Page 124 of Night of Shadows
"To Eleni: I have known you for seven years. I have not yet held your hand. I will, before I die. I am eighty-one. I am coming to Boston for the wedding."
My mother's voice catches. She looks up. Cathleen is openly crying. Maeve has put her hand over her mouth.
My mother keeps reading.
"To Cathleen: I have known you for six years. The shortbread is perfect every February. Brendan would have loved this letter. He would have loved Maeve. He would have loved Lex. He would have loved Nora most of all."
"To Maeve: I do not know you yet. I will. What I want to say to you tonight, in the kitchen of a Greek matriarch in Brookline, is what I have wanted to say to every woman who has come into this family by way of one of our boys: ‘Welcome home.’ You are in. You are ours. There is no version of the rest of your life that doesn’t include three matriarchs holding it up. We will not let you fall. We will not let your daughter fall. We will not let any of you fall. We are ours, and we are yours, and we have been waiting."
"All my love. ‘Sláinte.’ Brigid."
? ? ?
My mother lowers the letter.
The room is silent.
Maeve is crying. Cathleen is crying. Siobhan is crying with Sofia balanced on her lap. Cormac, who has been quiet since the letter began, is wiping his eyes with the back of his bandaged hand.
Nora, on her telephone-book chair, looks at Cormac. She looks at her mother. She looks at ‘Yia-Yia.’ She looks at her grandmother, Cathleen, whom she’s known for two days and has decided is the second-best grandmother in the building. She lifts her water glass with both hands.
She says, "‘Steeneeahmaz.’"
The table breaks. Cormac laughs first. Then Stavros. Then Nico. Then my mother, the wet still on her cheeks. Maeve, beside me, drops her face into her hands and laughs through the tears. Sofia, in the high chair, claps her small fists, on the principle that everyone else seems happy and she’s going to participate.
We drink again. ‘Stin ygeiá mas.’
Stavros serves the lamb.
The dinner becomes a dinner.
? ? ?
At 8:47 PM, while Maeve is in the kitchen with Cathleen and my mother, doing the quiet work of putting plates in the sink that women do when they need ten minutes alone with the matriarchs, my mother catches my eye across the room.
She’s at the sink. Maeve is drying. Cathleen is putting away.
My mother looks at me.
She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t nod. She doesn’t gesture.
She just holds my eye for one full second.
And in that second, I understand that my mother is telling me, with the quiet, fierce clarity of a Greek matriarch who has been waiting fifty-eight days to see her son ready, that tonight is the night.
Tonight.
After the family disperses. After Maeve has had her ten minutes with the matriarchs. After Nora is in bed, Eleni keeps ready for her. After the brownstone is dark and the city has gone quiet, and Maeve and I are alone again in the home we have been building since November.
Tonight.
I do not know what I am going to say yet. I have been writing it in my head for fifty-eight days, and I have not committed to the phrasing because the phrasing has been waiting on the moment, and the moment is going to be tonight, and the phrasing is going to come because the phrasing has always come.
I look at my mother. I nod, once.
She nods back. She turns to the sink and continues washing.
Maeve doesn’t see the exchange.
