Page 105 of Night of Shadows
"Yes."
"Alone."
"Yes."
She studies my face for a long beat.
Then she says, very quietly, "Okay."
She doesn’t ask why. She doesn’t ask what for. She’s, in the last seven hours, heard me say ‘I am going to ask you with my grandmother's ring’ and she’s heard me say ‘I want to do it the Greek way’ and she’s heard me say ‘I want to ask my mother first if she’ll give me her blessing on this family,’ and she’s, in the precise way of a wife who has been listening, putting two and two together while still mostly asleep against my chest.
She lays her head back down.
She says, "Bring me coffee before you go."
"Okay."
"And tell ‘Mitéra’I love her."
Something in me goes still. The word in her mouth. ‘Mitéra.’ She’s not used it before. She’s been listening to me say it in Greek to my mother for fifty-six days, and on a Sunday morning at 7:16 AM, with her face against my collarbone, said it back to me. The word is the right Greek for the woman my wife has been calling ‘Eleni’ for two months and is about to start calling something else this morning.
I do not say anything for a long time.
Then I say, "I will."
? ? ?
I drive to Brookline at 9:32 AM.
The morning is gray. The roads are mostly empty. Sunday in Boston in late January is the smallest version of the city, the version that knows the work week is forty hours away and is using the gap to be quiet. I have the velvet pouch in the inside pocket of my coat. I have not taken it out of the nightstand in forty-two days except to clean it and check the prongs at the Beacon Hill jeweler on Day 14. The pouch is warm against my ribs through the coat lining. I am not nervous. I am the man I have been preparing to be since 2005, when I was sixteen years old and stood at the side of my grandmother's hospital bed and made her two promises in the fierce, private Greek of a boy who didn’t yet understand what he was agreeing to.
I park at my mother's apartment building at 9:51 AM.
Petrov is downstairs. He nods at me as I pass through the lobby. He doesn’t ask why I am here without my wife on a Sunday morning. He’s, in the last fifty-six days, learned to identify the version of his boss who has come on family business and is not to be slowed by operational questions.
I take the elevator to the fourth floor.
My mother opens the door before I knock.
She’s in her Sunday dress. The navy one with the small white embroidery at the collar and cuffs, the dress my grandmother bought her in Thessaloniki in 1992 on the family's last trip back to Greece together, the dress my mother has worn for every important conversation of her life since my father's funeral in 2010. The dress is the ‘I am ready for what you have come to say’ dress. My mother has been wearing it since approximately 9:00 AM when she woke and decided, with the settled certainty of a Greek matriarch who has been waiting for her son to come to her on a Sunday morning, that today was going to be the day.
She doesn’t say ‘good morning.’
She says, "Come inside."
? ? ?
Coffee. Greek pastries. ‘Kourabiedes’ on a small white plate in the center of the table. The same shortbread cookies she sent home with Nora yesterday. She’s been baking again. I do not ask when. I sit at her kitchen table and she pours coffee into the small cup with the gold rim that has been in this kitchen since I was a child.
She doesn’t sit.
She’s at the counter, her back partly to me, and she’s doing the deliberate work of a woman who has resolved that the way she’ll not start crying in the next ten minutes is by keeping her hands occupied with cups and spoons.
"‘Mitéra,’" I say.
"Yes, ‘agóri mou.’"
‘My boy.’ The Greek I have been hearing in her mouth since I was four years old. The Greek I have been hearing since before I had words for what it meant. The Greek who arrives this morning is the unmistakable signal that my mother has already decided what will happen in this conversation and is letting me do the speaking only because speaking is what the protocol requires.
