“Hold on, someone is at the door.”
He listened to his sister rustle around, and he ate the rest of his croissant by the time he’d gotten back to his flat. He climbed the stairs, and then another voice filled his ear.
“Leonidas. How are you?”
It was his father.
“Patera,” he greeted, dropping the uneaten croissants onto his counter. “Aeliana was just telling me a story.”
“You should call your mama and let her tell you a story.”
“I’ll call her later this week,” he promised.
“She misses you,” his father said. “We all do.”
“I miss everyone too.”
“I’ll let your sister finish her story.”
“Where was I?” Aeliana asked, taking back the phone.
“The lion was traveling,” he told her.
“Right. The little lion had been bit by a bug that made him travel and he roamed the whole world. The lion’s older sister felt like that kind of life had to be terribly lonely, and she was forced to come up with fairy tales to tell her future children as to why their uncle was never around. The end.”
“I will not be an absentee uncle.”
“You cannot be an uncle if you’re not here,” she reminded him.
“I can.” He sighed.
“I don’t know how.”
“Did I stop being your brother when I stepped out of Greece?” Leonidas dumped out his coffee and made a fresh mug.
“No,” she grumbled.
“And I’ll be his uncle whether I’m here, there, or somewhere else.”
“I just want you home,” she sighed.
“I know.”
“Call Mama,” Aeliana said.
“I already toldPateraI would.”
“Filia,” his sister said.
“Filia, Aeliana.”
He hung up the phone and turned it off, throwing it back into the junk drawer. It landed on top of a postcard, a battered old thing that used to hold the highest place of honor among his things. It had to have been nearly sixty years old by that point, a memory he’d found in a dusty shoebox that belonged to his father. The box, the postcard, and the other things inside of the box had been the bug his sister had talked about, and he’d never been the same since.
Leonidas couldn’t have been older than nine or ten when he found the box, taken the postcard as his own and pinned it up on his wall. Then he’d begged for stories of the things his father had seen, the people he’d met, the way he’d felt when he reached the tomb of St. James in the end. Leonidas fell asleep every night for at least a year staring at that picture, thinking about the age when he’d be old enough to go do the walk, to follow in hispatera’sfootsteps, and then find himself too.
It was the life choices hispateramade after returning from Spain that had ensured their family would never want for money, promised that Leonidas could travel the world for as long as he wanted on money he hadn’t himself worked to earn. He never tried to be flashy about his family being wealthy, but he took the advantages it offered him with no complaint.
He took his freshly made coffee over to his bed and sat down, tucking himself into the corner so he could look out the window and down at the street. It was…Wednesday, he was fairly certain, and the air still felt thick with the promise of rain.
