Epilogue #4
Cori claps her hands together, the sharp sound snapping everyone to attention.
“Okay. Here’s the game plan.” She’s in full crisis-management mode now, the same energy she probably uses to run her high school classroom.
“Michalis, you’re going to the caterer right now to pick up the food and the extra decorations. The address is in the group chat.”
He salutes, already reaching for his keys. “On it.”
“Allie and Phoebe, you’re going to Party City—or wherever—and getting better decorations. Real ones. Not whatever this is.” She gestures at the sagging banner, the sad balloons, the entire aesthetic catastrophe of the living room.
“We don’t have a car,” Phoebe points out.
“Take mine. It’s out front.” Cori tosses her the keys. Phoebe catches them one-handed, because of course she does.
“What about me?” I ask.
“You’re staying here to help me make this”—Cori waves her hand at the room, at all of it—“more presentable. We have two hours before people start showing up.”
“Two hours?”
“Two hours.”
I look around at the crooked banner, the limp balloons, the three mismatched vases of sad, wilting flowers. “We’re going to need a miracle.”
“We’re going to need industrial-strength tape and a lot of wine.”
“Same thing, basically.”
Before anyone can move, the front door opens again.
Yiayia walks in like a general returning from battle, arms loaded with Tupperware containers stacked so high I can barely see her face.
She sets them down on the coffee table with a dramatic thud that rattles the frames on the wall, surveys the living room with a slow, sweeping gaze, and lets out a sigh.
“Panagia mou.” She crosses herself quickly, the habit so ingrained it’s automatic. “What is this? What am I looking at?”
She gestures at the banner. At the balloons.
At the entire room. Her hand moves in a circular motion, taking in all of it, the gesture somehow encompassing not just the current state of the living room but the state of the world, the decline of civilization, the failure of the younger generation to meet basic standards of competence.
“Thank the heavens above I bring food.” She’s already rolling up the sleeves of her cardigan—she’s always in a cardigan, even during heat waves that have the rest of us melting into puddles. “Because this? This is pathetic.”
“We’re trying to get it together before Leo and Annie get back,” Cori explains.
She suddenly walks over and cups my face in her hands. Her palms are warm and papery, crosshatched with decades of wrinkles. She smells like olive oil and garlic and the lavender sachets she keeps in her dresser drawers. She smells like my entire childhood.
“Agápi mou.” She kisses my right cheek. Then my left. Then, because she’s Yiayia and three is the magic number, my right cheek again. “How are you, my love? Tell me truth.”
“I’m good, Yiayia.”
“You look tired.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re working too hard. You need to rest more.” She pats my cheek. “You help me set up food, okay? And tell me everything. How is Brandon? When am I getting great-grandchildren?”
I freeze.
The ultrasound is literally in my purse ten feet away.
“Um. Brandon’s good. Working a lot.”
“He’s a good boy. Handsome. Good teeth.” She narrows her eyes. “But you need to feed him more. He’s too skinny.”
“He’s a dentist, Yiayia. I think he knows how to feed himself.”
“Men don’t know anything.” She waves her hand dismissively. “You feed him. Make him strong.”
I smile despite myself because this is just who she is, who she’s always been. Strong-willed. Opinionated. Always has a solution. Always feeding people.
She’s been the matriarch of this family for as long as I can remember.
The one who holds everything together. The one who shows up with Tupperware full of food and fixes whatever’s broken, whether it’s a sagging banner or a broken heart.
She immigrated here when Dad was five years old.
She and my Pappoú, who I barely remember except for his laugh and his smell—cigarettes and coffee and something warm, something safe.
He died when I was ten from a pulmonary embolism.
Yiayia kept going. She always keeps going.
She raised two children and helped raise three grandchildren and still makes Sunday dinners for the entire family even though we tell her she doesn’t have to. She’s eighty-one years old and somehow has more energy than all of us combined.
“Okay, everyone!” She shouts, looking around. “We have work to do. Let’s move!”
And just like that, we’re all in motion.
Somehow, within the next two hours, the living room stops looking like a crime scene and starts looking like something my mother would have actually wanted.
Cori found command hooks in the junk drawer—who knew we had command hooks?
—and the banner is now straight, professional, almost elegant.
Phoebe and Allie came back from Party City with actual coordinated decorations: gold and cream, nothing too flashy, nothing that screams BIRTHDAY EXTRAVAGANZA.
