Chapter 16 Naomi
NAOMI
On the Saronic Islands, the light hits differently.
Clearer, like the sea has been polishing it for centuries and now it bathes everyone lucky enough to near it with its beauty.
We step off the water taxi into a harbor stitched with little blue boats and nets.
Cats lounge on sun-warmed stone with the entitlement of emperors. Someone is frying sardines; someone else is hanging sheets that snap and billow like sails. It’s a perfect jumble of salt, jasmine, heat and contentment.
“Kalimera, Vasso!” a fisherman calls, waving a cap that has seen more summers than I’ve had birthdays. Two teenagers lift their chins at him in the way boys do for a man they’ve decided counts.
My husband—God, the word is still perilously addicting in my mind—answers in Greek, easy and low, and the sound slips under my skin and fizzes like popping candy.
We take the stepped alley that climbs the ridge, whitewashed houses winking cobalt shutters.
Halfway up, a narrow side path breaks off toward a back gate, old and made of iron.
There’s a familiarity in the way Vasso slips through the back that I clock it without meaning to.
A ghost doorway the housekeeper’s son used to take.
He sees me see it. His mouth does a small, private thing.
“Just FYI, Baba won’t be here for our visit,” he says, as if he’s commenting on the heat.
“He’s in Piraeus for a few days, chairing the prison reform clinic?
He mentors the new releases.” His voice roughens very slightly; pride, something else.
“It’s the intake week he scheduled months ago.
He wouldn’t cancel for us. He’ll come over tomorrow. ”
I nod.
Something inside me loosens at the phrase wouldn’t cancel for us.
I find I like that my father-in-law has somewhere to be that isn’t a room full of ghosts, but even as I applaud his ethic, I can’t dismiss the surge of relief.
I like to think I’m strong when it counts but I’m sure I’m ready to face Vasso’s mother and father in one visit.
We enter a small courtyard of a house folded into bougainvillea and spotless blue sky.
White walls, blue doors, a lemon tree shouldering against the fence as if it intends to grow straight through. The front door opens before we knock and she fills it
Small, straight-backed, hair coiled like steel wool, eyes that miss exactly nothing and forgive only with interest.
She takes one look at her son and collapses him into her arms, kissing his cheeks, his temples, the way mothers in old films do, muttering soft Greek that sounds like scolding wrapped around relief.
He lets himself be held. He always looks most powerful when he’s letting someone else be—funny, that.
Then she turns to me.
“Kalosorises.” Welcome. A measured kiss to each cheek. Her hands are cool and sure on my arms, the pressure light. “Signora Dillinger.”
My heart drops at the stiffness in the woman who used to call me ‘kouri mou’.
“Naomi, please,” I say, summoning my best smile, offering my throat to the blade.
A tiny nod. Not a bridge, not yet. Maybe a plank slid across water to see if it floats.
Inside is spotless floors and a neatness of a woman who’s never dropped the ball on perfection.
The living room walls are a timeline: a wedding photograph in black and white; a young man with familiar eyes in a work jacket; a small framed picture of a house I know too well, taken from the side where deliveries were made.
Seeing that Vasso’s mother kept the picture of the place that rejected her so horribly makes me flinch.
“Sit,” she orders, and it’s not unkind. On the table: a plate of cherry tomatoes glossy with oil, oregano and feta cheese crumbled between fingers and olives heaped in welcome.
She pours thick coffee into small cups that could double as shot glasses, slides it over and watches the way I drink it.
My tongue thinks it’s been kissed by thunder but I keep a straight face as I swallow the bitter beverage.
Then she puts a bowl of water next to my coffee and a knife on the other side.
“Wash hands, then chop,” she says, passing me a bowl of tomatoes. “Not mash. Salt at the end, or they cry water and drown the salad.”
I anchor my feet. “Yes, ma’am.”
When I start the chopping, she narrows her eyes at my hands.
The test is not subtle but I take it with both palms. Tomatoes yield neat, ruby crescents. I avoid the crime of mutilating cucumber. When I reach for the salt only when everything else is glistening in the bowl, she grunts something that isn’t disapproval.
