long time.
My back is against the island. Her head is against my shoulder.
The candlelight is moving on the kitchen wall above us.
The clock reads 9:12 PM. Then 9:18. Then 9:23.
We are not talking. The silence is the silence of two people who have just done what they have been organizing their lives around and are now, on the floor of their own kitchen, in the exact shape of ‘it is done.’
Around 9:31 PM, I say into her hair, "Maeve."
"Yes."
"There is one more thing."
She doesn’t lift her head from my shoulder. She says, "All right."
I take a breath.
"My grandmother made me two promises before she died," I say. "You know the first. The first was to marry a woman who knew me. I made that promise when I was sixteen. I kept it tonight."
Maeve nods against my shoulder.
"The second promise was that I would name a daughter Kalliope, if I ever had one."
Maeve goes still.
I say, "I have a daughter. She’s in the next phase of her name.
When she takes my last name, after the wedding, I would like her to also carry my grandmother's name.
As her middle name. ‘Yia-Yia’ would have wanted that.
‘Mitéra’ would want that. I would want that.
But it is your daughter. And it is your decision.
So I am asking. Will you let her be Nora Kalliope Konstantinos. "
Maeve lifts her head from my shoulder.
She looks at me. Her eyes are still wet. The face she’s making is the face of a woman who has been blindsided by a question she didn’t see coming and is, in the next two seconds, deciding she’s known the answer to it for some amount of time longer than the question has existed.
She says, "Yes."
"Maeve."
"Yes, Lex. Yes. ‘Yia-Yia’ gets the middle name. Of course she does. Nora Kalliope Konstantinos. Of course."
I close my eyes for one full second.
I open them.
I lean my forehead against Maeve's forehead.
We sit like that, on the kitchen floor, with our daughter's full future name between us, with the candlelight moving on the wall above us, with the brownstone silent and the city quiet and the family at my mother's apartment waiting for the text I have not yet sent.
Maeve says, against my forehead, "Send the text, Lex."
I say, "In a minute."
"They have been waiting."
"In a minute."
She doesn’t press. She knows. She’s the woman who knows me.
She’s known me since the gala in 2022, and she’s going to know me for the rest of our lives, and a minute longer for me to keep her on the kitchen floor in the candlelight before I tell my family that the answer is yes is a minute she’s going to give me.
We sit on the kitchen floor for a minute.
At 9:47 PM, I take out my phone.
I text my brother.
One word.
‘Yes.’
I set the phone down on the kitchen floor.
Inside ten seconds, the phone lights up with replies. Nico. My mother. Stavros. Siobhan. Cormac and Declan are in the lobby downstairs. Cathleen, who is at my mother's apartment with Nora. Five replies in eleven seconds.
I leave the phone face down.
I pull my wife against my chest in the candlelight on the kitchen floor of the brownstone we have been building since November and I hold her, and the family is celebrating in their separate kitchens around the city, and the daughter we share is asleep at her grandmother's apartment, and the ring is on her finger, and the Greek is in her mouth, and the rest of our life is starting tonight.