Twinkly lights are strung along the exposed brick.
Fresh flowers—real ones, all white and green, arranged by someone with actual taste.
The sad bodega carnations have been relegated to the bathroom, where they can live out their remaining hours with dignity.
Yiayia took over the kitchen like a general reclaiming territory.
The dolmades are warming on low heat, their grape-leaf wrappers glistening with olive oil and lemon.
The spanakopita triangles are arranged in neat golden rows on a platter, their phyllo dough so delicate I can see the layers.
Pastitsio. Moussaka. A bowl of tzatziki so thick the spoon stands straight up.
Yiayia caught me dipping my finger in it and smacked my hand with a wooden spoon, but not before I got a taste.
Garlic. Dill. That sharp, clean yogurt tang.
Mom’s favorites. I know because I’ve watched her eat them for eighteen years. The spanakopita first, always, because she says the phyllo is best when it’s just out of the oven. Then the dolmades, which she eats with her fingers, dabbing each one in tzatziki.
There’s also the catered stuff: trays of fancy hors d’oeuvres, a cheese board that puts my Murray’s platter to shame, crusty bread, hummus, tzatziki, grilled vegetables.
And flowers. So many flowers. Peonies everywhere because Mom loves them.
It looks…actually amazing. Which is good, because people have started arriving and the house is filling up fast.
I see some of Mom’s colleagues from CBS—producers, correspondents, camera operators she’s worked with for years.
Dad’s friends from Columbia, professors I’ve known my whole life.
Aunt Maria and her husband walking in with a bottle of wine.
Joe and Allison with their daughters Lauren and Alyssa, who immediately find me and Phoebe and pull us into hugs.
The house is buzzing with conversation and laughter and the specific energy that happens when you get a bunch of people who genuinely like each other in one room.
“I think they’re here!” Allie hisses from her position by the window.
“Lights off!” Cori commands.
Michalis flips the switch and we’re plunged into semi-darkness, lit only by the glow from the kitchen and those string lights.
Everyone goes quiet.
Mom’s voice, muffled through the wood: “Leo, did you remember to grab the mail?”
“I’ll get it later.”
“You said that yesterday.”
A key in the lock. The deadbolt turning. The door swinging open.
“Surprise!”
The lights blaze on. Forty voices, overlapping, rising in a wave. And Mom’s hand flies to her chest—that small, unconscious gesture, the one I’ve seen a thousand times. Surprise. Delight. Her fingers splayed over her collarbone like she’s trying to hold herself steady.
She’s perfect.
She always is. But tonight, in this light, with her face soft and her eyes wide and her lips parted in that barely-there smile—tonight she’s something else. Something I don’t have words for.
Her dark hair is down, falling past her shoulders in waves that catch the twinkly lights. Not styled, not arranged. Just hers. A lighter brown than Dad’s, but with threads of silver at her temples that she used to dye and now lets shine. Battle scars, she calls them. Evidence of a life well-lived.
Her eyes sweep the room. She’s wearing a cream-colored sweater, soft cashmere, slightly oversized, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows. Dark jeans. Simple gold hoops in her ears. Ballet flats. She looks like herself. Which is to say, she looks like home.
“Oh my god,” she breathes. “You guys.”
Her hand is still pressed to her chest. She turns to Dad, who’s standing behind her with that barely-suppressed grin he gets when he’s pulled something off, and she slaps him—playful, open-palmed, right across the chest.
“You didn’t have to go through all this trouble for me!”
He catches her hand, holds it there against his heart. “Of course we did.”
And then he leans down and kisses her.
Not a peck. Not the quick, perfunctory kiss of long-married people going through motions. A real kiss. One that makes Phoebe elbow me and whisper get a room, the kind that makes Yiayia nod approvingly from the kitchen doorway.
When they pull apart, Mom’s cheeks are pink.
“Okay,” she says, still breathless. “Okay. So this is—this is a lot.”
Her eyes find me and she opens her arms. I’m across the room before I realize I’ve moved.
So are Allie and Michalis. We converge on her like we’re eight and ten and sixteen again, a tangle of limbs and old instincts, and Mom wraps her arms around all three of us like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
She’s smaller than me now. When did that happen? She used to tower over me, this elegant, lively woman who somehow knew how to make me feel like I was the most important person in any room. Now I have to bend down to rest my chin on her shoulder.