Vasso leans a hip against the counter, watching the two most stubborn women in his life decide whether to make peace with their teeth or their hands. “Ma,” he says, and his voice is careful, respectful, but there is steel under the silk, “let’s have a nice visit, hmm?”
Eleni Dillinger purses her lips even as a wave of sadness washes over her face.
I want to reach out and cover her hand with mine, but it’s too soon.
Vasso straightens, strolls over to his mother, and drops a kiss on top of her head. “Some hurts you feed until they own you. They don’t make the Kanes bleed. They just keep your knife in your own heart.”
She holds his gaze a long, long moment. Then she looks back at me, takes the salad, salts it herself, and sets three plates on the balcony table that overlooks the harbor.
And just like that a seismic shift unfolds beneath my feet.
I’m under no illusion that the past is settled—no, that will take time and patience and open hearts—but one plank has turned into several, hammered with hopeful nails.
We eat outside, groaning at the lemon potatoes crisp at the edges, sardines kissed by a grill, bread you tear with your hands and drag through the good things.
And as I attempt to wedge a forkful of sinfully good baklava on top of my protesting belly, her questions come in small, precise slices.
“You work?”
“I did,” I say. “Then I didn’t. I’m hoping I will again.”
“With him?” She jerks her chin at her son, as if daring me to claim something not offered.
“Maybe. If he asks nicely,” I say, and I mean it to be a joke, but her eyes sharpen as if I have said something more serious and acceptable—if it’s a partnership, not a rescue or a command.
After the plates are stacked, she vanishes to the sink with military efficiency, sharply refusing help.
Vasso and I drift to the far corner of the balcony where the jasmine climbs the rail, to watch the harbor below make its ongoing fuss. A church bell wobbles the hour like a drunk uncle, wrong but committed.
“She’s upset with me.”
He doesn’t sugarcoat it. “She is. But she was upset with me too.”
“Really, why?”
His eyes glint. “What do you think?”
I start to frown but enlightenment comes with a lurching heart. “She didn’t want you to marry me.”
He remains silent for a short stretch. “A mother will fight tooth and nail not to see her only child hurt a second time.”
I can’t answer because I’m too busy swallowing an expanding lump in my throat.
“Give her time.”
I nod. “I’ll keep earning my place,” I say, my hands wrapped around my cup because I have to hold something.
He turns, the wind lifting his hair, the kind of man people turn to watch and I pretend not to notice. “You have one…with me.”
But for how long? The voice is sly, pitiless. You only have eleven months and change with him.
The reminder loops a wire around my ribs. I breathe around it and nod. “I know.”
He lifts a hand as if to touch my wrist, then lowers it again, and that small restraint does something wildly tender to me. I hold my breath on it and let it go.
We sleep in a room with a humming ceiling fan and a lemon tree tapping at the shutters.
He pulls me in and for once the quiet doesn’t have teeth.
I wake to sunlight falling in clean bars and his arm slung heavy over my waist, and for one foolish minute I believe in mornings that only require coffee and a kiss.
The next day is simplicity itself in the ways I like best.
We keep it ordinary and sacred, no sign of the self-made millionaire or the blue-blooded princess he married for convenience.
His mother sends us to the market for tomatoes and a block of feta “that doesn’t crumble like bad decisions.
” And when we return, we eat spanakopita from paper napkins, then wander down a handful of streets to the church with the blue dome where women pin prayers to a board and men mutter them into their knuckles.
Vasso surprises me by kicking off his loafers and diving into the water lapping the jetty. I stay dry with my feet in the water and my dress hitched to my thighs and watch him cut through the Aegean like he was made for it.
We nap. We help peel potatoes. We drink something cold and bitter at a café where the owner pretends not to know he’s giving us the good table.
And the most perfect day draws to a close with the three of us on the roof, watching stars drop pennies into the black.
His mother tells a story about Vasso at seven making a raft out of olive crates.
Then she reminds me about stealing my grandfather’s car at twelve and only getting as far as the drive and the collision with a prized fountain.
The laughter has softer corners and we navigate them without bleeding.
So of course it stands to reason that I’m at my mellowest the following evening—the pink hour, the caress before dark—when the world reaches in with a dirty hand.