The woman who once kept a house my dysfunctional family stained and who, for several years of my life, felt like a surrogate whose value I took for granted until I was gone.
Until my father shattered her.
As the SUVs sweep onto the tarmac, I smooth my skirt, square my shoulders, and pray I make it through the visit with my dignity intact, and my heart still beating where it belongs.
16
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 afamiliarity 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 phrasewouldn’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 motherandfather 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.
